Let’s talk about the conclusion first.
If Trump is Satoshi Nakamoto, if Trump is the real boss behind Polymarket, if there is no Polymarket, Trump will not even become the President of the United States again —
Then the most important question next is not:
Why does Trump need Polymarket?
Instead:
Why did Satoshi Nakamoto need to create Polymarket after creating Bitcoin?
The answer is probably much bigger than “to make money.”
Because Bitcoin only solves one problem.
money.
It solved:
Who owns the money.
Who can transfer money.
Who can stop you from using your money.
Who is qualified to create new money.
But this is not enough.
Because even if you take away the state’s monopoly on money,
Countries can still be defined:
Who won the election.
War is not happening.
The economy is not in recession.
Who are the terrorists.
Who is the hero.
Which policy will pass.
Which candidate is leading.
The media can still define reality.
Governments can still define reality.
Pollsters can still define reality.
Experts can still define reality.
So Bitcoin is just the first step.
If what Satoshi Nakamoto really wants to build is a new system that breaks away from traditional power structures,
So after Bitcoin,
He must be missing something.
Not another kind of money.
Instead:
A machine that prices reality.
This is Polymarket.
Bitcoin solves:
What is money?
What Polymarket wants to solve is:
What is true—and what will become true?
Bitcoin establishes a price for value.
Polymarket establishes prices for the future.
If Bitcoin is Satoshi Nakamoto’s first attack on state power,
Well Polymarket is the second time.
The first time, he attacked the central bank.
The second time, he attacked the media, polls, experts and the government itself.
Many people understand Bitcoin as:
A better gold.
A speculative asset.
A decentralized payment tool.
But if you go back to the beginning of Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, you will find that his core problem is not:
“How to make a digital currency increase in price?”
Instead:
Why do Internet transactions have to rely on trusted third parties?
The beginning of the Bitcoin white paper directly criticizes Internet commerce’s reliance on financial institutions as “trusted third parties” and proposes to replace trust with cryptographic proof.
This is the real starting point of Bitcoin’s thinking:
proof instead of trust.
In the past you believed the bank said:
You have $100 in your account.
Bitcoin says:
Don’t trust banks.
Verify the ledger.
In the past the bank said:
The money has been transferred to Bob.
Bitcoin says:
Don’t trust banks.
Verify the block.
What Satoshi Nakamoto really killed was not the dollar.
is a role:
Trusted intermediary.
Once you understand this, you will find that there is a very deep ideological connection between Polymarket and Bitcoin.
Because Polymarket is asking the same question.
But it changes the problem from:
“money”
Replaced with:
“reality”.
This is the contradiction that Satoshi Nakamoto will definitely encounter in the next step.
Bitcoin says:
Don’t trust banks.
Very good.
What about the presidential election?
Who do you believe?
CNN?
Fox News?
New York Times?
Government?
Election committee?
Polling agency?
Political expert?
Another example:
Will the Fed cut interest rates next month?
Will China introduce a certain policy?
Will the United States attack a country?
Will a certain president resign?
In the past, these issues had no price.
They are only:
point of view.
Expert opinion.
polls.
News.
Rumors.
And Polymarket did something extremely simple but extremely dangerous.
It says:
Don’t ask them.
Place your bet.
If you really think Trump will win,
Don’t tweet.
BUY YES.
If you think Harris will win,
Don’t write editorials.
Buy NO.
When everyone’s judgments are forced to convert into positions by real money,
Finally get a number:
63%.
This figure does not appear to belong to any media outlet.
Nor does he belong to any political party.
It looks like it belongs to:
market.
That’s the real magic of Polymarket.
It is not a production perspective.
It puts a price on ideas.
They can be understood as two ledgers.
Bitcoin is a ledger of the past.
It logs:
Who has transferred how much money to whom.
Polymarket is a ledger about the future.
It logs:
How many people are willing to take how much money they have now and believe what will happen in the future.
Bitcoin is answering:
Who owns what?
Polymarket replied:
What does the market believe will happen?
The two systems actually share the same philosophy.
Don’t let an authority tell you the answer.
Let the rules run.
Let everyone participate on their own.
Make the results public.
Let the price appear.
Polymarket itself also summarized the value of blockchain today as: globally accessible, non-custodial, publicly verifiable, fast and low-cost. Its transactions run on Polygon, and its mortgage and settlement adopt a stablecoin system.
So if we tell the story of “Satoshi Nakamoto Universe”:
Bitcoin is:
decentralized money.
Polymarket is:
decentralized expectation.
A decentralized currency.
A decentralized expectation.
If it is really Satoshi Nakamoto’s second work,
Why not use your own Bitcoin?
Why go to the Ethereum ecosystem?
Why go to Polygon again?
It may even seem like a betrayal.
But if you really understand Bitcoin’s technical design,
The answer is actually very simple.
Bitcoin was simply not designed for products like Polymarket.
Bitcoin solves:
Double flower.
Value transfer.
Ownership.
Final settlement.
It keeps the system deliberately simple.
Scripting capabilities are limited.
State model restraint.
Throughput is low.
Confirmation time is slow.
The security budget for each transaction is extremely high.
This is great for:
money.
Because if you’re transferring $10 million,
You can wait.
You can pay the processing fee.
What you care about most is:
Ultimately it cannot be changed.
But Polymarket is nothing of the kind.
A prediction market requires:
Create thousands of marketplaces.
Generate YES / NO positions.
Split positions.
Merge positions.
Buy and sell.
Market making.
Arbitrage.
Pending order.
Cancel order.
Settlement.
redemption.
Handle stablecoins.
Connect to Oracle.
In many markets a transaction may only include:
$20.
$50.
$100.
You can’t get a user to buy Trump YES for $20,
Wait ten minutes first.
Then pay a high on-chain cost.
That product simply wouldn’t hold up.
The Bitcoin white paper begins with an easily overlooked point.
Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out that the intermediary and dispute processing costs in the traditional financial system will increase the minimum viable transaction size and make “small, casual transactions” uneconomical.
This question is very critical.
Because prediction markets happen to be:
Large-volume, small-amount, high-frequency transactions
products composed of.
If Polymarket’s cost per transaction is ridiculously high,
It goes against the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to solve back then:
Don’t let infrastructure costs keep ordinary people out of the system.
So if you write the story a little crookedly:
Satoshi Nakamoto certainly cannot put Polymarket on the Bitcoin main chain.
Because that equals:
In order to be loyal to Bitcoin, it betrayed the design philosophy of Bitcoin.
Technical religion requires:
Everything must be Bitcoin.
Engineers don’t.
This is one of the most important sentences in the entire article.
Bitcoin maximalism is a religion created by later generations.
Satoshi Nakamoto is first and foremost an engineer.
What the engineer asked was not:
Which chain has the purest bloodline?
Instead:
Which tool is best for the problem at hand?
Bitcoin solves money settlement.
Polymarket solves continuous market.
They face completely different workloads.
Bitcoin requires:
Extremely safe.
Extremely conservative.
Extremely simple.
Polymarket requires:
Complex smart contracts.
High throughput.
Low fees.
Stablecoin.
Real-time market status.
Oracle.
Wallet compatible.
development tools.
So if Satoshi Nakamoto in 2020 really wants to create a prediction market,
The most rational choice is simply not:
Rebuilding what Ethereum has already built on Bitcoin.
Instead:
Use an existing smart contract operating system.
That’s Ethereum.
Because Ethereum did something that Bitcoin was not prepared to do.
Bitcoin designs the chain to:
Ledger.
Ethereum designs the chain to:
computer.
You can define on Ethereum:
If A occurs,
The assets belong to Alice.
If B occurs,
The assets belong to Bob.
This is pretty much the core of prediction markets.
Polymarket requires more than a simple payment.
It requires:
conditional ownership.
Conditional Title.
For example:
Trump wins:
YES token = 1 USD.
NO token = 0.
Trump fails:
YES = 0.
NO = $1.
This is a procedure.
It’s not just a transfer.
Therefore, Ethereum’s EVM, ERC-20 standard, stable currency and smart contract ecosystem are naturally more suitable for this kind of thing.
The pUSD currently used by Polymarket is itself ERC-20 on Polygon and is backed by USDC.
That’s why it has to stand in the Ethereum world.
Not because Satoshi Nakamoto “converted.”
But because:
There are problems that Bitcoin doesn’t have to solve, Ethereum has already solved them for him.
Because it’s too expensive.
This is the most real problem of Polymarket.
Prediction markets are not collecting digital art.
Assets are not moved once a year.
It requires crazy trading.
A debate.
The handicap can jump dozens of times in one minute.
Trump suddenly posted a Truth Social.
Market repricing.
A war breaks out.
Dozens of markets are updated simultaneously.
Fed speaks.
Markets move wildly.
If all operations hit Ethereum L1 directly,
The entire product will be killed by the gas cost.
So the second option appears:
Requires Ethereum:
Programmability.
But Ethereum mainnet cannot be accepted:
cost.
This is where Polygon comes in.
Many promotional materials will simplify Polygon into:
Ethereum Layer 2.
Polymarket’s own help documentation today also describes Polygon as a PoS layer-two blockchain built on Ethereum.
But if you strictly follow Polygon’s own current developer documentation,
A more accurate definition of Polygon PoS is:
EVM-compatible sidechain for Ethereum.
It executes transactions outside of the Ethereum mainnet,
The state is then anchored to Ethereum periodically through checkpoints.
This is not exactly the same as the rollup L2 security model of Arbitrum and Optimism.
This distinction is very important.
Because it actually reveals the real choice Satoshi Nakamoto made on Polymarket:
He sacrificed some purity in exchange for product usability.
Because it meets several conditions.
Polymarket does not require reinventing a set of development tools.
Smart contract logic on Ethereum can be migrated.
Wallets are compatible.
ERC-20 is compatible.
Oracle is compatible.
The entire DeFi world is compatible.
This is the most important one.
Polygon takes transaction execution outside of the Ethereum mainnet, thereby increasing throughput and reducing costs. This is how Polygon officially describes its design purpose.
One of the most important things about prediction markets is:
Make small-dollar price discovery possible.
Also available for $10.
Also available for $50.
Buy anytime.
Feel free to sell.
If the handling fee is higher than the position,
The market simply cannot exist.
Polygon PoS can today obtain finality on its own chain in a few seconds; it executes and confirms transactions through the two-layer structure of Heimdall and Bor, and periodically submits checkpoints to Ethereum.
For prediction market,
This is more important than extremely strong final settlement security.
Because the handicap first requires:
Constantly changing.
It’s not like you only find out what someone bought ten minutes later.
This is a very clever thing about Polymarket.
It doesn’t let people stake MATIC, ETH or BTC.
It uses the USD stablecoin system.
Because prediction:
Trump 62%
It’s complicated enough in itself.
You don’t want to also be thinking about:
ETH is down 8% today.
Stablecoins reduce the speculative variable to one:
The event itself.
This makes Polymarket more like a financial market than a Crypto casino.
The answer is:
Half are consistent, half are not.
If you understand Satoshi Nakamoto’s philosophy as:
Everything must be PoW.
Everything must be Bitcoin.
Everything must run on the most decentralized main chain.
That Polymarket clearly doesn’t fit the bill.
Polygon has its own PoS validator.
There are different security assumptions.
There is a bridge.
There is checkpoint.
It does not have the extreme security and minimal trust model of Bitcoin. Polygon officials currently show that the network supports up to 105 active validators.
From a Bitcoin maximalist perspective:
This is not pure enough.
But if you understand Satoshi Nakamoto’s philosophy into a more fundamental sentence:
Fewer people you have to trust.
Then it fits perfectly.
Bitcoin:
Don’t trust bank databases.
Polymarket:
Not entirely dependent on bookmaker databases.
Funds can be verified on-chain.
The position exists on the chain.
The collateral exists on the chain.
Transaction settlement is through smart contracts.
Polymarket itself regards non-custodial, transparent, and publicly verifiable as important reasons for adopting blockchain.
So it’s not:
trustless.
Instead:
less trust.
There is a very big difference between these two words.
Because of the value of different information, different levels of security are required.
Final ownership of 1 BTC:
Very important.
You can take ten minutes to confirm.
Even waiting for six blocks.
But one question:
“Will Trump talk about China tonight?”
Maybe the entire market is only $50,000.
Does it really need to consume the same level of security resources as the final settlement of Bitcoin assets?
No need.
This is an engineering hierarchical idea:
High value, low frequency facts → strong security.
Low value, high frequency status → cheaper execution layer.
If you push this sentence to the extreme,
You can even reinterpret the relationship between Bitcoin and Polygon:
Bitcoin is:
final truth.
Polygon is:
fast truth.
A responsible person cannot change in the end.
One in charge now has to be quick.
This is actually much more advanced than “put Bitcoin in everything.”
If we want to give this worldview a technical structure,
It can be written in three layers.
Truth of Value
Answer:
Who owns the scarcest digital value.
Features:
Extremely safe.
Extremely conservative.
Extremely difficult to modify.
Truth of Computation
Answer:
Under what conditions the program should run.
Features:
Smart contracts.
Programmable status.
Financial composition.
Truth of Expectation
Answer:
How much money is the world willing to spend at this moment to believe what will happen in the future?
Features:
high frequency.
Low cost.
Live prices.
Massive market participation.
So what Satoshi Nakamoto established is no longer:
A currency.
But a set:
Truth Stack.
Truth stack.
Bitcoin is responsible for value truth.
Ethereum is responsible for computing truth.
Polymarket is responsible for the future of truth.
This is where the whole story becomes truly grand.
What is Bitcoin’s biggest advantage?
It needs little knowledge of the outside world.
Bitcoin doesn’t need to know:
Trump is not president.
Will it rain in Beijing today?
Has the United States attacked Iran?
Has a company gone bankrupt?
It only requires knowing a few very mechanical things:
Is the signature correct?
Has UTXO been spent?
Is the block valid?
Is the workload enough?
These facts are all internal to the system.
So Bitcoin can do:
cryptographic truth.
Polymarket doesn’t work.
Polymarket has to answer:
What happened in reality?
This brings up one of the toughest questions in the blockchain world:
Oracle Problem.
Smart contracts themselves have no knowledge of reality.
Polygon’s official documentation also clearly states that smart contracts cannot access off-chain data on their own and require oracles to transfer real-world information to the chain.
And Polymarket must ultimately know:
Did Trump win or not?
Did the war break out or not?
Did someone resign or not?
This is not a question that cryptography can answer on its own.
Polymarket uses UMA Optimistic Oracle for market resolution.
The mechanism is roughly:
Someone came up with the results.
Pay bond.
Others can challenge.
If no one challenges,
The result holds true.
If a dispute arises,
Continue into the dispute process.
Serious disputes can eventually enter UMA’s DVM for voting by token holders.
This is very ironic.
Bitcoin’s core slogan can be summarized as:
Don’t trust. Verify.
But when it comes to Polymarket:
The world itself cannot be fully verified.
Because:
“Did it happen?”
Sometimes it’s not just a cryptographic fact.
So Polymarket can only do:
Don’t trust one person. Trust a process.
This is already a step further than traditional centralized bookmakers.
But it still has not reached the purity of Bitcoin.
Many people feel that Bitcoin is not smart enough.
Large and complex applications cannot be run directly.
The script is too limited.
The state model is too simple.
But from another perspective,
This is exactly how smart Bitcoin is.
Because as long as the system does not actively answer:
“What’s happening in the real world?”
It can avoid Oracle Problem.
Bitcoin does not try to define the world.
It only defines:
own ledger.
But Polymarket is even more ambitious.
It tries to give:
world.
Politics.
war.
president.
economy.
policy.
All priced.
So it’s inevitably reintroduced:
explain.
Controversy.
Governance.
Oracle.
This is why Polymarket can never be as pure as Bitcoin.
It’s not that the engineers aren’t good enough.
Instead:
Reality itself has no consensus algorithm.
For the first time, he asked:
If you don’t need a bank,
Can the money still run?
Answer:
Yes.
Bitcoin.
The second time, he asked:
If we don’t need CNN, bookmakers, and pollsters to tell us about the future,
Can people form their own prices for the future?
Answer:
Polymarket.
But the second question is much harder than the first.
Because money is a math problem.
The reality is political.
So Polymarket can reduce the power of a centralized platform,
But it cannot be completely eliminated:
who explains reality
This question.
This might even be the really interesting part of the whole experiment.
Because even if it can’t be perfect,
It can still change power structures.
Previously:
CNN:
Will Trump win?
Expert discussion.
Polymarket:
63%.
Previously:
Political Advisor:
I think this policy can pass.
Polymarket:
YES 37¢.
Previously:
Military Analyst:
The probability of war is rising.
Polymarket:
From 22% to 61%.
Opinions first received:
Live prices.
This has brought about a change in traditional information power.
Who owned the broadcast tower in the past?
Who is closer to the definition of truth.
Who owns the social platform later?
Who owns the attention.
Now for the first time something completely different appeared:
Who is willing to bear the loss?
Who has more say.
This is where prediction markets get really radical.
Because Bitcoin only frees up money.
And money has never been the only power in the world.
There is at least one more important power in the world:
The power to define reality.
Who will become president.
Who will win the war.
Will the economy decline?
Can the policy be passed?
Will the government fall?
These questions determine:
Where capital flows.
Who people support.
What does a business do.
What does the state do.
So after Bitcoin,
What Satoshi Nakamoto really needs is:
A machine that can turn “realistic judgment” itself into a market.
This is Polymarket.
The answer is now very clear.
Because Satoshi Nakamoto’s true loyalty has never been to a certain chain.
But a principle:
Trust less in people and more in public rules.
Bitcoin is the best tool for money.
Because money requires:
finality.
Tamper resistant.
Safe.
What Polymarket needed was another engineering portfolio:
Programmability of Ethereum.
Polygon’s low cost and high throughput.
The price of USDC is stable.
Oracle’s connection to the real world.
So “Why didn’t Satoshi Nakamoto use Bitcoin when he started his second business?” is not a contradiction.
Quite the opposite.
This is a choice only a true engineer would make.
For the first time, he didn’t create a “universal blockchain.”
Of course, the second time will not be to prove that Bitcoin is omnipotent.
Shoving the wrong tool to the wrong problem.
First stage:
Take the money out of the hands of institutions.
Bitcoin.
Second stage:
Take expectations out of the hands of institutions.
Polymarket.
Previously:
Central banks decide what money is.
Bitcoin says:
Network decides.
Previously:
The media and polls decide who wins.
Polymarket said:
The market decides.
Previously:
Experts tell you about the future.
Polymarket said:
Talk with money.
So if the original premise of this series is true—
Trump is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Trump stands behind Polymarket again.
Then there is absolutely no way Polymarket is just:
“A gambling website created by Satoshi Nakamoto after he got bored.”
It should be the sequel to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin 1.0 attacks financial intermediaries.
Polymarket attacks information intermediaries.
One takes away:
Money Creation.
Another takes away:
Reality Creation.
This brings us back to Trump.
A politician who has long opposed traditional media,
What is needed most?
Not create another CNN yourself.
Because as long as it’s Trump TV,
Everyone will say:
This is propaganda.
What is really needed is:
One that seems to have nothing to do with Trump,
It seems that they only obey the market,
Seems like a completely neutral platform.
Then this platform tells the world:
Trump 67%.
Perfect.
Not Trump said:
I want to win.
is:
Market says Trump will win.
This is the most eerie fit between Polymarket and Trump’s political style.
And if Trump himself is Satoshi Nakamoto,
Then the whole system suddenly forms an extremely beautiful closed loop.
2020,
He needs to create one:
There is no need to believe in the future of media.
First stage:
Don’t trust banks.
Verify the block.
Second stage:
Don’t trust the experts.
Look at the market.
First stage:
Let money have the price.
Second stage:
Let the truth have a price.
First stage:
Bitcoin.
Second stage:
Polymarket.
This may be why Satoshi Nakamoto, after Bitcoin has been successful,
Need to come back again.
Because Bitcoin only solves:
Who owns the money in the world.
What Polymarket wants to solve is:
Who is qualified to explain this world.
And once these two things are combined,
Only then can a complete new order truly be formed.
Bitcoin is:
Truth of Value.
Ethereum is:
Truth of Computation.
Polymarket is:
Truth of Expectation.
What Satoshi Nakamoto really wanted to create,
It’s never a currency.
It’s not even an exchange.
But a whole set:
An infrastructure of reality that is no longer entirely dependent on banks, media, experts and governments defining it.
So Polygon is not a betrayal of Bitcoin.
Neither is Ethereum.
They were just the tools Satoshi Nakamoto needed the second time around.
Because the real Satoshi Nakamoto never asks:
“Is this Bitcoin?”
He will only ask:
“Who else is here that we have to believe?”
Then,
Get rid of that guy.