this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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polymarket, for your depraved bets
Please, for the love of God, do not conflate prediction markets with polls.
The majority of the general elections I have lived through (it's been a few) have been called more accurately by the bookies than the polls.
They say people skip to the finance section of the paper for the actual news
Ironically, you've confused a conversation about odds with one about polls.
It's not about polls. We're talking about betting odds here. This is a gambling conversation. They said that Count Binface winning is paid 4:1, meaning an implied probability of 20%. I asked who is paying that, because it seems like that's far too low of a payout, giving Count Binface too high of an implied chance of winning.
If a candidate is being beat 4:1 in the polls, their betting odds would probably be 100:1 or higher.
Well hey a bunch of news outlets have been doing that so why shouldn’t I?
I'm currently wondering if I trust Polymarket with my data enough to take that bet, because he's definitely got better than 8% chance.
Not something that I've looked into, but if there are multiple futures markets with substantially diverging odds, I'd imagine that one could arbitrage that by placing opposing bets on them and provide a guaranteed win.
That being said, not familiar with how the payouts are computed and updated on them or what the market operator takes.
The payout is whatever the opposition bets - a small cut
You can bet with crypto on there so you don't have to actually give them your information because you can just use an anonymous crypto wallet. It used to be a lot better before it was commercialised. In the past, all the markets were fee-free, and it was just your typical degenerate crypto gambling site. Now they've started charging fees on most of the markets, and they advertise everywhere so it sucks. Now they're a for-profit enterprise or something and act exactly like any other scummy casino operator.
But the payouts are done algorithmically on the blockchain so you can be sure that winning bets are indeed actually paid.
Now I need to work out how to use a crypto wallet. Or just use my actual name.
You can use the Metamask browser extension. Polymarket runs on a token called USDC, which you can buy from Coinbase for US$1 a pop with no fee (and also sell it back for $1 for no fee).
I used to use Polymarket a lot because it was previously filled with crypto bros and MAGA idiots who would vastly overvalue stupid bets (like "Will Canada join the USA") and provide easy money. But I haven't used it for a while, so I don't know if that's the case any more.