Bitcoin’s Own Distributed Betting Market Launched: BetMoose

Have you ever had that gut feeling that you knew something was going to happen? Did you just know Obama had his second term locked up when others were still saying Romney in a landslide? Do you think our next president will be Hillary Clinton, or that Germany will win the FIFA World Cup? Well, then why not make some coin with your Nostradamus-like powers? And now you can, with BetMoose.com.

BetMoose is the place for P2P betting

BetMoose is a user driven betting exchange where you can place or create bets about anything and when I say anything, I mean everything. I could make one about the first pitch in the San Francisco Giants vs. the Arizona Diamondbacks Game Saturday 6/21/14  being a ball, or that the bitcoin price will hit $1000 before the year end. BetMoose makes a great exercise in testing your prophecy prowess.

The first thing that you’ll notice when you arrive at the site, is its clean and organized homepage. There are not too many buttons or options to confuse you, just an easy on the eyes  layout showing four of the many featured bets. Here is where the site gets interesting. You can place a bet on something you see, or host your own if you have a prediction. The site is P2P which means there are no unfavourable odds against you – bet against yourself if you wish, you’ll get back your own coin.

To give you some idea of  bets posted at BetMoose.com, I’ve compiled a list of my favorites:

• Bitcoin Will Pass $1600 By the End of this Year
• Ghash.io will reach 51% of the network hash rate in June – Resolved! (Guess what it was)
• Bitcoin will hit $700 before 7/4/14
• Amazon will accept Bitcoin by end of 2014
• Hillary Clinton to announce US Presidential bid

A New type of Bitcoin Prediction Market built from the ground up

Prediction markets can be quite sophisticated.  They are full of math, hard to understand terminology, confusing percentages and rates, hard to calculate arbitrage and as a result, they end up being quite complicated to figure out for the uninitiated bettor who just wants to put down some coin on their favourite team or prediction. Prediction Markets have also suffered historically compared to their theoretical counterparts in large due to low traffic and volume. They work amazing when everyone is using them, but it’s often difficult to get to that point.

BetMoose has done it differently: with ease, enjoyment and simplicity. First, they use an easy-to-understand pooled betting model known as parimutuel betting. Their model is customized by adding a time-multiplier to encourage (and reward) early bettors. Next, BetMoose is trying to foster an oracle community, with user accounts (customized profiles, performance metrics, competition, heckling in the chat box and mini games coming soon) which will hopefully add stability and contrast to the widespread pumping and dumping social methods. Lastly, to simplify the site and make it easy for the bettors and spectators alike, they use an intuitive interface across the site with color cues, calculators, and hover-overs. The site is currently in beta but it’s already rocking and support for other cryptocurrencies is coming.

The first distributed contract exchange

BetMoose is a little different than what you may have seen before by being the first distributed contract exchange. It’s the first exchange where hosts resolve their own bets with BetMoose building the supporting infrastructure, community and acting as a fail-safe from preventing hosts cheating.

Prediction Markets have been shown in studies to be quite valuable to the world. Evidence so far suggests that prediction markets are at least as accurate as other institutions predicting the same events with a similar pool of participants. For some analysis of prediction market data, the paper “Interpreting Prediction Market Prices as Probabilities” shows in practice, the prices of binary prediction markets have proven to be closely related to actual frequencies of events in the real world. Turning this into a betting market is something that can’t easily be done with fiat currency.  By leveraging the power of bitcoin, bets can be made and handled in ways that fiat money simply couldn’t: Good luck trying to accept $5 via a credit card for anyone to anonymously place bets, then pay out 5 cents to the host of the bet.

The Mainstream Vision

BetMoose wants to make prediction markets mainstream, while also appealing to veteran oracles and prophets. To be the platform for those that want to place serious investments on future events, or hedge their existing positions on future holdings. The vision of an easy and safe experience carries right over to the core principles and policies that the site follows:

• “You can’t lose if you win” means you will always get back AT LEAST your deposit if you are correct about something. This means full refunds for unmatched bets, and no vig if you bet an amount much larger than the opposite pot. In other words, risk-free betting on the events you predict (or have insider info on.) I expect we will find some of the anonymous bettors have this insider info.
• Fair time-weight multipliers that remove the aspect of “leeching” and levels out the playing field for predicting correctly, instead of just betting early on both sides. Early bettors are still incentivized with a multiplier, yet late bettors aren’t completely out of the game either.
• BetMoose can also be seen as an entry point into bitcoin. BetMoose tries to reduce the confusion and prevent scary questions we’ve all heard too many times like, “What do I do with this TXID?” or “I forgot to pay the miner fee”, “Are my coins lost?”, etc. With BetMoose, the system has been set-up on to ensure  none of these questions will ever arise.
• BetMoose is serious about security. From locking in your withdrawal address with a ‘24 hour cooling off period’ to cold-storing bet deposits in a unique delayed system, the team clearly sees this as a priority, as every bitcoin platform should.
• BetMoose claims to be the first to introduce ‘Multi-Option’ bets within the parimutuel betting model – these are quite lucrative as one side wins the combined sum of other sides’ pot.
• The hosts are ranked based on their reputation and make 0.5-1% of the bet pot on payout.

When I asked Adam King, the BetMoose creator what his ultimate goal was for BetMoose and what would it take for him to consider it a success, he said that

“The purpose of BetMoose is to bring a convenient, secure, and user-friendly way for anyone to profit from their predictions while at the same time driving bitcoin adoption, and being an easy entry-point for new users.”

I thought this summed up what I see when I vist the site. It’s a clean and inviting site that seems secure, user-friendly and extremely fun! As more people arrive at BetMoose.com, the possibilities and unique bets we will see will far outreach anything I could even imagine in my wildest gambling dreams.

How does it work?

Here’s an example of the process as Adam explained it:

If the bet is “Will Hillary Clinton become President” with “Yes” or “No” as options, I can (as an anonymous user) go into the bet page, click on ‘Yes’, and send some bitcoin (let’s say 1 BTC) to the unique deposit address generated for you. That’s it! You can optionally monitor your bet and expected payout (as more people bet) with the ‘track anonymous bet’ tool.

Now Negative Nancy comes and wants to bet 1 BTC on ‘No’. Nancy wants to sign up for added benefits, so she registers for free, inputting only her email that is kept private between her and the site. She then goes into her balance page, deposits her 1 BTC into that account, then goes to the bet page and places it on ‘No’. She can track her bet through her profile, as well as discuss the bet and taunt the ‘Anonymous bettor’ who is so totally wrong about this.

At the outcome time, the host of the bet (could be Me, Nancy, or another user) logs in and decides the outcome – Hillary did not get elected for president and thus the host sets the outcome to ‘No’. The 24 hours pass as the host did select the correct outcome, and Nancy will see 1.94 BTC in her balance page – almost double her money! The missing 3% is split between the site and the host – a reputable level 5 host (who may have shared this bet with Joe and Nancy directly) will earn 1% in commissions, which in this case is 0.02 BTC.

Instead of a simple “Yes/No” Proposition, you can also place bets that have up to 5 options  So, if I felt Hillary would win the 2016 Election, I could have named the other four possible choices.  Romney, Ryan, Obama or None of the Above. Now I, as the host of this bet should place my bets to create starting liquidity in the bet to attract interest, or maybe to hedge my position because I’m not 100% sure. Remember, only one option wins at the end, and gets all the coin from every other option. If the outcome happens to be one of the options I’ve placed on (say, “Ryan”), I will get my own coin I bet on the other 2 options, but it’ll be slightly less as it’s split with anyone else who bet on “Ryan” as well. This multi-option betting is something unique to BetMoose, and I hope to see some amazing things from it.

I’m in the USA.  Is this legal?

This is a gray area for the site but a few things are clear. Prediction markets by definition aren’t really gambling at all.  There’s no luck, chance or fixed odds in a parimutuel betting model and there is no ‘house’ to counter any bet. BetMoose is P2P, meaning players are matched against other players. Thus, they never actually ‘game’ the players with an edge. They provide a match-making service for you to easily find other bettors, or to use the system as a trusted escrow for your own bets. The reason games of chance are illegal in the US is to protect on-shore casinos and licensed gambling establishments. BetMoose does not compete with or relate to that sort of “casino gambling” and as Adam said to me, “We don’t believe those US laws apply to us. We don’t really think we meet the ‘skilled game’ concept either as someone could use our site for so many varied purposes that put us outside of that definition.”

So, the only question left to ask is, “Wanna Bet?”

The author has a very high opinion of BetMoose. Being a gambler for a few years, and always enjoying good competition, I can’t imagine an easier or better structured platform to perform P2P “Bets” where the site and hosts work together as escrow agents, ensuring that the correct result is recorded in every instance. The site’s ease of use and security practices makes it a cool destination that I would fully recommend you visit in the coming days. I think I will go make that bet on the first pitch of the Giants game Saturday. I still think it will be a ball. Do you think I’m wrong and it will be a strike?  Wanna bet?