Last week, for instance, for 92 cents you could buy a future that will pay off a dollar if the Ryan Gosling movie “Project Hail Mary,” which opened Friday, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93 percent positive or higher on Monday morning, several hours after this piece is published (for 8 cents, you could buy one that will pay off a dollar if that doesn’t happen). Each market sustains trading on those futures, and the result is effectively a collective forecast of a future outcome: When a future is trading at 50 cents, the market is telling you it is an even bet; when it goes to zero, it has essentially concluded it is impossible.
For a long time, these online prediction markets were, like online sports betting, so tightly regulated as to be inaccessible to the average person in most of the United States, though enterprising would-be gamblers could gain access to sites with V.P.N.s. But after a series of ambiguous legal victories and the arrival of a friendlier presidential administration, they have leaped into the legal gray area and exploded not just in popularity but in visibility, as well.
Their boosters tell us, grandly, that the sum of all those bets gives us our best forecast of the future — even a workable approximation of the truth. They also offer an unnerving implicit philosophy: that we should relate to the future not as citizens or moralists, problem solvers or advocates, but as gamblers, each of us surveying the horizon of possibility somewhat indifferent to human outcomes and looking instead for a betting edge.
The markets don’t concern only matters of grim geopolitical consequence, such as when Iran might lose control over Kharg Island, when China might invade Taiwan or how many different countries Israel will attack this month. No, they offer lighthearted action, too, such as whether the vacuous YouTuber MrBeast will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 (he won’t be legally eligible to run until 2036), or about what words would be said in an episode of “The Late Show” (even after the interview in question had already been taped), about just how high the temperature will rise one day in Miami or how much snow might accumulate the next day in Manhattan, on when the United States might confirm the existence of aliens, whether the price of Bitcoin will be up or down in the next five minutes or whether Jesus Christ will return this calendar year.
For most of the last year, the price of a $1 future on that last question cost less than 4 cents, which means that the market gave less than a 4 percent chance of the Lord’s return, and in 2025 nearly $3.3 million was bet on the possibility — a small enough market that most of the wagers were probably jokes and larks. Then, suddenly, in February, the odds jumped.
