By Stips · Updated
Most arguments about the future end without a score. Someone says a fight will be announced by Friday, someone else says it will not, and a week later nobody remembers who was right. Stips makes the disagreement concrete: you take a side at a price, the event happens, and the record is kept.
Stips is a play-money prediction market. Every market is one Yes/No question about something that has not happened yet, and the price of Yes — quoted in cents — is the crowd’s estimate of the odds. You take a side with free credits, the event happens, and the record shows who was right.
The price is the interesting part. If Yes is trading at 67¢, the people putting credits behind their opinion collectively think there is roughly a 67% chance. As people trade, the price moves, so a market is a live reading of what a group believes rather than a single loud opinion.
No. Stips takes no deposits, pays out no money, and its credits cannot be converted into currency. Every account starts with $500 in play credits and there is no card involved at any point. It is not a gambling site and should not be described as one.
That is a deliberate design decision, not a stage we are waiting to grow out of. Real-money betting changes what a market is for: it brings licensing, age verification, geographic restrictions, and a duty of care that a small product cannot honestly discharge. It also changes who plays and why.
Stips is built for the argument, not the stake — the reward for being right is that the record shows you were right. If you are looking to bet money on events, this is not that.
Anyone can. A market is a single question with an unambiguous answer and a stated deadline, and whoever writes it stakes credits on a side, which sets the opening price. Some markets are drafted automatically from current news and labelled as such, so you can tell them apart from ones people wrote.
What separates a good market from a bad one is whether it can be settled without an argument: "will X be officially announced by 9 August" rather than "will X be good". A question nobody can score is worse than no question at all.
The automated ones are why the board has fresh questions about fights, world affairs, economics and gaming without anyone hand-writing each one. They go through the same rules as everything else — one question, a deadline, and criteria published before anyone can trade.
At its close time a market stops taking trades and is then settled against public evidence — an official announcement, a published result, a primary source. The criteria are written on the market page before you trade. Winning positions are paid automatically; losing positions pay nothing.
Publishing the criteria up front is the point: you can see exactly what will settle the question before you take a side, rather than finding out afterwards. If a market is ambiguous, that is a flaw in the question, and the fix is a better question rather than a judgement call after the fact.
Stips is made by Barsky Design, a one-person product and design studio run by Hiram Barsky. It is an independent project rather than a company with a support desk. Bug reports and disputed resolutions go to hbarsky01@gmail.com — include the link to the market.
A market that resolved wrongly, a price that looks broken, or anything that is plainly a bug is worth writing in about. Reports naming a specific market are far more useful than general ones, so send the link with it.