Mark Ginzburg on blockchain and the future of the crypto world: analyzing the US elections through the lens of decentralization

This time, my love was polygamous - blockchain technology, decentralized applications and smart contracts were the object of my adoration and adoration.

There have been many doubts, insights and suspicions over the past seven years, but today my love is still unconditional. 
This post is about the benefits of decentralized apps, which for me are already undeniable, but this time through the prism of the American election.

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Who will be the 47th President of the United States?

With only 21 days left until the election, the battle of the candidates is threatening to bring the world to an unprecedented level of intensity and to unleash a social conflict at the level of a serious civil confrontation.

The specifics of American elections are such that supporters of the Democratic Party will always vote for the Democratic candidate, regardless of virtually any dirt against him, just as supporters of the Republican Party will always vote for the Republican candidate. At the finish line, between the primaries and Election Day, the battle is for the votes of the so-called “undecideds.”

And this large group of voters is very sensitive to the results of opinion polls of solid and respectable sociological structures.

On October 15, 2024, almost every reputable polling agency favored Kamala Harris. I've compiled data from the top six presenters.

ABC News Project 538 shows Harris leading in national polls with a 48.5% lead over Trump's 46.1%.

A poll from The New York Times/Siena College shows Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump by 3 percentage points (49% vs. 46%).
                                              
An even better result for Harris comes from the Economist/YouGov poll, where she already leads with 49% vs. 45% for Trump.

And quite favorable to Kamala is the famous Reuters/Ipsos, which says Harris is ahead of Trump by 5 points - 49% vs. 44%!

270towin shows a 2.5% advantage for Harris.

Realclearpolling gives betting odds in favor of Harris at +1.7.

And suddenly Polymarket, a very popular information-analytical-sociological resource, announces an unexpected result.

Its data are sensational: they are categorically in favor of Trump with a result of 57.9% against 41.7% for Harris.

How can this be ? And who to believe then ? I will now give my explanations and you can draw your own conclusions.

All the above six Agencies and Polymarket are super-professional and very reputable structures. But there is one fundamental difference between them. All the first six are traditional centralized platforms.

And Polymarket is a decentralized information trading platform where people bet on the outcomes of various events, from political to sports. In essence, it is a prediction market where participants buy and sell positions depending on how they estimate the probability of the outcome of a particular event. It is a kind of mixture of a financial market and a crowdsourcing mechanism for predicting future events.

Now Polymarket is massively betting on the outcome of the presidential election.

The platform works on blockchain, which provides transparency and security of transactions. And now a short (I'll try!) information about the essence of decentralized applications that I love so much.

Decentralized applications or DApps are applications on the blockchain, working without a backend with smart contract functions, thanks to which they can work autonomously, i.e. without human intervention.

DApps and regular applications may not differ in terms of interface, but the fundamental differences lie in the way the programs work and the code is executed.

The main feature of DApp applications is that they operate in a decentralized network using blockchain technology and have no single point of failure. “Conventional” centralized applications store data on centralized servers, which leads to risks of information leakage or unauthorized interference in data processing.
Centralized (“regular”) applications are managed by companies, in the examples I gave at the beginning of this post, such as media monsters like ABC News, The New York Times, The Economist, Reuters, who set the rules and dispose of the data at their discretion.

And the code of Polymarket's blockchain application is executed in a decentralized network, not on the company's servers. In a peer-to-peer (peer-to-peer or P2P) network, all participants have equal rights and decide how to dispose of their data and assets. The application only synchronizes with the network of computer nodes.

The problem with centralized applications is also that the client and server are interconnected and dependent on each other. If the backend code on the server is compromised, the client side will also be affected, making centralized applications vulnerable to hacking.

In a decentralized network, applications are isolated from the main blockchain.

Wait, I'm getting carried away.

So, CONCLUSION:
The main difference between the decentralized application used by the Polymarket platform, which notified the world yesterday of Trump's significant advantage, and the top six “competitors” that showed Harris' lead (all six-centralized applications) is that in a DApp, no person or entity controls the operation of the application or the network over which it runs. The programs are controlled by an algorithm described in a smart contract and this makes it impossible for interested parties of any rank, including the President of the country, to interfere in the process of calculating the result. Any slightest adjustments of data and falsification of results are excluded.

By the way, I started my analysis with the very influential ABC News/538, which I think is very cool, not because of ABC News' involvement, but because of its second partner, the FiveThirtyEight platform. This platform is actively engaged in aggregate polls, which means they collect and analyze data from many different sources, taking into account a wide range of opinions and trends, rather than relying on the results of one or a few polls. The Platform uses sophisticated statistical models to process this data. I know the two lead developers of FiftyThirtyEight very well and I can affirm that the technological part of the Project is very professional and impeccable. However, the second and primary contributor to the Project, ABC News, is already a politically biased entity.

Re-read. It may be a bit long and rambling, but now, armed with additional knowledge, you will take a different look at the numbers we are being told.