Episode 24 of the Sports Predictor podcast features professional bettor and tech guru Stephen Rothwell.
Listen in to learn –
- Why cryptocurrency is perfect for sports betting
- What is the purpose behind the MicroBook startup?
- Some of the difficulties our Canadian neighbours deal with while trying to bet online.
- Will the sportsbook model die in coming years?
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We’re creating a set of smart contracts based in a programming language called Erlang which are to be controlled by a large bettors who want to take in zero-vig action. Basically, cutting out sportsbooks altogether. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just trade without a bookmaker fee at zero margin? The question is, how do we do that? I guess the value of bookmakers is they do things for us, but they charge us a margin on our bets to do it. But what do they actually do? They manage the escrow and the storage and the ledger of your bet and capital. But we have blockchain now and it’s better in every way, except, it’s a little bit slower.
So why do we let bookmakers charge us? They provide odds, but we have machine learning now at scale, so we can do our own odds. We don’t need the high volume, low margin model. There’s all these things that bookmakers do that are just getting eaten up as technology increases. Payments by the blockchain, machine learning for risk management and you have these cool languages like Erlang and Elm, which are fault tolerant, once I deploy them, they don’t crash ever. You can almost imagine now a bettor putting these little pieces together and starting to spin up their own personal branded sports books on Linux and just walking away from the industry all together, which doesn’t treat us sports bettors very well by the way. MicroBook builds these systems with the intent of allowing large scale bettors to deploy these open source smart contracts.
We think we have some of the best machine learning approaches in the business and we want to explore giving away these stacks to large scale bettors with the intent of starting a new network of tiny margin commerce. Essentially walking away from the sportsbooks because they don’t take action and they ban everyone.
Stephen Rothwell is a mathematician and expert in Machine Learning, Blockchain and Programming. He is currently advocating for the rights of bettors to have access to data and to be treated fairly.
