Ok so I am through the process of making an account and adding funds to it. You have to transfer your money into the Cryptocurrency DAI. The bet with the lowest fees and the longest expiration date (to allow for a longer time until the results are known), has Trump at 62%. The cheapest NO-share that you can buy immediately is at .69. There is a 0.77% market fee. But there is a relatively high fee for making a transaction which is payed in Ethereum. it currently costs the equivalent of around 10$. But this transaction doesn’t scale with your bet, so if you already plan to make a large bet (>500$) this shouldn’t affect your decision much.
Turns out I had been too optimistic with this. I did not realize at the time that I would also have to pay transaction fees for claiming my money later. I also procrastinated on getting my money back for a long while, because I needed to add more funds to my account in order to pay for the transaction costs. In the end I payed another ~150$ in gas fees.
I went the crypto route a bit, but then decided to funnel it through an acquaintance and use predictit instead.
If I understand everything correctly and calculated all the fees properly (probably haven’t), then the overall deal from the point where money leaves my paypal to the point where hopefully more comes back, is analogous to betting on Biden as if he had a 73,6% on the markets. Which I guess is still pretty good, but man do I wish that there was just one large market with minimal fees, instead of fees on transferring, currency conversion, profit on predictit, and withdrawal from predictit. So many fees :x
Also, it takes a few more days. I hope the markets don’t shift in Biden’s favor in the meantime (then the deal obviously gets worse). It’s amusing how I now want them to move into the opposite direction.
And all that is assuming a 0% risk that the person just screws me over and keeps the money for themselves, which is probably roughly accurate.
Ok so I am through the process of making an account and adding funds to it. You have to transfer your money into the Cryptocurrency DAI. The bet with the lowest fees and the longest expiration date (to allow for a longer time until the results are known), has Trump at 62%. The cheapest NO-share that you can buy immediately is at .69. There is a 0.77% market fee. But there is a relatively high fee for making a transaction which is payed in Ethereum. it currently costs the equivalent of around 10$. But this transaction doesn’t scale with your bet, so if you already plan to make a large bet (>500$) this shouldn’t affect your decision much.
Turns out I had been too optimistic with this. I did not realize at the time that I would also have to pay transaction fees for claiming my money later. I also procrastinated on getting my money back for a long while, because I needed to add more funds to my account in order to pay for the transaction costs. In the end I payed another ~150$ in gas fees.
I went the crypto route a bit, but then decided to funnel it through an acquaintance and use predictit instead.
If I understand everything correctly and calculated all the fees properly (probably haven’t), then the overall deal from the point where money leaves my paypal to the point where hopefully more comes back, is analogous to betting on Biden as if he had a 73,6% on the markets. Which I guess is still pretty good, but man do I wish that there was just one large market with minimal fees, instead of fees on transferring, currency conversion, profit on predictit, and withdrawal from predictit. So many fees :x
Also, it takes a few more days. I hope the markets don’t shift in Biden’s favor in the meantime (then the deal obviously gets worse). It’s amusing how I now want them to move into the opposite direction.
And all that is assuming a 0% risk that the person just screws me over and keeps the money for themselves, which is probably roughly accurate.
Such a market exists, though unfortunately it is restricted to countries where most LW users are not citizens of.