An Italian initiative has been launched that allows betting with bitcoin on the outcome of the European elections of May 26th. The initiative was born on the Italian telegram group Bitcoin Italia and is managed by the engineer Luca Venturini.
It is a Google Docs questionnaire through which it is possible to send a bet on the result of the 2019 European elections in Italy, indicating the number of seats that will be obtained from each Italian electoral list.
Whoever records the lowest amount of deviations from the actual seats allocated after the election will win the bet. In the event of a tie, answers to two additional questions will also be taken into consideration.
It will be necessary to indicate the number of seats obtained from each list, not the percentage of votes collected, bearing in mind that the seats allocated in total will be 73.
The questionnaire also shows the results of the previous elections, i.e. the number of seats obtained by the Italian lists that participated in 2014, so as to have an idea of how the bets work.
Participating is actually totally free, but those who wish can also optionally bet 0.01 BTC with their own prediction. As a result, two final rankings will be drawn up, one for the free bets and one for the bitcoin bets: the winner of this second ranking will receive the entire BTC amount.
In order to participate in the betting list, it is necessary to send 0.01 bitcoin to the address 19zvFZ7uqRSxnjmb2BEkSGmwhY2Zfkf9c and insert in the field at the bottom of the questionnaire the address from which the BTCs were sent (necessary to receive the BTCs in case of victory). The address will be visible to all, as the data collected through the questionnaire itself will be public.
A curiosity: the predictions, once sent, will actually be modifiable until 23:59 UTC on Saturday, May 25th, and will be visible to all. It is therefore a kind of prediction market, with participants who, in theory, at some point before the deadline could reach a kind of consensus on the result.
