Gambling is one of the main lines of cryptocurrency, and it may also be one of the original sins of blockchain.
Written by: Huang Shiliang
This time, the total amount bet on the Trump vs. Harris presidential election on Polymarket exceeded $3.5 billion, which is indeed a staggering amount. This is just the betting amount for a single bet; there are numerous other bets related to this election, including those for the House and Senate, and even a large number of bets on whether Trump will mention a certain word during his campaign speeches. I estimate that in the past week, the total amount bet on Polymarket has exceeded $10 billion (uh, I searched the site for a long time and couldn't find any statistical data).
I couldn't find data on the betting amounts at traditional casinos, but I found the following data.
I checked the betting data from Macau casinos, which reported that "the average daily gaming revenue in October reached 1.08 billion Macau patacas (approximately $134 million) [1]."
Assuming that the gross profit of Macau casinos is 10%, the average daily betting amount would be $1.34 billion.
From this data, it appears that in the past week, Polymarket has attracted more gamblers and betting due to the U.S. presidential election event, surpassing traditional gambling giants like Macau.
In fact, gambling has always been one of the most important applications of cryptocurrency from the very beginning.
The earliest codebase released by Satoshi Nakamoto for Bitcoin included a set of poker simulation code [2]. Satoshi may have envisioned that one of the main application scenarios for decentralized cryptocurrency would be gambling from the start.
Moreover, the largest early application of Bitcoin was a gambling project called Satoshi Dice, which was a simple high-low betting game, completely decentralized and designed exceptionally well.
This project significantly promoted the popularity of Bitcoin and was one of the most favored projects among early Bitcoin holders, as well as a nightmare for many early Bitcoin holders who lost large sums of money. I know some big players who lost a lot in it.
There are many stories about Satoshi Dice, making it an important treasure trove for understanding early Bitcoin culture. Perhaps the most famous story is that one of the largest mining pools in China used a 51% attack to win money on Satoshi Dice, but I cannot verify its authenticity.
Later, due to high transaction fees, Satoshi Dice migrated to the BCH network in 2018. In the past two years, one of the largest ecological projects that emerged from the BCH network after activating cashtoken is also a prediction market project called Guru.
After Ethereum introduced smart contracts, gambling became fully popular on the blockchain.
However, perhaps people feel that directly calling it gambling is too embarrassing, so everyone renamed it as a prediction market.
In the Ethereum ecosystem, as early as 2015, there was a decentralized prediction market project called Augur, which was highly recommended by many well-known figures in the cryptocurrency space, including Vitalik Buterin. Vitalik is one of the investors, and A16Z is also an investor.
Augur is probably the earliest decentralized casino built on the blockchain.
Augur is extremely decentralized and completely outperforms Polymarket in terms of decentralization. However, Polymarket offers a very good user experience; it appears to be a centralized online casino using digital currency as betting funds, with the betting funds held in smart contracts, so the casino cannot run away.
Later, in 2017, when EOS became popular, the main Dapp applications were also small gambling games.
Additionally, I believe that this year's most popular meme coin market is also a form of gambling, akin to lottery culture, disguised as a cryptocurrency trading game.
The success of Polymarket has the potential to make prediction markets a trend, capturing the traffic from memes.
……
In summary, gambling is indeed one of the main lines of cryptocurrency. Perhaps this is also one of the original sins of blockchain.
Friends, it’s better to participate less in these games and save your money for value investing.
The success of Polymarket this time may reignite the promotion and popularity of the prediction market. It is estimated that web3 entrepreneurs have found a new trend.
This market may further intensify, and new projects will emerge on top of the already existing ones.
[1]Preston, Marjorie. "In Macau Casinos, October Topped May for Best Post-Covid Performance." iGaming Business, November 4, 2024. https://igamingbusiness.com/casino/in-macau-casinos-october-topped-may-for-best-post-covid-performance/.
[2]Fenton, Andrew. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Online Poker Payment System by Satoshi Nakamoto." Cointelegraph Magazine, April 8, 2020. https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-poker-payment-satoshi-nakamoto/.
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