A Little Wager on the 2013 Australian Federal Election
In the interests of making next year’s Federal Election a little more entertaining for myself and other Bitcoin users I have returned to the Bets of Bitcoin site and made a couple of statements on the outcome.
The first statement is that the ALP will form government and the second is that the Coalition will do so.
It is ninety-nine point something ridiculous percent guaranteed that one of these being true will guarantee the other being false. Since there is an almost insignificantly tiny chance that both could be true or both could be false, I decided to make both bet statements.
For both statements to be true the Coalition and ALP would need to form an alliance against minor parties and independents. For both statements to be false a minor party (probably the Greens) would need to form government in conjuction with a massive number of independents and face off against both the ALP and the Coalition. While that would be quite entertaining, I don’t expect to ever see it. Both statements deal entirely with the results of the election for the House of Representatives, so even if an election is called prior to the 3rd of August the results of these statements are not affected.
This time I bet both for and against each of my statements, so even though I will receive a percentage of the winnings in addition to my successful bets, I don’t expect to actually come out ahead in this. The main reason for making the bets is to add more than just bets on American elections to the site and make things a little more entertaining for Australian Bitcoin users. There’s also some interesting aspects with the weighting being based on the dates I put in which are the latest possible date for the election. So the weighting will never be reduced to zero, which is a bonus for any bet made, even if an early election is called.
Betting on both sides of each statement effectively just seeds the pot so that people betting on either statement in either direction are guaranteed something if they win. While I can’t break even unless there is a total of 8.00 BTC in the winning pools across both bets. Half of that would cover the statement fees and the other would half cover my inevitable losing bets.
The most unlikely outcome, of course, is that something really weird happens and both statements are declared a draw. If that happens I’ll just be down 0.2 BTC, but on the plus side Australian politics would be a very weird and interesting thing.
What will be really interesting with both bets is the social experiment. Since the bets are effectively the opposite of each other, except for weird results, will people prefer to vote for a party or against one? Although as more people bet on one statement or the other, an estimate of likely winnings is more likely to determine which way a bet will be placed and on which statement.
Hopefully this will provide a shade more entertainment in the election for some people.
Originally published at Organised Adversary. Please leave any comments there.