I tried to bet on this on Polymarket a few months ago. Their native client for directing money into your account didn’t work (I think it was because I was in the US and it wasn’t legal under US law). I tried to send money from another crypto account, and it said Polymarket didn’t have enough money to pay the Ethereum gas fees to receive my money. It originally asked me to try reloading the page close to an odd numbered GMT hour, when they were sending infusions of money to pay gas fees, but I tried a few times and never got quite close enough. I just checked again and they’re asking me to send them more money for gas fees, which I should probably do but which is a tough sell when they just ate the last chunk of money I sent them.
I assume the person you’re talking about who made $100K is Vitalik. Vitalik knows much more about making Ethereum contracts work than the average person, and details the very complicated series of steps he had to take to get everything worked out in his blog post. There probably aren’t very many people who can do all that successfully, and the people who can are probably busy becoming rich some other way.
I don’t know why you had so many troubles putting money into polymarket a few months back. Right now polymarket is in ‘trouble’ since ETH fees are so high so its expensive to withdraw.
I mostly election bet elsewhere but I got five figures into polymarket without too much trouble.
I wish you had posted on lesswrong. I would have happily helped you.
I assume the person you’re talking about who made $100K is Vitalik. Vitalik knows much more about making Ethereum contracts work than the average person, and details the very complicated series of steps he had to take to get everything worked out in his blog post. There probably aren’t very many people who can do all that successfully, and the people who can are probably busy becoming rich some other way.
I could have imagined this was true a month ago, but then I spent about 15 total hours learning about Ethereum financial widgets, which was fun, and wrote it up into this post, and now I totally understand Vitalik’s steps, understand many of the possible risks underlying them, and could have confidently done something similar myself. Although I am probably unusually capable even among the LW readership, I think many readers could have done this if they wanted to.
Similarly, I don’t know anything about perpetual futures, but I guarantee that I could understand perpetual futures very clearly by tomorrow if you offered me $20k (or a 20% shot at $100k) to do it.
Having to think hard for a week to clearly understand something complicated, with the expectation that there might be money on the other end*, is definitely a convincing practical explanation for why rationalists aren’t making a lot of money off of schemes like this, but it’s not a good reason why they shouldn’t. Of course, many rationalists may not have enough capital that it matters much, but many may.
*It’s not like these are otherwise useless concepts to understand, either.
It’s worth noting that doing Vitalik’s steps is one thing. Figuring out to pay taxes on the trade and how that effects the trade will be much more complicated.
I think by far the easiest way to trade the US election (for non US persons) was on FTX www.ftx.com
For reference, this is Vitalik’s blog post about the US election prediction markets (which of course favors Ethereum-based platforms!) https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html. It looks horribly complicated. Maybe Vitalik himself didn’t know about FTX?
Side note: for US persons, www.ftx.us is available (but more restrictive).
https://ftx.com/markets/prediction has little markets and doesn’t look to me like it has markets that easily allow you to make tens of thousands of dollars with nearly no risk.
markets that easily allow you to make tens of thousands of dollars with nearly no risk.
Back during November-January, FTX had a contract called TRUMPFEB that gave ~risk free ~15% returns in 2 months, up to millions of dollars (by betting against Trump to be president in Feburary). Right now the FTX OLY2021 market comes pretty darn close—you can bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Olympics happening at 76c. There is obviously the risk of the Olympics not happening, but I haven’t seen a good case for that risk being under 10%, making this a fantastic trade in expectation.
I tried to bet on this on Polymarket a few months ago. Their native client for directing money into your account didn’t work (I think it was because I was in the US and it wasn’t legal under US law). I tried to send money from another crypto account, and it said Polymarket didn’t have enough money to pay the Ethereum gas fees to receive my money. It originally asked me to try reloading the page close to an odd numbered GMT hour, when they were sending infusions of money to pay gas fees, but I tried a few times and never got quite close enough. I just checked again and they’re asking me to send them more money for gas fees, which I should probably do but which is a tough sell when they just ate the last chunk of money I sent them.
I assume the person you’re talking about who made $100K is Vitalik. Vitalik knows much more about making Ethereum contracts work than the average person, and details the very complicated series of steps he had to take to get everything worked out in his blog post. There probably aren’t very many people who can do all that successfully, and the people who can are probably busy becoming rich some other way.
Not Vitalik. A friend of mine from OBNYC.
I don’t know why you had so many troubles putting money into polymarket a few months back. Right now polymarket is in ‘trouble’ since ETH fees are so high so its expensive to withdraw.
I mostly election bet elsewhere but I got five figures into polymarket without too much trouble.
I wish you had posted on lesswrong. I would have happily helped you.
I could have imagined this was true a month ago, but then I spent about 15 total hours learning about Ethereum financial widgets, which was fun, and wrote it up into this post, and now I totally understand Vitalik’s steps, understand many of the possible risks underlying them, and could have confidently done something similar myself. Although I am probably unusually capable even among the LW readership, I think many readers could have done this if they wanted to.
Similarly, I don’t know anything about perpetual futures, but I guarantee that I could understand perpetual futures very clearly by tomorrow if you offered me $20k (or a 20% shot at $100k) to do it.
Having to think hard for a week to clearly understand something complicated, with the expectation that there might be money on the other end*, is definitely a convincing practical explanation for why rationalists aren’t making a lot of money off of schemes like this, but it’s not a good reason why they shouldn’t. Of course, many rationalists may not have enough capital that it matters much, but many may.
*It’s not like these are otherwise useless concepts to understand, either.
It’s worth noting that doing Vitalik’s steps is one thing. Figuring out to pay taxes on the trade and how that effects the trade will be much more complicated.
I think by far the easiest way to trade the US election (for non US persons) was on FTX www.ftx.com
For reference, this is Vitalik’s blog post about the US election prediction markets (which of course favors Ethereum-based platforms!) https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html. It looks horribly complicated. Maybe Vitalik himself didn’t know about FTX?
Side note: for US persons, www.ftx.us is available (but more restrictive).
https://ftx.com/markets/prediction has little markets and doesn’t look to me like it has markets that easily allow you to make tens of thousands of dollars with nearly no risk.
Back during November-January, FTX had a contract called TRUMPFEB that gave ~risk free ~15% returns in 2 months, up to millions of dollars (by betting against Trump to be president in Feburary). Right now the FTX OLY2021 market comes pretty darn close—you can bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Olympics happening at 76c. There is obviously the risk of the Olympics not happening, but I haven’t seen a good case for that risk being under 10%, making this a fantastic trade in expectation.
I agree and recommend this trade here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MSpfFBCQYw3YA8kMC/violating-the-emh-prediction-markets