Comment by tpm
2 days ago
> But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
Long time ago I was working for a betting company and we had a product where virtual (horses, dogs, bikes, cars) were racing in a virtual environment. This was displayed on a TV in physical branches and on the website, along with completely transparent information that it is all random, source of randomness was even some government audited hardware. The customers could place bets on these virtual racers, identified by numbers. Essentially if there were 8 'dogs' in a race, there was a 1/8 chance your pick would win. And then a new set of random numbers would be generated and based on that a new 'race' video would play. The 'races' would go on every day, 4 in hour or something like that.
And the customers (in the live chat or sitting in the physical locations) were often debating the form of the individual 'dogs', how they would perform in the next race and so on. Yes, really.
Your company was taking bets on https://www.online-stopwatch.com/horse-race/ ?
Unrelated - that site is great. I looked into membership, but $6/month seems steep.
Am I overlooking something, or would that mean it’s super easy for a rational participant to make money?
Presumably it's a negative expected value game - the company running it has to make money after all... so likely not.
Prediction markets don’t need a bookie. Each bet has another real person taking the other side.
It’s more like the stock market brokerages. They just take a fee on each trade and don’t need to give you a spread over the stock price
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Not sure what you mean exactly. If you mean the virtual rates, a gambler has no way to make money by placing bets there (while the real probability is 1/8, the odds the betting company is selling are of course much worse). If you mean in a broader context that it is easy to take these people's money, yes and no - there is a long queue of people wanting to do the same and what they want to do is mostly either heavily regulated or illegal.
Sometimes. Often the sure fire bets have lower returns than the expected annual stock market returns.
You have to watch out for resolutions are don’t depend on the truth or could be abused.
Examples of markets to avoid are those that a single individual can manipulate. They could take the most profitable side and corrupt the result.
pigeon dancing (ala Skinner). Humans love to ascribe meaning to things, we have a real problem with randomness.