Investors talk about Polymarket: The market is the best source of truth

Author: Nick Tomaino, founder of 1confirmation; Translated by: 0xjs@黄金财经

The prediction market is exploding, with June being Polymarket's highest-volume month with over $100 million in trading volume.

Get involved, or shut up

It's hard to know what the facts are today.

We know that the U.S. government often controls corporate media (see the CIA's "Mockingbird Operation") and social media (see Twitter files) to spread lies for its own benefit.

One of the great things about Musk taking over X is that there is less censorship and top-down narrative control. But on X, anyone can easily make up their own false narrative, and the algorithm tends to reward popularity rather than truth. Community Notes addresses this problem to some extent, but X still has a long way to go in helping people distinguish between truth and lies.

If you talk to young people today, they feel this problem deeply. They know that the popular narratives created by corporate media and social media are often untrue, but they don't know how to tell what's true and what's false. So they usually just default to following the popular.

Markets Are the Best Source of Truth

A prediction market is an open market where anyone with knowledge of future outcomes can contribute their knowledge in the form of a bet, and if they guess right, they make money, and if they guess wrong, they lose money.

For example, “Will Joe Biden drop out of the 2024 US presidential election?”

Talk is cheap. It’s easy for experts to say Biden will drop out, and if they’re wrong, they won’t lose anything. But in prediction markets, if you’re wrong, there’s a real financial cost to lose. Currently, you can buy YES shares on Polymarket for $0.81 per share. If you buy YES, that means you’ll make a 23% profit if Biden drops out, and a 100% loss if Biden stays in the race. All independent opinions participating in it give an 81% chance of Biden dropping out.

The Biden Dropout market on Polymarket has been the best way to get a sense of what Biden’s participation in the 2024 election will look like. As early as October 2023, the market indicated a 26% chance of Biden withdrawing. Meanwhile, The New York Times and other corporate media continue to spread lies about Biden's mental state.

Polymarket continues to be a leading indicator of Democratic reality during the June 27, 2024 debate. The market immediately reacted to Biden's apparent lack of sharp thinking, with the market pricing him out of the race almost doubling.

Markets are superior but not perfect

If Biden does not ultimately exit with an 81% chance of winning, does that mean markets are incapable of providing the truth? Not at all. Markets at scale reflect current reality, represented by a diverse group of players from all walks of life. They do not always accurately predict outcomes. Market participants can be biased and irrational. And, there is a lot of new information that can be introduced that changes outcomes.

The point is, markets are a better source of truth than a group of pre-selected elites (old media) and profit-seeking algorithms (new media), and will play a key role in bringing more truth to the world in the coming years. Especially at the scale of global liquidity, where on-chain payment rails enable this. In the crypto industry, we have been waiting for a mainstream use case that people don’t even need to know is a crypto use case. Now, we have a use case that plays a major role in the future of the U.S.