I think the "volume" problem breaks further into two critical sub-questions: 1. A big selling point of these markets is that there are theoretical commercial v

I think the "volume" problem breaks further into two critical sub-questions: 1. A big selling point of these markets is that there are theoretical commercial value to predictions- i.e. a company could get information of the likely success of their new product line ahead of time, to help them make strategic adjustments. However, Robin Hansen (one of the top economists working on betting markets) says, counterintuitively, that industries have been very luke warm about actually doing this in reality, for various psychological and economic reasons (he got into this in his econtalk interview I think) 2. Suppose bets on Augur start ramping up- How do we know these are real bets from real customers? The Augur company has immense funds on hand and its easy on blockchains to simulate fake volume through anonymous accounts. I have no reason to doubt the ethics of the Augur team, but it's unfortunate that if their marketplace starts taking off that it'll be so hard to tell how organic the growth is.