[HN Gopher] Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election
___________________________________________________________________
Prediction Markets: Tales from the Election
Author : 0-_-0
Score : 181 points
Date : 2021-02-19 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vitalik.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (vitalik.ca)
| didibus wrote:
| > There just really are far fewer people than I thought who are
| actually motivated enough to take a weird opportunity even when
| it presents them straight in the face
|
| It Me hehe
|
| I feel my only motivation is fomo, but I'm actually not
| interested in putting in the effort and time with associated
| stress, my job already delivers on a lifestyle I'm happy with, so
| the potential additional money isn't enough to push me to act.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I think what we're seeing is that the set of people making bets
| on political outcomes leans sharply Republican. It's selection
| bias.
|
| There may be a broader message there about representation too: if
| you are sitting in a meeting and 8 people think something is
| going to happen, but you disagree, and they are all upper class
| men (for example), and you're a lower class woman, you probably
| have a better than 1 in 9 chance of being right, if it's an issue
| that affects the public generally. People don't realize their
| views are non representative if they live in an echo chamber.
| viklove wrote:
| You should start a quant firm employing only lower class women,
| and use their insight to decide which companies to invest in.
| If your hypothesis is correct, you'll be filthy rich in no time
| at all.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| That's actually a pretty good idea.. but in the short term
| and during a speculative bubble, you make the most money by
| chasing what everyone else is also investing in, so it pays
| to have groupthink. The approach you suggest would probably
| work though if you could be patient over the course of the
| whole business cycle, 20 or 30 years.
| xalava wrote:
| "Prediction markets" is a fancy word for gambling. It is a highly
| regulated activity almost everywhere, mainly has it can have
| terrible consequences at the individual levels and major side-
| effects such as corrupt games in sports. Let's not even talk
| about politics where it is generally forbidden for obvious
| reasons.
|
| The conclusion is disheartening "It shows a lot about how market
| efficiency actually works in practice, what are the limits of it
| and what could be done to improve it." Yes at a small scale, but
| at the current rate of adoption of crypto it will not go well if
| it is still treated as a playground.
| f430 wrote:
| It's worse that people actually believe it is a reliable way to
| predict the future especially now with the pseudo-intellect
| speak that people in the crypto space resort to.
|
| If wisdom of the crowd worked then casinos would be out of
| business. There's an entire industry on the other side.
| myownpetard wrote:
| What is the relationship between casinos and wisdom of the
| crowd? Just about all casino games I am familiar with have
| known and controlled odds. There is no need for a 'wisdom of
| the crowd' to compute the probability distribution.
| rspeele wrote:
| > If wisdom of the crowd worked then casinos would be out of
| business.
|
| That does not follow. In prediction markets or sports
| betting, the gamblers aren't betting against the casino.
| They're betting against each other, and the casino
| (PredictIt, BetFair, etc) is skimming off the top, just like
| Duke & Duke in Trading Places. Most forms of gambling where
| players _do_ bet directly against the house are games of pure
| chance where no amount of wisdom will help you beat the odds
| -- odds which are naturally always stacked in the house 's
| favor.
|
| Not to say that I think these betting markets _are_ good at
| predicting future outcomes. They 're clearly very bad at it!
| But I do think in _concept_ they could be at least as good as
| any other method, since the existence of a betting market
| essentially sets a bounty for beating that market.
|
| What is limiting them is a mix of: obscurity, bet size
| limits, bet participant count limits, counterparty risk of
| shady betting sites, cost of fees/taxes making many bets not
| worth taking. Some prediction markets eliminate parts of that
| equation but amplify others, like the crypto markets not
| having the bet size limitations but also being much more
| obscure and shady.
|
| Furthermore, I don't even think those are problems that
| _should_ be solved, because if none of those problems existed
| you 'd see big traders like investment companies playing in
| prediction markets with billions of dollars, and then you'd
| have way bigger problems with insider trading and the market
| affecting the outcome. Things as mundane as surprise
| resignations and as shocking as assassinations.
|
| People already joke about stuff like that happening on
| PredictIt, with its $850 investment cap. No way to prove that
| it did, but it would be very easy for certain employees to do
| and get away with it. For example, in the 2020 election there
| was a market for when the GSA would ascertain the winner
| (releasing funds to the transition team). That was a decision
| made by one government employee. The market started on Nov
| 18th and had brackets like "Nov 23 or earlier", "Nov 24-Nov
| 30", "Dec 1-Dec 7", and so on. By the afternoon of Nov 23,
| with no news, the "Nov 23 or earlier" bracket was trading at
| 1c. Then the ascertainment happened and it settled.
|
| Now, that could have been a coincidence. It probably _was_ a
| coincidence. But if you were the GSA administrator you could
| 've made around $70k taking those 1c shares on the 23rd, and
| nobody would have to know.
| f430 wrote:
| > In prediction markets or sports betting, the gamblers
| aren't betting against the casino.
|
| Are you saying the crowd has an edge over the house? Sports
| betting platforms, poker sites, they are in the business of
| profiting off people who think they have an edge (aka ppl
| believe in the non-zero sum nature of these markets)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Are you saying the crowd has an edge over the house?
|
| No, the crowd is paying the house to bet against each
| other.
|
| > Sports betting platforms, poker sites, they are in the
| business of profiting off people who think they have an
| edge
|
| In that that's a big part of what motivates people to
| gamble, yes, but parimutuel gambling--which, in effect,
| includes prediction markets--the house isn't taking a
| side against the gambler, it's taking a cut off the top
| from all the gamblers on all sides, then the winners
| split the remainder. (Or splitting among winners first
| and charging a fee to the winners, which amounts to the
| same thing.)
| rspeele wrote:
| I'm saying the house doesn't even have skin in the game.
| At least in the prediction markets, the house is just
| pairing one person who'll bet "Trump wins" against
| another person who'll bet "Trump loses".
|
| Even when the "wisdom of crowds" holds true, the crowd is
| made up of thousands of individual winners and losers.
| The house just extracts a cut (fee, commission, vig,
| juice, take) from the winners' profits. They stay
| profitable no matter how "wise" the odds settled on by
| the crowd ended up being.
|
| Edit: concrete example. If you want to bet on Andrew Yang
| winning election for NYC Mayor, right now you'd pay 47c
| for a share on PredictIt. If he does win the election,
| you get a dollar. Where does the dollar come from? Well,
| you didn't really buy your "Yes" share from PredictIt.
| You bought it from somebody else on PredictIt, who's
| placed a standing offer to pay 53c for a "No" share. You
| accepted their offer when you bought your share taking
| the opposite end of their bet. Your 47c plus their 53c
| makes the dollar, and whoever wins gets the whole dollar.
| Except not quite, because PredictIt takes 10% of profits,
| so if you're right, you actually get your .47 back + (0.9
| * .53) = $0.95, PredictIt gets the $0.05, and the loser
| gets zero.
|
| It's good to be the bookie.
| jldugger wrote:
| > people actually believe it is a reliable way to predict the
| future
|
| It's comical because I made like 30 percent in the span of a
| few months by betting against well known biases in IEM -- the
| investment stakes are too low for informed participants to
| move the market meaningfully.
|
| But it's too low stakes to bother automating arbitrage
| strategies that would remove some of the bias of the public
| market.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _" Prediction markets" is a fancy word for gambling._
|
| Hard disagree.
|
| Gambling is set up with the principal aims of a) making money
| off the spread and b) getting participants as "gamified" as
| possible with exciting events and the ability to bet lots of
| money.
|
| Prediction markets are set up with the principal aim of
| crowdsourcing intelligence from a diverse set of minds. They
| can be set up by academia, think tanks, research labs, etc. And
| while (arguably) necessarily tied to real money, they also
| often limit participants and the size of bets through various
| mechanisms for a host of reasons (one being to make corruption
| non-viable as you mention).
|
| Gambling is more often related to entertaining events like
| sports and national politics; prediction markets are often
| focused more on niche or technical outcomes though they also
| often expand into national politics to garner participation and
| scale.
|
| Obviously any market in practice can lie somewhere in the
| middle. But that doesn't make the distinction any less
| important. They're not just the same thing.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Do you think politics can qualify as a sport? It seems to be
| a sport to some.
| xalava wrote:
| Theoretically, that might exist.
|
| I recommend that you open each platform mentioned in the
| article and apply your definition.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I recommend you simply read the Wikipedia article for
| prediction markets. It even has a list of prediction
| markets you can visit yourself:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
|
| Clearly there's nothing theoretical about it.
| woeirua wrote:
| This seems like an extremely risky way to make this bet. By
| trying to keep his exposure to ETH price changes, he set himself
| up for a scenario in which he could lose $1 million for a
| potential upside of $50k. Not sure I would make that bet.
|
| A lot of people recognized this for what it was, but chose not to
| play because of how finicky PredictIt and other prediction
| markets were around the rules of the game. In most previous
| elections they would have already closed the markets.
|
| Personally, I made off with a nice chunk of change buying No-
| Trump on WI, MI, GA, and AZ after the election, but I only played
| with what I could afford to lose.
| ttul wrote:
| Vitalik is worth hundreds of millions (if not more - I haven't
| checked in a while). He can afford to play games like this.
| ja3k wrote:
| I had a similar experience on Predictit which I wrote about here:
| https://ja3k.com/blog/predictit
|
| It's still very strange to me that the prices were so irrational.
| jldugger wrote:
| Interesting that Vitalik doesn't mention that presidential
| gambling is illegal in the US, save for a few no-action
| letters[1] to specific clearing houses. That alone puts a massive
| selection bias when trading contracts on platforms like Augur or
| Polymarket.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market#Legality
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| eargaaadfa wrote:
| Clearly Trump won and the Democrats staged a coup:
| https://hereistheevidence.com/
|
| We're currently under occupation by a geriatric pedo that is
| completely mentally shot and controlled by Xi Jinping.
| NickLamp wrote:
| I'd like to sell you a bridge
| Supermancho wrote:
| What I read was a story of making money from some niche
| prediction market sites (that I would never touch). There is also
| quite a bit of handwaving, eg "I saw more and more arguments from
| Very Smart People whom I respected arguing that the markets were
| in fact being irrational and I should participate and bet against
| them if I can. Eventually, I was convinced." and showing some
| math from trivial arbitrary scenarios the author poses (nothing
| to do with the story). This then dovetails into how ETH is a good
| bet because, they know some calculus? This is crypto-promotion,
| plain and simple.
| lunatuna wrote:
| I think the fascinating part of this article is in the third
| paragraph: ". . . I would make all of these remaining bets,
| against willing counterparties, after Trump had already lost
| the election." I wasn't expecting that. But we are in GME and
| WSB phase of markets. I guess I have a lot of catching up to
| do.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Many people felt Polymarket resolved the market too early
| after the election was called. They then setup another market
| where the question was whether Trump would be inaugurated. It
| was possible to make 20% on that market at one point.
|
| I wouldn't compare it to GME and WSB though. It's still
| stupid.
| avarun wrote:
| ...it's written by Vitalik Buterin. Of course he thinks
| Ethereum is good?
| lucasverra wrote:
| Vitalik is Ethereum founder
| vonwoodson wrote:
| Thank you for pointing out the obvious: That even on HN
| people talk before they know even they tiniest thing about
| who or what they are talking about.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > That even on HN people talk before they know even they
| tiniest thing about who or what they are talking about.
|
| Regardless of the author (I don't bother to google every
| author) the content is as stated. It's a crypto-ad and not
| much else.
| drdeca wrote:
| I think the expectation of the article is that the reader
| knows who the author is, and therefore expects the
| article to be pro ETH , insofar as it mentions it.
| Temasik wrote:
| how do i downvote this scammer
| ttul wrote:
| Say what you will about cryptocurrencies, it sounds like a damn
| interesting area in which to be spending your time as an
| engineer, even if 90% of the stuff ends up being total crap or a
| fraud.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > even if 90% of the stuff ends up being total crap or a fraud
|
| Working on something that turns out to be total crap or a fraud
| is actually very demoralizing, not to mention not great for
| your resume.
|
| In the distributed systems space, I've interviewed a lot of
| burnt out engineers who thought they were getting in on the
| next big blockchain company that turned out to be a couple
| founders use blockchain as a get rich quick scheme.
|
| For every story we hear about people getting lucky by timing
| something blockchain-related just right, there are many more
| people who got the timing wrong and lost out when the hype
| collapsed.
|
| Be careful out there.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >Working on something that turns out to be total crap or a
| fraud is actually very demoralizing, not to mention not great
| for your resume.
|
| Too bad most people here have worked on startups that failed
| then.
| phpnode wrote:
| The problem with making this bet is that the value of the
| underlying crypto can move by far more than the possible 15%
| return while the result is pending.
|
| 2 months is more than enough for the price to double or halve and
| people want to be able to exit to fiat at a moment's notice when
| they think things are heading south.
| fairity wrote:
| There are cash-based markets like Predictit where you could've
| made a similar bet. Predictit charges 5% withdrawal fees + 10%
| of profits, but if you expect a 15% ROI, it's still profitable.
| Kranar wrote:
| PredictIt didn't have this anomaly where Trump had a 15%
| chance of winning. After Georgia called the election the
| percentage went above 95%.
| rspeele wrote:
| Oh, it definitely did. Maybe not to the same degree as the
| crypto markets (never looked at them), and there were
| certainly spikes this way and that, but you could get Trump
| NO cheaper than 90c well into December.
|
| The Texas v. Pennsylvania case getting swatted down by
| SCOTUS was probably the last of the cheap shares where it
| was worth depositing money just to play, but if you already
| had some money in your account it was worth taking the
| obvious bets all the way to the end.
|
| edit: went back and checked one of the markets to refresh
| my memory. Yep, check the 90-day chart. Dec 6 "NO" on a
| Republican win was only 84c!
|
| https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/2721/Which-party-
| wi...
|
| edit2: here's another hilarious one.
|
| https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/5554/Will-Donald-
| Tr...
|
| Yep, "Will Trump win the popular vote" closed on Nov 24th
| while still trading at 8 cents. The _popular vote_. Jesus
| Christ. For reference he lost the popular vote by 7
| million.
|
| I'd actually be curious to know if there was a crypto-
| market equivalent to that one, because I want to believe
| most of that pricing was due to PI's limits. For example,
| one Trump bettor maxing out his $850 limit of 7c shares,
| requires 14 Biden bettors maxing out $850 of 93c bets to be
| his counterparty. With a 5,000 trader limit that means that
| there might be just a handful of Trump-won-landslide
| bettors vs a few thousand No-he-didn't bettors with a lot
| more invested, all maxed out and unable to move the price
| further. But I don't know if that shook out differently in
| the crypto space with no limits.
| Kranar wrote:
| You are correct, thanks for providing those sources.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The fiat-based prediction markets tend to limit the number of
| people in a particular markets, the size of positions in the
| market, and a number of other aspects of the market in a way
| which make it difficult to seize apparent opportunities and
| to limit the possible returns from doing so, even before
| considering the way that their fees eat up returns.
| tialaramex wrote:
| These limits are because the ones you're thinking of are
| research projects, not in fact betting markets (even though
| as an individual you can treat them as betting markets just
| fine). This makes them accessible (legally) to US
| residents.
|
| Betfair is a British gambling firm, and isn't a research
| project, when Betfair's "Did Donald Trump win the US
| presidential election?" and "Did Joe Biden win the US
| presidential election?" closed it had _hundreds of millions
| of pounds_ of bets across those two questions.
|
| I got paid, as in I put cash in and a couple of weeks later
| more cash was paid out to my bank account when BetFair
| closed it, for knowing that Donald Trump did not win that
| election _in December_.
|
| It was even possible (though of course risky) to buy the
| lows and sell the highs as MAGA rallied when they thought
| the Kraken had been released, or when Rudy was going to
| prove everyone wrong, or whatever other nonsense.
|
| I was actually underwater for more than 50% of the two
| weeks between placing my "bet" and the cash returned,
| because MAGA were _bidding up_ the "Donald Trump won"
| position even as it became increasingly obvious that they'd
| lose everything.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean for anyone who wants to use BTC any anything other than
| an investment vehicle this is how it's gonna be. BTCs value to
| non-currency speculators is as a settlement layer of last
| resort for people that can't access or don't want to use
| foreign exchange markets. You want to get in, do your transfer,
| and go back to fiat as fast as possible specifically because of
| the volatility.
| casi wrote:
| Pretty much all the crypto betting protocols use stablecoins
| (mostly pegged to the $), people arent betting in eth/btc.
| Vitalik placed bets on https://catnip.exchange/ so would have
| been in dai.
|
| Also on the topic of stability, Rai launched this week so we
| now have non-pegged stable assets backed by eth ->
| https://www.reflexer.finance/
| Tenoke wrote:
| Poly.Market which he mentions (and where I bet on the US
| election) just uses a stablecoin (USDC) pegged to the US
| dollar. Same situation for the DAI he mentions he used. So this
| is an already solved issue.
| xur17 wrote:
| I've used Poly.market a few times and been pretty happy with
| it - they use a second layer network, so after depositing,
| trades are fairly cheap (you just pay a market maker fee, no
| crypto miner fee as far as I can tell). Downside is that the
| outcome is provided by the poly.market creators, but your
| actual bets are non-custodial.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| The fees were quite expensive before they started using
| Matic.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > There was also another problem: I did not have any DAI. I had
| ETH, and I could have sold my ETH to get DAI, but I did not want
| to sacrifice my ETH exposure; it would have been a shame if I
| earned $50,000 betting against Trump but simultaneously lost
| $500,000 missing out on ETH price changes.
|
| Doesn't this fact pervert the underlying market? Now there are
| two components at play: the actual underlying odds of the
| election result, and the price fluctuation inherent in DAI/ETH.
|
| Another way to frame this bet is as a high interest loan with
| some probability of not needing to be paid back. They are
| borrowing $0.85 worth of DAI/ETH now and may need to repay it in
| the future.
|
| That being said, I could be misunderstanding how this all is
| working. The system seems complicated.
| zone411 wrote:
| There was news out on Wednesday about YC-backed Kalshi raising
| $30 million: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/online-trading-
| platform-wil.... The big difference is that they are approved by
| the CFTC, hopefully resulting in higher trading limits and more
| liquidity.
| as300 wrote:
| I see quite a bit of disappointing talk that disregards the
| contents of the article, here.
|
| Namely, the author names one sort of bias that led 'Very Smart
| People' to give an outsized likelihood of Trump winning:
|
| >I remember thinking at the time that this particular opinion of
| his was over-confident, perhaps even a result of over-
| internalizing the heuristic that if a viewpoint seems clever and
| contrarian then it is likely to be correct.
|
| Doesn't this explain crypto-user's pro-Trump bias? Someone who
| uses crypto as a way to play on a prediction market is
| necessarily going to be contrarian, to some degree (remember
| we're being constantly bombarded by claims of how all crypto is
| "just speculation"). In the same way, believing Trump actually
| has a case for overturning the election results is a highly
| contrarian view.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Note that PredictIt offered similar options for all-cash users,
| and they were also still at 15% for Trump winning after he had
| clearly long lost.
|
| This was not solely, or even primarily, a crypto thing.
| as300 wrote:
| This was addressed in the article, though. PredictIt odds
| could've been skewed by:
|
| * Maximum of $1000 being able to be invested on the platform
|
| * A small fee being taken by PredictIt out of every bet.
| pwinnski wrote:
| So PredictIt odds were skewed by bet limits and fees, but
| you assert that the crypto markets, skewed to almost
| exactly the same degree, were instead skewed by the
| contrarian nature of crypto users?
|
| Occam's razor suggests that when two different sites
| correlate so closely, their reasons are likely not so
| completely different.
| vbuterin wrote:
| > Doesn't this explain crypto-user's pro-Trump bias?
|
| It does. But I was never surprised that there were people
| willing to bet for Trump. I was surprised by the lack of people
| taking the opportunity that was sitting there for over a month
| to bet against them.
| didibus wrote:
| He did need 1 million dollar simply to make a one time 50k
| return, and it also seemed like it took considerable effort to do
| it. I don't know how many people with that money also have the
| know how, are aware of these betting markets, and care much that
| they'd make an extra one time 50k.
|
| I think it'll be interesting to see how crypto based betting
| markets evolve and if regulations will strike them or not. I
| don't really know what to think about people simply full on
| gambling on whatever world event, is that a good thing?
| Tenoke wrote:
| He locked 1m dollars to take a loan to use, he didn't use 1
| million dollars. You can use your assets directly and do earn a
| 10%+ profit on whatever you put in this case (which I did).
| dragandj wrote:
| I don't know why everyone here is talking about dollars,
| while there is zero dollars involved all the time. The author
| did not put in any dollars, but his ETH, which he has plenty,
| since he created the Ethereum thingy. That may be a large
| part of the answer why no one "exploited" that hole: most
| people would have to put real dollars in, expose themselves
| to all kinds of crypto gymnastics, and end up with ETH, which
| may or may not be convertible to real dollars where they
| live. And, yes, they would also have the always pleasant
| exposure to tax authority now (which may or may not be
| solvable, depending on the place of Earth one happens to live
| at).
| oramit wrote:
| I actively participated in the prediction market this election
| cycle on Predict-It. I didn't know anything about the Ethereum
| applications so this was an insightful read.
|
| My main takeaway from this whole election cycle was that the
| betting markets were not that great at predicting the outcome. As
| the article points out, and I agree with, a big reason is just
| that these markets are underdeveloped. You have to really be
| interested in politics or gambling to get involved and the
| transactions costs are high. Because of this you end up with a
| mix of die-hard partisans and gamblers looking for an edge. No
| normal people are participating on these sites. In fact the
| markets on predictit were sometimes comically wrong because of
| partisan money. As the author mentions there were contracts
| trading at 15 cents for Trump to win states after he had already
| lost them. I bought the NO contracts for 85 cents and made good
| money on that. For quite a while on predictit there was a
| persistent pro Trump bias to almost every state level contract.
| It persisted even after the count was over!
|
| The second reason is that the betting markets themselves were
| just a reflection of polling data. I'm sure some sophisticated
| people were using other sources to make bets but most of the
| predictit discussions were just about polling and how to weight
| certain polls. There didn't seem to be some big insight that
| analysts like Nate Silver had missed that the prediction market
| sniffed out.
|
| In the interest of full disclosure I fall into both the partisan
| and gambling camps. I wanted Biden to win but knowing that I
| avoided contracts that were political since I knew I would bias
| myself. I went instead for proxy contracts where pricing was out
| of whack. I settled on the total vote count:
| https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/6882 Each bracket has a
| 3 million vote range and about a month out from the election I
| saw that the higher range contracts were underpriced. For some
| reason the predictit market had concentrated the betting around
| the 2016 vote total which made no sense to me. I knew this was
| going to be a big turnout (even more partisan than 2016 and
| everyone was at home with covid). At the very least it was going
| to be more than 2016. The prices were so low on the contracts I
| just bought all of them above the 2016 numbers with a bias to the
| upside and it worked out quite well.
|
| It was a fun game but I didn't think it gave me much more insight
| into the final result.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
|
| I always thought the the problem with prediction markets is you
| have the incentive to make the prediction come true. And that
| gets ugly fast. But hell, I guess that's what all this is at the
| end of the day.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| That's why you have counterfactual prediction markets. You
| don't have markets on an outcome; you have two markets of an
| outcome conditional on some action, and on an outcome
| conditional on that action not being taken.
| dylan604 wrote:
| did you just describe sports betting?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the problem with prediction markets is you have the
| incentive to make the prediction come true_
|
| If players in the market have ways outside the market to
| significantly affect the outcome that the market is betting on,
| then it isn't a prediction market. The whole point of a
| prediction market is that there is no such feedback mechanism.
|
| For example, the article discusses prediction market bets on
| Trump winning the election. The underlying assumption of such
| markets is that no player has more than one vote in the actual
| election, out of some 150 million or so votes, so each
| individual player's ability to affect the outcome is
| negligible.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >The underlying assumption of such markets is that no player
| has more than one vote in the actual election, out of some
| 150 million or so votes, so each individual player's ability
| to affect the outcome is negligible.
|
| But this is not necessarily true. In the extreme case, a
| bettor could be one of nine Supreme Court justices. Or a
| participant in some sort of fantasy vote-rigging conspiracy.
| Or even a political insider tanking their candidate's own
| chances and betting against themselves. There's a pretty wide
| range of people who could plausibly (or not-so-plausibly in
| the conspiracy example) have more than a one-vote influence
| over the result of the election.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Sure, that's why there are rules about when and how a CEO
| can sell their company's stock (they generally have to
| announce the sale in advance). I'm not sure about the laws
| around Supreme Court justices, but I'm pretty sure it's at
| least well-accepted that no judge should work a case when
| they have a personal interest in the outcome. I hope that
| would be grounds for removing a justice.
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| >Or a participant in some sort of fantasy vote-rigging
| conspiracy.
|
| This is even more relevant outside of the US. In the US
| vote rigging conspiracies are impossible for some
| inexplicable reason, perhaps related to magical soil, but
| outside of the US they are a real concern.
| mvc wrote:
| May I be so bold as to suggest that not all vote rigging
| conspiracies are considered impossible. Just the ones
| that have been rejected by every court that has tested
| them.
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| One theory I've heard is that the magical soil in the US
| would compel the riggers to confess and/or provide
| evidence of their guilt to the courts and to the general
| public, rather than lying and/or concealing that
| evidence. In the rest of the world, courts often are not
| provided with relevant evidence or confessions, and
| therefore rigging remains possible.
| j4yav wrote:
| Doesn't this path lead to believing anything you like,
| once you free yourself from the chains of needing
| evidence? I feel like I'd lose all track of what is real
| if I used this logic.
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| My understanding is that people in those other countries
| have not been lead down such a path, even though they
| know that sometimes people get away with stealing
| elections in their countries. I believe they use reason
| and inference when judging what is real, because all
| relevant hard evidence is not always available to them.
| drdeca wrote:
| If you remove the putting of stupid words in others'
| mouths from this (great going there, btw), the only thing
| that remains is "but the courts could have not gotten the
| evidence".
|
| But if the evidence is not available, then there is no
| good reason to believe it. You have to explain why people
| claiming it have enough evidence to believe it, but the
| courts don't have enough evidence for it to be even
| claimed in the courts, if you want to claim that the
| reason is that courts don't have access to the evidence.
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| >But if the evidence is not available, then there is no
| good reason to believe it.
|
| Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an
| American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant
| hard evidence always being available. What you may not
| know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some
| hard evidence is not available, so those people have
| adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what
| is true. One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw
| inferences from other relevant facts.
|
| For instance, in those countries, if a man who has
| professed a strong desire for wealth is tasked with
| guarding a large pile of money, and the money disappears,
| people in those countries will infer that the man likely
| took the money, even if no one saw him take it and the
| money is not later found in his possession.
| drdeca wrote:
| > One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw
| inferences from other relevant facts.
|
| The "other relevant facts" are called "evidence". An
| observation is evidence for a proposition when the
| posterior probability for the proposition, after updating
| on the observation, is greater than the prior probability
| of the proposition, before the observation.
|
| Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not
| __legally considered__ evidence, or isn't "evidence" in
| the legal sense of the term, and that that is why it
| wasn't presented it court?
|
| I have to admit that I'm not particularly clear on what
| kinds of evidence are and aren't considered "evidence" in
| the legal sense admissible in court. Are you familiar
| with the criteria that make the distinction?
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| In a bench trial, the judge is supposed to weight the
| evidence presented, and issue various different degrees
| of relief based on whether it meets certain standards in
| totality. For a case where the plaintiff is asking the
| judge to overturn the result of an election, the judge
| would require a rather high standard of evidence.
|
| I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a
| smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it.
| According to what I have been lead to believe, if
| election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of
| said fraud would be discovered and presented to American
| courts, though that is not the case in other countries.
|
| Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person
| considers whether there was election fraud in the US,
| they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has
| been presented to courts or to the media, not whether
| there exist other lesser forms of evidence.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In the US vote rigging conspiracies are impossible
|
| No, they aren't, which is why our most recent ex-
| President (who also was notorious for inventing
| fantastical vote-rigging conspiracies out of no evidence
| in the same election) is currently at the center of a
| criminal investigation for one based on fairly hard
| evidence, and his political party is trying to change the
| Georgia State Constitution to derail the investigation.
|
| There's a difference between " _That_ vote-rigging
| conspiracy is an unsubstantiated fantasy" and "Vote-
| rigging conspiracies are impossible." Pretty much no one
| in the US has ever argued the latter.
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| >No, they aren't
|
| Have I been mislead? If it is possible to carry out
| election rigging conspiracies in the US, then how can we
| be so confident that no such conspiracies were carried
| out by people that viciously hate the former president?
| Surely if it is possible for conspirators to get away
| with it in other countries, and there is no magical means
| of preventing it here, then it's possible for them to get
| away with it here as well. They have courts and
| investigations and evidence in other countries as well,
| and that has seemingly not prevented election rigging
| there.
| yibg wrote:
| Big difference between the general statement of "vote
| rigging is impossible" and "this last election wasn't
| rigged". The usual claim is the latter, not the former.
| rspeele wrote:
| It's kinda like how Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster
| _could_ be real, and we 'll never really know for sure,
| but most people conclude that they are almost certainly
| _not_ real.
|
| Some motivated people have spent a lot of time and money
| trying to find proof of those creatures, and come up with
| nothing but some blurry pictures (including some known to
| be intentional fakes) and conjecture. So there's not much
| reason to take them seriously.
| jtxxwl2 wrote:
| It's also kinda like how Al Capone might not have ordered
| the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and we'll never
| really know for sure, but most people conclude that he
| probably did, even though no one could definitively prove
| it.
|
| And also kinda like how Kim Jong Un might be the
| preferred candidate of 100% of North Koreans, and we'll
| never really know for sure, but most people conclude that
| he is almost certainly not.
| rspeele wrote:
| Thanks for the additional examples. Another good one is
| the moon landing. I don't strictly know we went to the
| moon, I don't have direct proof, but based on the
| evidence available to me and the crappy arguments from
| people claiming we didn't, I'm pretty confident it
| happened.
|
| As usual these arguments never really end, but thanks to
| prediction markets, this time the people who believed the
| possible-but-highly-unlikely outcome, "Trump actually
| won", ended up donating lots of their money to the people
| who believed the much more simple and plausible scenario:
| "No, he didn't".
| jetrink wrote:
| One recent example is the man who ran onto the field at the
| Super Bowl after having proxies place $370,000 in bets on that
| occurring. However, he bragged about what he had done on a
| radio show and those bets were invalidated.
| notahacker wrote:
| Another example that springs to mind is a British bookmaker
| that ran a promotional betting offer on a fat lower division
| substitute goalkeeper eating a pie during a televised cup
| match.
|
| The fat goalkeeper ate a pasty whilst sitting on the bench,
| and was promptly banned for a couple of months even without
| any evidence of financial gain for "intentionally influencing
| a betting market"
| roganartu wrote:
| There was another example of this in Australia back in 2016
| where some prediction markets offered a novelty bet on what
| colour tie one of the TV hosts would wear.
|
| The host got wind of it and, for fun, changed ties at least
| five times throughout the evening.
|
| https://twitter.com/sportsbetcomau/status/74921969735939686
| 4
|
| https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/federal-
| election-201...
| __s wrote:
| Just have to keep in mind that bets could be a strange gofundme
| & don't participate in bets that can be bought out against you
| gumby wrote:
| That's similar to short sellers trying to manipulate a stock:
| pretty much only works in the shallows (small cap, thin
| coverage, moderate liquidity).
|
| You could manipulate the dogcatcher election (or, more
| profitably, a bond initiative) but a presidential election is
| probably too hard, especially in this case (amount of money
| you'd need to spend is much larger than the amount you could
| make on these markets).
| ahelwer wrote:
| Yep, it clearly leads into assassination markets - for example,
| opening a large bet that person X will die on a specific date.
| spyder wrote:
| That's why there is the invalid token too.
| solveit wrote:
| Yes, just like you can short Tesla and assassinate Musk.
|
| This is ridiculous, regulate prediction markets like any
| other financial market (in particular, your identity should
| be traceable) and then all your clever plan does is get your
| funds frozen pending a very thorough investigation.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > assassinate Musk.
|
| Would this cause Tesla stock to rise or fall?
| bidirectional wrote:
| Fall massively, I would imagine. Tesla's valuation is
| obviously not driven by fundamentals, Musk's personality
| is one of the things it is based on.
| ouid wrote:
| Isn't that just life insurance?
| mbg721 wrote:
| It sounds like term life for an unusually specific term.
| But you do typically have to have an insurable interest in
| order to buy insurance on someone's life.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Yes, insurance in general has this problem if unregulated,
| hence the evolution of the concept of "insurable interest".
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurable_interest
| m463 wrote:
| That got ugly too until they prevented people from taking
| out life insurance on people without their
| knowledge/consent
| btilly wrote:
| Concrete example, Walmart took out life insurance on its
| employees because they were betting that their horrible
| working conditions made people more likely to die than
| the insurance companies thought. And then were
| incentivized to make those conditions worse.
|
| See https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/life-
| insurance/dead-peasa... for an overview of current
| regulations that resulted from that.
| opo wrote:
| >...Walmart took out life insurance on its employees
| because they were betting that their horrible working
| conditions made people more likely to die than the
| insurance companies thought.
|
| No, Walmart was doing it since they thought the policies
| would be tax deductible. They ended up losing money and
| eventually ended up bringing up a case against their
| insurance companies:
|
| >...Discount retailing giant WalMart cannot sue its
| insurers just because it gambled and lost $1.3 billion on
| getting a tax break from thousands of insurance policies
| it took out on employees, according to a brief filed by
| the insurers in the Delaware Supreme Court.
|
| >WalMart is contending in an appeal that it was entitled
| to rely on its expert insurance brokers to warn the
| company of the inherent dangers of buying COLI policies.
| WalMart has asked the high court to revive its bad-faith
| and breach-of-duty claims against its insurers, which the
| Delaware Chancery Court had dismissed.
|
| >Such policies lost their attraction for corporations
| long ago but disputes over liability for the tax
| consequences continue for companies in a position similar
| to WalMart's.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dead-peasant-insurance/
| btilly wrote:
| My understanding was based on articles like
| https://workdayminnesota.org/court-slams-walmarts-use-of-
| dea.... Where Walmart was being sued specifically because
| there were perverse incentives and what they did was
| against various state laws.
|
| As to your case, Walmart thought that it could deduct the
| premiums. It turns out that it could not. Walmart also
| thought that it could create and collect them under
| Georgia law. It turns out that it could not. Walmart also
| has been forced to pay families of workers some of the
| payouts. None of which it expected.
|
| All of these things affect how profitable the policy is
| for Walmart. But they don't change the fact that once the
| policies are taken out, Walmart has a financial incentive
| to treat workers poorly. Which is why many states had
| banned the practice. And is why federal law currently
| only allows companies to take out life insurance on
| approximately their most highly paid third of employees.
| (Who also have to consent to it.)
|
| Back to the suit. Walmart sued its insurers in 2002 for
| fraud for failing to explain these risks. The brief
| quoted in Snopes is as filed by the insurers in 2005.
| They lost that judgement, but the case continued on. As
| of 2009, per http://www.contingentfeeblog.com/2009/05/art
| icles/corporate-..., the Delaware Supreme Court ruled for
| Walmart a 3rd time. I don't know the final outcome of the
| case. But it certainly wasn't as open and shut as the
| insurer's brief made it sound.
| TerminalWarrior wrote:
| Or, cheap life insurance for the suicidal.
| bostik wrote:
| Reputable prediction markets don't offer contracts where they
| themselves, or someone in general, could profit from human
| misery.
|
| Disclosure: I work for one.
| btilly wrote:
| Opening the bet that they die on a particular date is a
| problem because they know when to be careful.
|
| Opening a market on when they will die that goes to the
| person who is closest to the right date, now any would-be
| assassin can place their bet and try to win. And the target
| may know that people are hunting for them, but won't be
| forewarned of when.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| They would need a counter party to be able to place the bet
| though, and those people have an equal incentive to keep
| the person safe. If no counter party exists then there's no
| incentive.
|
| Plus this ignores risks outside the market, like the risk
| the would be assassin gets caught and sent to prison.
| btilly wrote:
| It is a winner take all market. All money placed in the
| market goes to the winner.
|
| So if I want Donald Trump dead and am willing to pay a
| million dollars, I start the market and put a million
| dollars in for tomorrow. Eventually he dies and someone
| collects. Almost certainly not me, and not necessarily an
| assassin.
|
| But any would-be assassin who wants can place a bet and
| now has a million dollars riding on whether they succeed.
|
| This is not novel, the idea has been around for a quarter
| century. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for
| more.
| rmb177 wrote:
| Rumor on PredictIt was one of the reasons they shut down tweet
| markets was Andrew Yang's campaign received email threats in
| regards to him tweeting.
| monkeydust wrote:
| >Blockchains are often criticized for being speculative toys and
| not doing anything meaningful except for self->referential games
| (tokens, with yield farming, whose returns are powered by... the
| launch of other tokens). There >are certainly exceptions that the
| critics fail to recognize; I personally have benefited from ENS
| and even from >using ETH for payments on several occasions where
| all credit card options failed. But over the last few months, >it
| seems like we have seen a rapid burst in Ethereum applications
| being concretely useful for people and >interacting with the real
| world, and prediction markets are a key example of this.
|
| Was hunting this week for real-world use cases for blockchains,
| this is one to add to the list I feel.
| tptacek wrote:
| It is in the same way drug bazaars are: states have been
| hesitant to regulate blockchain applications, so they're a form
| of regulatory arbitrage. Without regulation, nothing prevents
| conventional predication markets from removing limits.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| I mean speaking personally, the reason I don't get in on such
| things is that I'd have to hold cryptocurrency. This means both
| technical complexity (Buterin discusses the fairly low complexity
| of getting into such markets once you know how to effectively use
| Ethereum, but not that of getting up to speed on using Ethereum
| in the first place) and a security problem: Either I keep it in
| an exchange and have to worry about how trustworthy that exchange
| is, or I keep it myself and have to worry about losing it all
| should my private key accidentally become exposed.
|
| So, that's the specific reason I haven't gotten in on it. Get
| past that barrier and yeah I would've been buying NTRUMP for
| sure.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It took me just under 5 minutes to go from debit card to
| Poly.market in the summer the first time I bet on it, though I
| later did it with my bank account via Coinbase for slightly
| lower fees.
| Kranar wrote:
| I decided to just go for it, I mean if there's free money
| like this article suggests, why not take it? I can throw the
| minimum 250 bucks at this and expense it on the company card
| for research purposes.
|
| There's literally a market for whether Donald Trump will be
| president on March 31st of 2021 with offers available at 98
| cents, so presumably I can make a 2% return in a month right?
|
| Okay well I signed up, I had to buy USDC and that cost me 8%.
| In the future I should use Coinbase to cut that down to
| 0.50%, but for now my motivation is just to see if this thing
| is for real.
|
| After a fairly smooth sign up process that took about 10
| minutes, involved confirming my e-mail address, an SMS and
| then verifying a credit card transaction, I got the 230 USDC
| sent to me and immediately used it to buy NO on Trump being
| president.
|
| I wont lie, this was easier than I expected, the whole
| process took about 10-15 minutes tops and as far as I can
| tell I do legitimately have this position.
|
| I guess the only concern left is whether there's some
| loophole that will cause this market not to resolve at
| all/become invalid.
|
| I will do a few more transactions later today since the site
| is literally displaying some fairly significant arbitrage
| opportunities. I will do it with just a couple hundred
| dollars at a time as a proof of concept, and if this works
| out then perhaps I go a little deeper, use Coinbase Pro to
| buy and sell the USDC.
| throwsaways212a wrote:
| Ensure you take into account fiat deposit fees, trading
| fees for USDC and withdrawal/transaction fees from the
| wallet you deposit with along with counter-party risk.
| throwsaways212a wrote:
| I've used polymarket and want it to succeed, but it's not a
| smooth process yet.
|
| Steps I had to follow to bet:
|
| 1. Send USDC to polymarket address
|
| 2. 'Claim' USDC when it arrives in Polymarket, but due to ETH
| gas fees, this function didn't work. It only works when they
| top up the relayer with ETH, so you can wait (as I did but it
| was emptied before I clicked), or pay more ETH yourself to
| self fund this conversion.
|
| 3. Place your bet
|
| 4. Wait for the bet to complete (to be fair, the team quickly
| resolved the market)
|
| 5. Withdraw the cash, this worked, although I got several
| errors throughout.
|
| The best part here over other crypto based prediction markets
| is the resolution is quick (unlike the weeks/months augur can
| take), but that's due to the resolution being a centralised
| process, at which point, why am I bothered about using crypto
| at all? What's wrong with a traditional betting exchange like
| Betfair?
| nojito wrote:
| Prediction markets, more specifically predictit, have an hard
| extreme bias towards the right.
|
| I was basically printing money last year.
| NovaJehovah wrote:
| You may be correct, but since we are dealing with long tail
| events, I really doubt that we have anywhere close to enough
| data to make statistically significant empirical statements
| about bias. You are almost certainly being results-oriented.
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| I've always had the impression that the cryptocurrency community
| was trending rightwards. So it's good to see some quantifiable
| evidence of it.
|
| Which leaves the question: why? Technology as a whole is centre-
| left, so there's something else going on.
|
| One common theme seems to a loss of trust in any institutions,
| and democracy itself: "the FED is just a private bank" isn't far
| away from "the mainstream media is lying", and even the latter is
| an opinion more common among the crypto bubble as far as I can
| tell.
|
| Or are crytocurrencies of interest primarily to people interested
| in "getting rich, fast" and therefore liable to glorify a self-
| annoited master of making money with little work?
| Fireflite wrote:
| The enormously wasteful environmental cost of PoW is certainly
| a turn off to those of us on the left as well.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's not quantifiable evidence of a political bias. You win
| in a prediction market by guessing who will win, not by stating
| who you want to win.
| notahacker wrote:
| Whilst your second sentence is true, belief that Trump would
| be declared the winner of the election even after he lost is
| something highly skewed towards people inclined to believe
| Trump and Trumpists' claims about electoral fraud,- Mike
| Pence having the casting vote etc.
|
| And the most obvious reason why not enough unbiased
| cryptoenthusiasts were tempted to place massive bets on
| something _already decided_ to correct the odds was suspicion
| that the oracles might be too biased in favour of Trump being
| the real president for them to be sure of the easy profit the
| odds implied
| whatshisface wrote:
| There's another possibility, which is that "Crypto people,"
| are another isolated pocket separate from any mainstream
| faction, that come up with their own weird beliefs for
| their own divergent reasons. An uncorrelated niche faction
| would be expected to go closer to one mainstream faction's
| beliefs over another's about half the time.
| avarun wrote:
| Right, and as mentioned in the article: The markets were
| guessing Trump would win after he had already lost. If that's
| not evidence of a political bias to you I'm not sure why.
| whatshisface wrote:
| When hurricane forecasters predict that a hurricane will
| strike a city, would that be evidence of their pro-
| hurricane bias? If they were consistently overeager to
| predict hurricane strikes, would that be evidence that they
| supported hurricanes, or merely were overcalibrated to
| predicting them?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If a forecaster saw a hurricane make landfall in Texas
| and still gave it a 15% chance of hitting Alabama, that'd
| be pretty far beyond simple poor calibration, and I think
| it'd be justified to ask some pointed questions about why
| they're so dedicated to their bad prediction.
| Aqua wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your comment. Crypto was always about
| freedom, and as things stand the right is advocating for
| freedom more than the left (gun rights, freedom of speech,
| smaller taxes).
|
| Crypto was always about freedom, you're liberated from the
| dependence on your country, bank, or whatever else it may be.
| Your fate is in your own hands, your wallet, your funds.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > the right is advocating for freedom more than the left (gun
| rights, freedom of speech, smaller taxes).
|
| You got that backwards: The left is advocating for freedom
| more than the right (freedom from gun violence, freedom from
| hate speech, freedom from preventable/treatable medical
| conditions).
| fallingfrog wrote:
| The kind of freedom the left advocates is more about
| freedom from being dominated by some authority; but we see
| your boss or your landlord as being more of an immediate
| authority than the government. So we support labor
| organizing and tenant rights. Many leftists support the
| right to bear arms (Karl Marx, famously).
| undefined1 wrote:
| agree about freedom re: healthcare. it would also mean
| freedom to take risks as a creator or entrepreneur, if you
| don't have to rely on an employer for health insurance.
|
| the gun issue is a city vs rural thing. you don't want them
| in a city, but you might in the rural context.
|
| > freedom from hate speech
|
| but reframing censorship as freedom is blatantly Orwellian.
| also, the left is not a monolith.
|
| the _liberal_ left advocates for free speech and liberty.
| aligned with freedom.
|
| the _illiberal_ left advocates for censorship and control.
| the opposite of freedom.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > reframing censorship as freedom is blatantly Orwellian.
|
| Why? People largely agree that things like false
| advertising and fraud regulations increase freedom,
| despite being literally censorship.
| DC1350 wrote:
| It's a positive vs negative liberty difference.
| Decentralization and unregulated currency is aligned with
| the right wing ideas about freedom.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| The original meaning of "right wing" meant supporters of
| monarchy or aristocracy. (The supporters of the
| aristocracy sat on the right in the Estates General
| assemblies right before the French Revolution, the
| commoners on the left). What you are describing is a free
| market libertarianism that denies or pretends that class
| doesn't exist at all, which generally serves the
| interests of economic aristocracy.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Yes - I just finished reading a book about the French
| Revolution and it was surprising how far the modern
| definition of right vs left has strayed. Imagine living
| in a time when the leftists were pro-war nationalists who
| loved prison and the death penalty! But in the current
| political climate, libertarian market ideas are generally
| included in the basket of ideas labelled 'right'. That's
| all I meant.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Yes, I think also that the word freedom is a bit
| ambiguous which lends itself to being distorted. The left
| wing view is that freedom means not being dominated by
| authority figures, and the way you fight back against
| authority is to band together to pursue your common
| interests, which means that to obtain freedom you have to
| take collective action. So freedom is seen in terms of
| power relations. The right wing idea of freedom is being
| alone or being independent; but we on the left would say
| that being alone just makes you vulnerable, unless you
| are already in a position of considerable power. But you
| know, independence from other people is a kind of freedom
| too, so I can see the idea there.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > right is advocating for freedom more than the left (gun
| rights, freedom of speech, smaller taxes)
|
| immigration, religious tolerance, lgbt rights.
| drdeca wrote:
| There are multiple kinds of freedoms, I suppose. For
| immigration, yeah, being free to move somewhere seems
| clearly freedom. A freedom to do something.
|
| Not being forbidden from practicing ones religion is also a
| freedom to do something.
|
| Being free from being discriminated against on the basis of
| religion is a different kind of freedom, I think.
|
| There is a similar way to split the third kind.
|
| I suppose the boundary between "the freedom to do x" and
| "freedom from being treated badly for doing x" is kind of
| fuzzy. It would be absurd to say that "we have freedom of
| immigration, it's just that basically anyone who comes in
| we happen to shoot.", in such a situation, people are
| clearly being forbidden from immigrating.
|
| But if someone is endlessly harassed by people, and treated
| with extra suspicion by the police, in response to their
| practicing their religion, yeah, that is kind of going
| against freedom of religion kind of in the first sense, or
| perhaps somewhere between the two senses, even if
| officially by law there is nothing forbidding it, and
| another law says that no law can be made which does forbid
| it.
|
| But, even if things like this show that the distinction
| between the two senses is kind of fuzzy, I still think that
| the distinction is still somewhat relevant and somewhat
| reasonable.
|
| A self-consistent rightist could very well support nearly-
| open borders, and legal protection of the practice of other
| religions, and oppose attempts to criminalize or otherwise
| legislate against LGBT things, on the basis of freedom,
| while at the same time also being somewhat discriminatory
| on a personal level against one or more of those groups.
| ska wrote:
| > and as things stand the right is advocating for freedom
| more than the left
|
| I don't think that's quite clear cut. The right politically
| makes more hay about freedoms these days, but they have
| equally strong positions that are anti-freedom (pro-life,
| voting restrictions, immigration policies, drug policies,
| religion) and the left has pretty strong advocacy areas for
| freedom (religion, drug policies, "gay marriage" ) etc.
|
| Crypto has always been about a number of things.
| voldacar wrote:
| > Technology as a whole is centre-left
|
| or maybe it just isn't and crypto is a counter example? not
| sure why it has to be an axiom that tech is "Centre-left"
| especially considering the historical relativity of terms like
| right and left
| solveit wrote:
| Crypto understandably leans libertarian, which is increasingly
| becoming orthogonal to the right-left axis of American
| politics.
| TLightful wrote:
| "trending rightwards" .... LOL!!! ...
| DC1350 wrote:
| Why do you believe that technology is centre-left? Crypto is
| basically a libertarian fantasy come true.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Center-left is a liberal euphemism for _normal._ It 's what
| you assume everybody is when you're part of the urban middle-
| class and don't really talk about politics.
| lend000 wrote:
| Prediction markets are fascinating to me. Of course they are not
| perfect, as demonstrated by this post, and also by the spreads of
| certain "fan favorite" sports teams that people throw money at
| irrationally. I still think that on average (just like prices in
| any other decentralized markets), the prediction prices are
| better than any known centralized system, and with a robust
| implementation, could be used for important planning.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| I considered myself pretty in-the-know and knew about Predictit,
| all kinds of crypto, and therefore I thought I was up-to-date on
| the crypto news but I did not even know that there was a crypto
| clone of Predictit.
|
| >blockchain-based markets are highly niche
|
| Not sure if he means if the whole of blockchain is highly niche
| or blockchain-based prediction markets are highly niche, but if
| it's the latter, I definitely agree.
| elwell wrote:
| I had heard of Augur but not PredictIt.
| ruuda wrote:
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metaculus-monday and
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metaculus-monday-2821
| mention a few other markets.
| solveit wrote:
| Check out Polymarket, much smoother UX than Augur (at the cost
| of being more centralized, as I'm sure you guessed).
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| One thing he didn't talk about was capital gains tax.
|
| If I wanted to bet on the election, I would first have to realize
| my short term capital gains.
| ahnick wrote:
| He avoids capital gains in the article by using a MakerDAO CDP.
| This is a loan that is collateralized by his Ethereum holdings.
| (IIRC 1.5 ETH to the amount of DAI you want)
| mannykannot wrote:
| Indeed, though at 3:2 you are apparently at considerable risk
| of the loan being called by anyone (with no margin call
| beforehand):
|
| _If the value of the ETH collateral that you deposited drops
| to less than 150% the value of the DAI you withdrew, anyone
| can come in and "liquidate" the vault, forcibly selling the
| ETH to buy back the DAI and charging you a high penalty.
| Hence, it's a good idea to have a high collateralization
| ratio in case of sudden price movements; I had over $3 worth
| of ETH in my CDP for every $1 that I withdrew._
| as300 wrote:
| While this is true, you could easily write a listener
| script (very easy with ETH due to the extensive bloom
| filter use) that adds more collateral to your position if
| it reaches, say, within %175 of the capital you withdrew.
| tantalor wrote:
| Prediction market positions are not capital gains in the same
| way that lottery tickets are not capital gains. It is gambling.
| jldugger wrote:
| But your source of funds might be. Sounds like the OP avoided
| this by borrowing against assets, but since his assets are
| volatile blockchain stuff, the interest rate was absurd.
| ahnick wrote:
| The interest rate on the loan was 3.5%. Long term capital
| gains in the US are typically 15% (short term 30%), so
| using a CDP can save a lot of money depending on the tax
| laws that apply to you.
| jldugger wrote:
| Huh, I thought I saw 35 percent APY but admittedly I
| wasn't playing as close attention to the numbers as I
| would if my own money was on the line.
| rspeele wrote:
| Yeah, my PredictIt winnings (also from betting against Trump
| after Trump lost) are on a 1099-MISC as "Other Income", which
| I believe is what gambling would be. Still, the point stands
| that gambling sucks since not only are you likely to lose
| more often than you win after fees, but taxes eat your
| winnings too! But then again, it's hardly gambling when you
| are betting against Q.
|
| Hilariously, on PredictIt you could _see_ the market
| inefficiency in action as the site has a cap of $850 risked
| per bet, but after the election you could make essentially
| the same bet a dozen different ways. Which party will win?
| Which candidate will win? Will the winning candidate also win
| the popular vote? What will be the electoral college margin
| of victory? Will a woman be elected VP in 2020?
|
| Of all those different ways to make the Trump/Biden bet, the
| most straightforward ones like "which party wins the 2020
| election" had the highest Trump prices, while the less
| prominent markets like "Will the SC Dem Primary winner win
| the general election?" had lower Trump prices.
|
| Now, why would I and other gamblers not sell my bets from the
| expensive 88c "SC Dem Primary Winner" market, and move the
| money into the cheaper 84c "Which party wins" market? Why
| would the prices not equalize since they are, at this point,
| bets on the same outcome? Because I'm already at the $850 cap
| in the "Which party wins" market. I can't put more in. Or, if
| I wasn't betting on that before the election, I might not
| even be able to because PredictIt also caps each market at
| 5,000 total traders.
|
| In other words, the more obvious markets filled up to their
| limits earlier in the process and had their price influenced
| more by people who thought Trump would win, and had less
| price movement after that due to the distribution of traders
| already locked into the market. The obscure markets were low-
| volume before the election, but filled up after-the-fact with
| people like me eager to find "free money" bets, so the price
| on the Biden side ended up a few cents higher.
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