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One factor: There's a limit on shorting, due to discounting. Suppose you're 100% convinced that Jesus does not return by 2027, so you want to buy the "No" trading at 96 cents. But you only get your 1$ back in 2028, when the bet resolves. You're not going to pay more than 96 cents for that if you can instead put them in risk free treasuries for the same paltry return.

Thus, the 4% yes are not necessarily people actively pushing back against "No", but rather an artefact of discounting. To alleviate that (and make bets near the extremes track implied probabilities more closely), the cost of making a bet should not be the currently traded probability (plus a spread), but the currently traded probability times the discount factor to resolution time. (This gets tricky if resolution time is probabilistic, of course.)

by notahacker4 hours ago|

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Yep, not much profit over long time horizons in correcting a relatively small number of people who are either delusional enough to believe in second comings or think it's a fun bet

To add to that, even if there's zero probability of an actual Second Coming, there's nonzero risk whatever oracle a betting market uses gets hijacked by Second Coming believers who resolve some new Jesus.AI or declaration by a cult leader as representing the authentic return of the Biblical Jesus, plus risks of exchanges defaulting on all bets or your winnings being locked up for gambling-restriction related reasons. For related reasons, you could earn money betting on Trump winning the most votes in 2020 after they'd been counted.