In a Twitter exchange, Silver was challenged by venture capitalist Paul Graham on why the betting markets give Donald Trump a 37 percent chance of winning November’s presidential election, while Silver’s popular FiveThirtyEight website give him just an 18 percent chance.
“It's because political betting markets are populated by people with a sophomoric knowledge of politics. There are way too many excuses made for them when they have a poor track record,” Silver said in a tweet.
When challenged further by Microsoft’s Jeff Ma, Silver added: “We have been on the right side of the markets in basically every election since FiveThirtyEight was founded with a huge ROI. Way different than sports where you have a much more sophisticated player base and more liquidity.”
There have been record levels of betting on November’s US election, with Bitcoin one of the most popular ways to wager on the result. Leading cryptocurrency sportsbooks such as Sportsbet.io and Cloudbet are offering odds on the outcome.
Looking for your next crypto casino? Check out: Bitcasino or FortuneJack.