Betting is a tax on BS.

Hi! This is a tool that helps people make friendly wagers, thereby clarifying and concretizing their beliefs and making the world a better, saner place.

Personally, when I force myself to make concrete predictions -- especially on topics I feel strongly about -- it frequently turns out that I don't actually believe what I thought I did. Crazy, right!? Brains suck! And betting, i.e. attaching money to my predictions, is an incentive to actually try to get them right: it forces my brain to cut through (some of) the layers of social-desirability bias and Triversian self-deception to lay bare my actual beliefs about what I expect to see.

I made this tool to share that joy with you.

But what does it do?

Biatob provides a place for you to advertise things like this to your friends:

Hey, I think that X is pretty likely! If you disagree, let's bet: I'll pay you $20 if I'm wrong, against your mere $10 if I'm right.

Then, you publish a link to that page, and any of your friends can take you up on that bet. Biatob handles the bookkeeping, emails you (if you want) to make sure you remember to resolve the prediction when the answer becomes clear, and calculates and informs everybody of their net winnings so that they can settle up.

Note that last bit: everything is purely honor-system. Biatob doesn't touch money, it relies on you to settle up on your own. While a significant restriction in some ways (you can only bet against people whom you trust to pay their debts) this also makes things much simpler: you don't need to give me your credit card number, you don't need to pay any fees, I don't need to worry about being charged with running an illegal gambling operation -- everybody wins!

If you want thickly traded markets with thousands of participants, try PredictIt or Betfair. This is a different beast.

Cool! How do I use it?