Ironically, you've confused a conversation about odds with one about polls.

It's not about polls. We're talking about betting odds here. This is a gambling conversation. They said that Count Binface winning is paid 4:1, meaning an implied probability of 20%. I asked who is paying that, because it seems like that's far too low of a payout, giving Count Binface too high of an implied chance of winning.

If a candidate is being beat 4:1 in the polls, their betting odds would probably be 100:1 or higher.

The majority of the general elections I have lived through (it's been a few) have been called more accurately by the bookies than the polls.

Well hey a bunch of news outlets have been doing that so why shouldn’t I?

Not something that I've looked into, but if there are multiple futures markets with substantially diverging odds, I'd imagine that one could arbitrage that by placing opposing bets on them and provide a guaranteed win.

That being said, not familiar with how the payouts are computed and updated on them or what the market operator takes.

You can bet with crypto on there so you don't have to actually give them your information because you can just use an anonymous crypto wallet. It used to be a lot better before it was commercialised. In the past, all the markets were fee-free, and it was just your typical degenerate crypto gambling site. Now they've started charging fees on most of the markets, and they advertise everywhere so it sucks. Now they're a for-profit enterprise or something and act exactly like any other scummy casino operator.

But the payouts are done algorithmically on the blockchain so you can be sure that winning bets are indeed actually paid.