The Polymarket users betting that Jesus will return this year

Summary

Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The market traded as high as 5%, and is now stably trading at 3%. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet that Jesus Christ will not return this year, and earn over $13,000 if you’re right. There are two mysteries here: an easy one, and a harder one. The easy mystery is: if people are willing to bet $13,000 on “Yes”, why isn’t anyone taking them up? The answer is that, if you wanted to do that, you’d have to put down over $1 million of your own money, locking it up inside Polymarket through the end of the year. At the end of that year, you’d get 1% returns on your investment. And you can do so much better on the stock market, or even in U.S. treasury bonds. So that’s why no one is buying the market down to 1%. But the real mystery is: why is anyone participating in the market on the “Yes” side? Like, who is betting that Jesus will return this year, and why? Here are a few answers I came up with: [True Believers] Maybe these people really believe that there’s a 3% chance that Christ will return this year! [Incorrect Resolution] Maybe the “Yes” people are betting that the market will be resolved incorrectly (that there’s a 3% chance that the market will resolve “Yes” even though Christ will not return in 2025). [The Memes] Maybe the “Yes” people are buying “Yes” for the lulz. It’s kinda fun to tell people that you bet that Jesus Christ would return this year! But none of these hypotheses ring true to me: The True Believers hypothesis rings false because that would be a frankly ridiculous belief to hold. Sometimes people profess ridiculous things, but very few of them put their money where their mouth is on prediction markets.1 The Incorrect Resolution hypothesis rings false because, while there’s some chance of an incorrect resolution, it’s really unlikely to be as high ...