After realizing how late it is, I updated to rails 3 and restart from scratch the bitpredict project directory. A disappointing start, but the key is progress.

If you can move, you will eventually get to your destination no matter how long it take. So, my goal is to alway be somewhere further along at the end of the day rather than be stuck at the beginning of the day.

More progress: figured out how to generate static pages in rails.

Yay!  Bitcoin prediction market.  I am glad to see this coming together.  I wish you luck, let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

Very tired person from college. All I did today was beginning the use of an authentication framework and generating a user model.

I did another session of coding tonight. I created an empty template page for new user, wrote unit testing code, and generally making sure that you can't actually have empty username.

People put up a bet on things that they will think will happen. For example, who will get elected in 2012 US presidental election. Will the republican take over congress? The marketshare of the search engines. It will be mostly be something specific and easy to verify.

that would be fantastic. I am ready to join!

While I generally agree that it is (and should be) the site operator's discretion as to which bets should be taken, I wonder if the rules could be very simple.  The simplest rule I can come up with is that "all bet outcomes must be exogenous with respect to participants."  I think if you simply focus on verifying that topics are truly exogenous, all the unethical or dangerous things will fall by the wayside.  If any participants have a say in the outcome, the bet is not exogenous, and therefore should be banned.

Allowing anonymity while enforcing exogenous bets is the biggest challenge IMO.

If a user can create his own prediction, how are predictions settled?

I start a prediction "The difficulty level for generating bitcoins will be equal to or greater than 3500.00 on 12/31/2010 11:59:59pm ET"

and the predictions total on 1/1/2011:

Yes: 500 btc
no: 347 btc

the difficulty level settles at 3700, who clicks on the 'yes' button and distributes the coins?

i just registered on TAABL have tried to get a ticket and placed a bet.
then for some reason cancelled the ticket and now my 1 bitcoin is completely gone in my account.
what happened?
how can i get my BTC back.. and bet again?