[HN Gopher] Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran mi...
___________________________________________________________________
Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
Author : defly
Score : 1219 points
Date : 2026-03-16 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.timesofisrael.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.timesofisrael.com)
| pydry wrote:
| The level of censorship in Israel right now is off the charts:
| https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
|
| I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of
| what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.
| mickwe wrote:
| But the Times of Israel reporter reported that a missile _hit_
| - and where. The censor tries to prevent reports like that, for
| (ostensibly) security reasons - telling the enemy where their
| missiles hit.
| bootsmann wrote:
| There is a clip embedded within the article that corroborates
| what the journalist wrote.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I don't understand what are you saying. The journalist
| published an article claiming that a missile struck without
| being intercepted (although with no damage). The gamblers
| wanted the journalist to retract and say that the missile was
| intercepted.
|
| Are you saying that the gamblers were actually the censors or
| that the reality was that the missile was indeed intercepted
| and somehow the censors forced the journalist to say it wasn't?
| damageboy wrote:
| The rules don't apply for reporters outside of Israel, and this
| was historically been the way that Israeli journos and other
| bypass the censorship completely.
|
| The author is being pressured (IMO) because the degens feel
| like they can threaten him (physical proximity)
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| I think it's the opposite - the censorship has made the Israeli
| public believe they're safer than they really are. The US is
| lying about their stockpiles and frantically moving resources
| from East Asia to try and shore up missile defense in the
| Middle East.
|
| These people believed that no Iranian missiles could possibly
| get through and instead of accepting they were misled they're
| shooting the messenger
| mvelbaum wrote:
| I live in Israel. There is fake news being spread about Tel
| Aviv being destroyed and Israel being hit hard. This is
| absolutely false. The volume of rockets is way lower than the
| 12 Day War. In fact, I even do the irresponsible thing of not
| even going to the bomb shelter when the odd siren rings out.
|
| There was a decision made by the security establishment not to
| allow reporting on Iranian missile hits in order to make it
| harder for the Iranians to do BDA.
| fzil wrote:
| Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets
| are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its
| not even close.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| By far?!
|
| There's a very long list.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty
| interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-
| view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet
| on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the
| Oscars?"
|
| But we're in an era of less and less _responsible_ government
| oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there 's
| no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the
| accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.
|
| Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of
| competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some
| societies having had to mortgage their souls.
|
| Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism
| and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be
| exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form,
| the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things
| happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body
| of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor
| of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and
| there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me
| betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet
| on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the
| Emmys?"
|
| I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I mean, what's fun about _my_ specific example? Guaranteed
| money.
| croon wrote:
| By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept
| are the same as the fun.
| relaxing wrote:
| Conan hosted the Oscars.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like
| that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
| relaxing wrote:
| Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
| ipaddr wrote:
| The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks
| there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| If some specific prediction market can easily be
| manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better
| should not gamble in it.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on
| insider information. The punters without edge are the bait
| incentivizing the insiders.
|
| And in the US prediction markets are regulated like
| commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because
| again, insider trading is the point.
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| > insider trading is the point
|
| Says who?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| It's in the name: _Prediction_ market. The point is to
| predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at
| that than non-insiders.
|
| Though I think where things start to get a bit more
| insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely
| to inside information, but the ability to change the
| outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned
| IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction
| markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning
| that is possible is debatable.)
| atmavatar wrote:
| That isn't very convincing, as the stock market itself is
| largely a prediction market. People buy stock to bet on
| future success, whether that manifest in the form of
| stock price increases, splits, and/or dividends. It's
| merely a much more narrowly-focused prediction market.
|
| For that very reason, insider knowledge, and especially
| the ability to influence future outcomes, become the
| subject of heavy regulation. And, the lack of such
| regulation for congressional members is also why their
| net worth tends to skyrocket once entering office.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I'd argue that the "purpose" of the stock market is
| matching investors with companies that want liquidity.
| Allowing insider trading hurts the purpose by driving
| away non-insider trading participants, and it does not
| really help in any way.
|
| With prediction markets, the "purpose" is information
| discovery, and "insider trading" actually _helps_ (= >
| via information from insiders).
|
| Disclaimer: I'm somewhat playing devils advocate here, I
| personally think that prediction markets are for now
| mostly an ineffective zero-sum game (and legalized
| gambling with all the drawbacks _that_ brings).
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > I'd argue that the "purpose" of the stock market is
| matching investors with companies that want liquidity.
|
| But you don't usually buy the stocks from the company
| itself, do you? Unless there is some shenanigans with
| buyouts going on...
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| Companies can issue new shares to take advantage of
| positive public sentiment.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| If I use a drone to look over a fence to count the amount
| of inputs and outputs of a factory, and only I know this,
| it is perfectly legal for me to trade on it. Not insider
| trading! I'm just a really good information-finder and
| I'm morally just in how clever I am at finding an edge.
|
| If I work at the company and count the inputs and
| outputs, and trade on it, I am a morally bankrupt scumbag
| and I have hurt society and all of the traders in the
| market.
|
| Hmmmmmmm
| KPGv2 wrote:
| This is a troll post, and I'll bite.
|
| The reason insider trading is illegal is because it
| undermines confidence in the markets by establishing a
| pattern by which insiders with privileged, secret
| information leverage it to profit off people who cannot
| access this information.
|
| It also incentivizes insiders to leverage their position
| within a company to manipulate the business in order to
| profit. This also undermines integrity of markets.
|
| Your second example, setting aside all your troll bait
| inflammatory verbiage about moral bankruptcy, is an
| illustration of this risk. I don't care if it rises to
| the level of moral bankruptcy, it is harmful to a
| capitalist society in a serious way.
|
| Your first example is a depiction of someone leveraging
| information that anyone can gather. It does not undermine
| the integrity of markets because it is just an investor
| acting on publicly-accessible information.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| If you work at the company you have almost certainly
| signed an agreement not to disclose such information; if
| you do so, you are violating the agreement. But that
| isn't insider trading.
|
| If you hold a position of fiduciary responsibility within
| the company (or gain information from someone who does)
| that's a different matter. But the analogy there would be
| hacking into the company to read internal records, not
| just looking over a fence. in both cases, it's a crime.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| > Robin Hanson, the economist who's commonly known as the
| godfather of modern prediction markets, thinks that using
| inside information to place bets like this is actually
| necessary for these markets to work--making "insider
| trading" a feature, not a bug.
|
| > "The point of these markets is to get information, so
| the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if
| you think you have some information," said Hanson, a
| professor of economics at George Mason University whose
| academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets
| Polymarket and Kalshi. "People with more information
| should trade more and get more money because that's how
| they get paid for the information they contribute."
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/01/09/why-
| predi...
|
| Seems like you should read more about these markets.
| variadix wrote:
| Insiders bring information to a market. Intelligent
| analysis and prediction also does, but obviously insiders
| have special information they are incentivized to bring
| to the market. Most people placing these bets are simply
| gambling, insiders and analysts at least have rational
| reasons for placing bets and add information to the
| market.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Insiders bring information to a market [...] special
| information they are incentivized to bring
|
| Simultaneously: Insiders have power to coerce an outcome,
| the market creates a corrupt payoff for them to abuse
| that power.
| cjonas wrote:
| How is it useful when what we are seeing is insiders
| place massive bets immediately before the event resolves.
| Does gaining this information a few hours early provide
| value to society that offsets the impact of normalizing
| gambling and attaching incentives to bad outcomes of war,
| politics, etc.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| > Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on
| insider information. The punters without edge are the
| bait incentivizing the insiders.
|
| And like any other gambling (see 1919 Black Sox), they
| can also incentivize behavior for actors who can
| influence the outcome of what's being gambled upon.
|
| Personally, that's a significant enough negative
| externality for me to not want to live in a society where
| "prediction markets" are popular.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I personally think it's ridiculous that we have allowed
| these prediction markets to subvert our sports betting
| laws. And meaningful corruption legislation should exist
| to prevent government and military personnel from
| profiting from them.
|
| But if you are going to allow them at all, you want as
| much expertise as possible in them. Sharks eating minnows
| is what that looks like.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Makes me wonder if there's a bet you can take on
| Polymarket that Polymarket will get shut down due to it
| negatively influencing behavior. The insider trading on
| that one should get interesting.
| amelius wrote:
| Will it pay out if it is shut down though?
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| 1. I believe you can bet on this
|
| 2. If it's only banned in the US, yes it pays out, you
| just need to get a VPN or go to another country.
|
| Also even it's banned everywhere, the markets are
| blockchain contracts so you should be able to access it
| without the website, which is just the frontend. (this is
| where my technical expertise breaks down, someone who
| knows blockchain is a better expert)
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| Why would we want insiders to profit on a public decision
| like war? If some general has money on Iran's leader
| being taken out by March 1, he might not be acting in the
| best interest of the country.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo
| cjrp wrote:
| For me that feels like the difference between insider
| trading and market manipulation.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| The idea is that prediction markets show the "odds" of an
| event occurring (that's why it's percentages after all).
|
| So if a war with Iran is going to happen, and so a
| general bets that it will, the odds will jump and go very
| high.
|
| Now at least theoretically, people in the Middle East can
| see the high odds, and travel elsewhere.
|
| After seeing how many people got trapped in the UAE, I
| might check these prediction markets in the future for
| similar things.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It only work if you have a "good" passport and you can
| pack your income source and move it (i.e. easier for a
| web page designer than a goat farmer).
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| Sure, but some people would get out, right?
|
| Surely you aren't saying that because prediction markets
| can't save every single life, that it's somehow useless
| to save a few.
|
| Another example, if odds jump on a missile strike on a
| particular city, you might have the chance to move out of
| the way.
| airstrike wrote:
| This notion that price discovery is only possible with
| insider trading is demonstrably false yet somehow
| surprisingly pervasive.
| kibwen wrote:
| In the same way that the crypto hucksters were desperate
| to invent legitimate reasons for NFTs to have trillion-
| dollar valuations, pathetic gamblers are desperate to
| invent legitimate reasons for there to exist some non-
| gambling cover for the existence of predictions markets.
| amelius wrote:
| Even in stock trading you can get away with it for a long
| time. See Epstein.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yeah there are all those stupid things like "what color of
| Gatorade will they pour over players at the end of the
| game" that are ultimately about some arbitrary decision an
| individual or small group. Probably a whole sports game is
| fair to bet on because it involves so many sub-events but
| people gamble on things that make no sense to be gambling
| on.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| The stock market and the sports market are also honeypots .
|
| I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn if you believe that
| when you bet on the stock market or on the sports market
| for each and every particular bet involving millions of
| people the maximum profit is not reaped by a half a dozen
| of insiders who trade on inside informations and their only
| problem is not being too obvious about it.
|
| Also even if they get caught the millions of people
| wagering are still getting fucked because there is not a
| redo or making people whole when the insider traders get
| caught (which is a tiny percentage of the time)
| tatersolid wrote:
| > Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment
| for insider trading.
|
| Wouldn't the good old-fashioned fraud laws present in
| basically every jurisdiction apply?
| Balgair wrote:
| Friend of a friend does announcing online.
|
| Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your
| game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice.
| A good way to make a little in the off hours.
|
| So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at
| some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it
| gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened.
| So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up,
| then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the
| people's total haul.
|
| Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the
| guy says you pay and I'll say.
|
| No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0].
| People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like
| a _lot_ of people ' he said.
|
| That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of
| High Card, essentially.
|
| You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the
| higher value one wins. Repeat.
|
| It is _the most Degenerate_ form of gambling out there. There
| is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random
| numbers.
|
| My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing
| with this for decades.
|
| [0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this
| quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another
| site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can
| access it that easily.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there.
| There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure
| random numbers.
|
| While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of
| gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets.
|
| At least this form _is_ (psuedo)random, and the odds are
| statistically fair and published (by law).
|
| Contrast to slot machines, which are _not_ random, but are
| in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which
| maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value
| for the player.
|
| The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling
| where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot
| machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot
| games).
| nemomarx wrote:
| One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that
| really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated
| at the jackpot animations, because they break up the
| "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch
| screen continually. They might be the most evil form of
| gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for
| hardcore gambling addicts.
| Retric wrote:
| Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum
| games, you're going to lose anyway. While I find most
| forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the
| experience it's little different than spending 50$ at an
| arcade.
|
| My game of choice is the big state lottery and it's
| simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of
| winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of
| depressing because the odds are so low. But look at it as
| paying for the experience of the possibility of a jackpot
| and realize when you buy one ticket or multiple so just
| buy one and it becomes a cheap thrill.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| How is this _not_ degenerate?
|
| You know you're going to lose.
|
| You know the money is wasted.
|
| You do it anyway -- and knowingly just _pretend_ those
| first two facts aren't true.
|
| Then you lose your money. Which you knew was going to
| happen.
| bryan_w wrote:
| How would you define degenerate?
| Retric wrote:
| Go to a movie and you are going to be put the ticket
| prices, it's a money losing proposition clearly there's
| no reason to do so. Obviously, people place value on some
| experiences so any argument which fails to consider that
| is flawed.
|
| If you happen to be at a casino, make exactly one bet in
| your lifetime and there's a significant chance you'll end
| up ahead. On average you'll be out money but we don't
| live out every possibility and average them. It's just
| one event and you could easily end up ahead, it's only as
| you repeat it with minimal gains and negative returns
| that things quickly become a near certainty.
|
| With Powerball the odds are low but not astronomical that
| you buy 1 or 1000 tickets and end up ahead. It's the most
| likely outcome by a massive margin but due to non jackpot
| prizes a long way from zero.
|
| However again the odds of breakeven just reduce the cost
| of play they aren't the only thing people get for their
| money.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to
| lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the
| hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up
| in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I have one friend who likes to gamble. I've tried the old
| math argument with him and he dismisses it out-of-hand.
| He says that, yes, he knows it's a negative sum game but
| sometimes he wins and that makes it worth it. Then he
| says, "You spend money on a symphony or an art museum or
| an expensive restaurant, right? Those are guaranteed to
| leave you a little bit poorer at the end of the night.
| Same thing as gambling, but with a bigger guarantee."
|
| And I didn't have a response.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| All people who go to casinos are not pathological
| gamblers.
|
| They have some disposable income, and spend it at the
| casino for a bit of fun. Sometimes, they come out richer,
| and they are happy, sometimes, they lose, they come out a
| bit disappointed, but that's the cost of of
| entertainment.
| temp84858696945 wrote:
| Some fraction of people that start out that way end up
| addicted and spending way more money on gambling then
| they should.
| matwood wrote:
| Gambling can be entertainment, and as long as it's viewed
| as consumption it's fine IMO. I enjoy playing craps
| whenever I'm in a casino, and have great memories with
| friends playing the ups and downs of the table.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Hear me out: Whenever people try the "math argument" on a
| gambler they are basically wrong and are misunderstanding
| how recreational gamblers actually think, which is not
| irrational (for the most part) or at least not irrational
| in the way people think on the surface.
|
| Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to
| explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying
| tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will
| (on average) lose money.
|
| Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are
| not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to
| maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that
| the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life
| far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they
| get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically
| nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to
| lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely
| change the life of most people and therefore the marginal
| utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater
| than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on
| the ticket.
|
| It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling
| companies are arbitraging. And for people who become
| addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The
| companies are just exploiting people who have a disease
| and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies
| which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the
| dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating
| the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just
| keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
|
| [1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
|
| [2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by
| probability. This could be seen as how much of a
| difference the payoff would make to their life.
| temp84858696945 wrote:
| The response is probably that gambling is designed to be
| as addictive as possible, and while your friend might
| think they will not get addicted, is it really a good
| risk to take?
| urikaduri wrote:
| Well, you can win the big state lottery if you really
| khow what you're doing. But you might need to hide in a
| remote island if you win too much.
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/how-to-
| win...
| Projectiboga wrote:
| Two or more tickets in the same draw have a lower
| expected value. Yes it is a very small change to your
| payout while having an extra chance. In some way you're
| betting against your self with a second bet in the game
| relative to the jackpot .
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't play the lottery but I've never really understood
| the math against it. It's a negative expected value,
| sure, but it also produces a (small) probability of a
| high return. The math against it seems to hinge on the
| idea that people should maximize the expected value of
| their wealth.
|
| But, an alternative goal is to maximize your probability
| of qualitative changes up, and minimize the probability
| of qualitative changes down, for your living conditions.
| If somebody is in a situation where they can spend a
| qualitatively inconsequential amount of money on
| lotteries, then playing the lottery is a rational way of
| maximizing this metric, right?
|
| Of course, it does add the hard-to-quantify risk that
| they'll become addicted to gambling and start spending a
| qualitatively meaningful amount of money gambling!
|
| OTOH if we as a society all started putting a small
| percentage of our wealth toward the lottery we're
| essentially misallocating whatever that percentage was.
| So it produces a somehow less efficient economy I guess.
| So maybe there's a social bias against it.
| moregrist wrote:
| > if you like the experience it's little different than
| spending 50$ at an arcade.
|
| If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a
| little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and
| player.
|
| $50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you've
| broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just
| feeds an addiction. But there's no skill here; the odds
| of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player
| does.
| eloisant wrote:
| Unless you do insider trading, which can be pretty easy
| on prediction markets depending on your job...
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but
| are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways
| which maximize the earnings for the house and the
| addictive value for the player.
|
| this isn't correct. slot machines are random. my first
| job out of school was, in part, making sure slot machines
| were random.
|
| people think the machines are rigged because they don't
| understand the rules. the machines are fair, it's the pay
| tables that are rigged.
| uncletammy wrote:
| How does someone break into that field. I have a buddy who
| used to announce pro sports ( he's sort of famous for it )
| that wants this kind of work.
| Balgair wrote:
| He just kinda hustled I think. I don't know him all that
| well. But from what I do know, he started announcing for
| his buddies who referred him to other people and so on.
| Eventually he had a website going and would schedule when
| he was available for announcing (dude has a family and
| day job so not all the time). Made a niche in online
| basketball games and was open to really anything.
|
| If your buddy is somewhat famous, then get on the socials
| and network with the players in the files already, they
| all seem really open as it's still a big and unaddressed
| market. Payouts are gonna be small at first, think beer
| leagues and largeish friends groups. And from what I can
| tell the competition for big gigs is tougher as you go up
| in the field.
|
| Honestly give it a try, seems like a great side hustle.
|
| Edit: be a great idea for AI in the low end, but it's the
| human touch that really makes it. The guy I know is
| pretty funny and I assume his wisecracks help him
| bombcar wrote:
| As mentioned in the other comment, scout out local events
| - bars that have trivia nights, bowling contests, etc.
| Find the ones where it's obvious the bartender is also
| the MC, and offer to do it for them for free/drinks/small
| fee.
|
| Have business cards ready to go and have them laying out.
| soerxpso wrote:
| I don't see how this is more degenerate than betting on
| roulette at a casino. Prediction markets usually provide
| more efficient odds than casinos because the house profits
| from trading volume instead of from the spread, so it's
| essentially just a way to bet on a game of complete chance
| with a much better average-loss than you could get on games
| of pure chance in the past. If people want to bet on
| coinflips, it seems objectively better that they have
| access to a way to do that in a way where they only get
| fleeced for 1% of their bet rather than 5%+ of their bet.
|
| For sporting events, for example, the alternative to
| prediction markets 5-10 years ago was to use a website
| where you bet against the house directly, and they'd
| usually take around a 15-20% spread, and they'd ban you and
| keep your account funds if they decided you're winning too
| much. Now you can bet on the same events on prediction
| market sites, with around a 1-5% spread, and the house
| doesn't care how much you win (so there's actually an
| argument that you're playing a game of skill, compared to
| the old format where you definitely weren't, since you'd be
| banned for being too skilled).
| mapt wrote:
| > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there.
| There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure
| random numbers.
|
| Never go to Nevada.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| But you _have to go to Nevada_ for that.
|
| You don't have Nevada 24/7 in your pocket. Or you
| shouldn't.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| How is that different from roulette?
| xandrius wrote:
| The regulation behind who can operate such establishments
| legally and who can participate, etc.?
| gosub100 wrote:
| Roulette uses a physical process and is not compromised.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book
| by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the
| game.
|
| The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling
| by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially
| published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
|
| The book focuses on a group of University of California,
| Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the
| Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed
| and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially
| modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the
| outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew,
| presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp,
| that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and
| taking into account peculiarities of the particular
| wheels being played they could increase their odds of
| selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage
| over the casinos.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Yes if you hold a camera and capture the speed and
| position of the ball and wheel you can gain an edge,
| people have tried it. Good point.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| But if that physical process were somehow complicated,
| why, you could break the bank at Monte Carlo!
| kqr wrote:
| It literally has to be compromised to work. If the
| roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to
| predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start
| of the spin. It has to have irregularities and
| asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour - and those same
| irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!
| thrance wrote:
| In my heart of hearts, all gambling is equally degenerate:
| from stock markets to assasination markets.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Economics sort of works ok when money transfers are used
| to mediate, y'know, the exchange of goods and services.
| Nearly everything else turns out to be a pretty obvious
| moral hazard.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Reminds me of the cheap bets casino from National Lampoons
| Vegas Vacation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byfewcZsug4
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there.
| There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure
| random numbers.
|
| How is this any more degenerate than slot machines? At
| least it is truly random, rather than rigged.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| slot machines are truly random. the rigging is in the pay
| table.
| thayne wrote:
| > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there.
|
| I don't think so. At least you have a 50% chance of
| winning. Unlike say a lottery or a slot machine.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| 50% chance of winning, but there is a rake from the site.
| eloisant wrote:
| It's not the chance of winning that matters, it's the
| mean expected value.
|
| If you have a 50% chance of losing $2 or gaining $1, you
| have a negative expected value and that's bad.
|
| If you have a 10% chance of gaining 100$ and 90% chance
| of losing $1, that's an expected value of $9 and it's a
| great deal.
| thayne wrote:
| Yes that is bad, but it isn't as bad as the expected
| value of a Powerball lottery ticket.
|
| I didn't say it isn't bad, just that it isn't the worst.
| walthamstow wrote:
| You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated
| bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Sure, it's fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar
| bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that
| amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling
| on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet
| self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and
| ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn't
| shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.
| btilly wrote:
| Indeed, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what
| an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead?
| Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of
| money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit
| opportunity for an assassination.
|
| The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action
| taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when
| this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have
| prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an
| administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption:
| https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-
| Ord...
|
| The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars
| for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity,
| because the investigators have been fired. :-(
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or bribery: "I didn't _pay_ anybody to dismiss the case
| against me. I just _innocently hedged_ my personal risks by
| betting I 'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk
| _just happened_ to be betting I 'd go free, so that my
| million dollars is _coincidentally_ in their pockets...
| well, that 's just how things work out sometimes in
| _prediction_ markets. "
| btilly wrote:
| The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy
| a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just
| happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm
| no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for
| Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into
| Justin Sun that got stopped.
|
| See also the list of prominent people and companies that
| benefitted from executive action after investing in the
| Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon,
| Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what
| exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library
| needs a jumbo jet.
|
| As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this
| kind of stuff can just happen in the open...
|
| (To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump
| has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is
| no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will
| want to move it back.)
| brightball wrote:
| Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports.
|
| You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to
| develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming
| obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an
| alumni base for the rest of your life.
|
| And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant
| money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy
| doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your
| opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling
| kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much
| gambling is playing a part.
|
| It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for
| developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of
| their way to _not_ report on the stories of people being hurt
| by the process.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer
| being able to _"..develop young men, teach them about hard
| work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become
| a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.. "_
|
| we would actually have had to have been delivering on the
| whole _"..develop young men, teach them about hard work,
| overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a
| part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.. "_
| story.
|
| Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in
| money sports, we never really delivered on all of those
| promises in the past.
|
| These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are
| just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student
| athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we
| did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball
| athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and
| then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need
| the "value" of the "alumni base".
| akudha wrote:
| _if there 's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls
| or the accompanying morals_
|
| I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing
| like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do
| it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on
| anything and everything, right?
|
| _I had fun betting $5 here and there_
|
| Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than
| $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and
| not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists
| etc?
| Terr_ wrote:
| You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing
| popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common
| they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in
| front of an insider so that they reveal (or _cause_ ) a
| strong outcome through greed?
|
| Actually, there's _another_ perverse incentive operating on
| a higher level, when it comes for the people _running_
| things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to
| IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're _not_ first-in-line
| for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody 's going
| to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier
| form of polling."
| uoaei wrote:
| It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with
| extralegal means of enforcing your win.
| azan_ wrote:
| I'd say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it's
| not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that
| covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the
| internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful
| things related to internet in my opinion.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Or from the death of family and friends.
| manphone wrote:
| We can walk and chew gum at the same time, the government can
| regulate thousands or millions of different types of things
| at the same time. It doesn't make sense to say there's stuff
| on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should
| not do anything about it.
| echoangle wrote:
| It's not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion.
| There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over
| social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.
|
| Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that,
| assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely
| in my opinion).
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you,
| the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on,
| while real, is not huge.
| echoangle wrote:
| I am sorry for that and I can see that it's bad, but the
| internet just has a lot of things that are even worse.
| manphone wrote:
| That's not an explanation or an excuse at all.
| echoangle wrote:
| What do you mean? The claim was that prediction markets
| are the worst thing on the internet and I mentioned some
| things that are worse. What else is there to explain?
| lynx97 wrote:
| It is a valueable learning experience. Especially if you
| are naiv enough like me, to actually give police a call
| after someone threatened you with death. Pretty sobering
| when the guy on the other end of the line just flips you
| off with "And what do you think are we supposed to do about
| it now?" Thats when you learn that some of your problems
| are pretty much imagined :-) and that there is a difference
| beween TV and real life...
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Yeah CSAM is worse.
|
| But I think we can all agree there are a lot of negative
| effects of the new world where online gaming is without
| limits and government intervention is needed to some extent.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _people selling murder for hire on the Darknet._
|
| It's always a honeypot, no one besides local junkies and
| people with personal beefs will do a murder for hire that a
| working person can afford.
|
| There are people who are dumb enough to go to prison after
| paying like $1k-$10k for a "murder", like after a flight and
| hotel how much are you expecting your would-be assassin to
| make?
| morkalork wrote:
| It exists in organized crime but all the cases I've read
| about have that one thing in common: The killer worked for
| organized crime. And they were never fully unaligned
| either, always for the same families or groups that are
| loosely allied.
| creatonez wrote:
| > and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.
|
| When this existed, it was quite literally done using the
| prediction market model. It was an early prototype for all
| this insanity.
| coole-wurst wrote:
| I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.
| ambicapter wrote:
| That existed before the internet.
| laurentiurad wrote:
| it's a hyperbole dude. It accelerates the moral decay of a
| society, and the barriers for entry are very low. The one you
| mentioned is straight illegal and punishable in any
| jurisdiction across the globe.
| loeg wrote:
| The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.
| tartoran wrote:
| One has nothing to do with the other and it's a poor argument
| to defend prediciton markets.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days
| cannonpr wrote:
| It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior
| en masse that we don't normally get to see. A long time ago
| there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up
| on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried
| to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered
| underneath and started chanting "jump, jump" because of a rule
| that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down
| their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group
| A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with
| large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and
| worse things than this.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Sounds like a urban legend.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human
| behavior
|
| Why "can look", "but", "just"?
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think GP is saying it's not the prediction market that's
| bad, but human nature itself. The prediction market just
| makes it more visible.
| tclancy wrote:
| If we ignore that people are literally profiting from
| running the prediction market that happens to make it
| visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to
| have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the
| purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.
| cannonpr wrote:
| Because it's one of many events that violates our belief in
| our selves more than the nature of human society and man as
| a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a
| whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one
| among college students is that if your roommate dies you get
| straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban
| legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their
| roommates.
| astura wrote:
| >There is a whole class of urban legends like that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_by_catastrophe
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| I think that's horribly fatalistic perspective.
|
| Yes, humans can be bad. But humans can change. Let's not
| start accepting bad stuff as not so bad, simply because it is
| "just human behavior".
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Yes - and further, even if something is "just human
| behavior", that doesn't mean it's never beneficial to
| humans to legally regulate the enablement or exploitation
| of that behavior.
| dominicrose wrote:
| It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types
| of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they
| can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic
| and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit
| usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.
| riskable wrote:
| You've got the problem of prediction gambling framed
| incorrectly. It's not a matter of people losing money on bad
| bets, it's all about _incentivized corruption_ and causing
| bad events (even catastrophic) so that a few may profit from
| them. It creates a perverse incentive for bad things to
| happen.
|
| As the odds shift and the potential payout grows, prediction
| markets can essentially fund crimes of all kinds and cause
| disasters. Simple example: Imagine if the payout for someone
| being assassinated goes really high. Eventually, people will
| be placing bets on that person being assassinated and _make
| sure it happens_.
|
| But it can get much worse than that! Imagine bets on dam
| collapse, buildings burning down, school shootings, even
| traffic accidents!
|
| Prediction markets are a bad idea all around and should be
| banned everywhere. It should be a no-brainer. In fact, we
| should _all_ place bets that the world leaders of countries
| that allow prediction markets will be assassinated!
| swingboy wrote:
| Easily the worst thing and it's not even close? Really?
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| Absolutely horrifying.
|
| Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb.
|
| Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb.
|
| This needs to be banned.
| kibwen wrote:
| Make a bet for "$PUBLIC_FIGURE will be dead by $DATE" and see
| how quickly people realize that this is just a distributed
| assassination contract.
| jamilton wrote:
| Technically any market that's about someone doing something
| by a certain time can be an assassination contract, if you
| think the market will it enforce it that way. Can't do it
| if they're dead.
| tim333 wrote:
| It was kind of close to that betting on Trump to not win
| the last election - $3.2bn was bet on Trump vs Kamala and
| there was of course an assassination attempt although not
| related to the betting.
| DANmode wrote:
| "Markets related to death are technically not supposed to
| be allowed at regulated prediction markets in the US."
|
| https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-
| khamene...
| efdee wrote:
| Already banned in several European countries, mostly because
| of the betting on political events.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was
| already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter.
|
| So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot
| operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they
| have on humanity.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| On aggregate, humans will engage in exactly as terrible and
| selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without
| fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't
| need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is
| use our collective power as a social species to shut down
| each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not
| solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce
| them.
| jbxntuehineoh wrote:
| I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the
| Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos
| vincnetas wrote:
| But wait, there is more: Assassination market
|
| bet that someone will die by certain date
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
| nekusar wrote:
| Huh, I figured they were rumors.
|
| But it's fairly close to a tontine. But those are banned in
| the USA. But in those cases, rewards are split regularly
| between survivors. People who die with a tontine lose their
| share.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
|
| I could see a movie about that, with living tontine holders
| sending out hitmen to remove other tontine holders, so they
| can get more money.
| Bender wrote:
| I _ predict _ that prediction markets will be more tightly
| regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. _i.e. CFTC loses
| jurisdiction._
|
| - More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to
| make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar
| to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction.
|
| - Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.
| hnfong wrote:
| What do you mean outlawed? It will simply just happen in a
| jurisdiction that does not care about it.
|
| If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to
| cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.
| Bender wrote:
| That would be an interesting exercise. I suppose if it were
| outlawed the feds would seize all related domains and raid
| the HQ for Polymarket and Kalshi _both in NY_ and freeze
| all their assets. It might spring up in another country
| under another domain name but then those could be seized as
| well. It could move to Tor but then money would have to be
| moved around on something like Monero I suppose. Anywhere
| money is involved gives countries incentives to cooperate.
|
| Which countries would be best for them to operate out of if
| they were outlawed? What percentage of their user-base
| would use the Tor Browser?
|
| Odd, I just noticed both Polymarket and Kalshi are hosted
| on the same IP address in San Fransisco. The IP belongs to
| Amazon but is not part of their cloud. That CIDR used to
| belong to Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and then Aptum
| Technologies and now Amazon in SF. Kalshi used to be based
| out of SF but moved to NY.
| empath75 wrote:
| So, a fun historical fact is that insurance markets started
| with people in coffee houses betting on whether or not ships
| would sink for fun. Eventually ship owners realized that if
| they bet on their own ship sinking, that it reduced the
| financial risk of travel, then betters realized that ship
| owners were doing that and decided to research before taking
| the other side of the bet, and so on until you end up with ship
| insurance.
|
| In a sense, prediction markets are all forms of insurance. A
| "war market" is just an insurance market against war. If you do
| business in someplace that is at risk at war, placing a huge
| bet on the war happening mitigates the risk of doing business
| in that place.
|
| There is a reason that insurance has taken the shape that it
| has -- incredibly detailed contracts, requirements that the
| insured have an interest in the thing being insured, etc, and
| the reason is exactly that pure prediction markets went through
| this exact cycle hundreds of years ago which lead to laws being
| passed banning the practice. That is why LLoyd's of London
| exists. It started as a pure gambling and became insurance
| through regulation and business evolution.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774
|
| I'm not incredibly against the concept of prediction markets,
| per se, but running them _globally, _at scale_ with _no
| regulations_ is going to lead to really awful outcomes, up to
| and including murder.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> insurance markets started with people in coffee houses_
|
| Regardless of whether or not that anecdote is true, insurance
| is one of the oldest human institutions. We have records of
| Hammurabi's code from ancient Babylon that pertain to
| insurance (including ship insurance).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Referenced here: https://risk-
| engineering.org/concept/history-of-insurance
| nurettin wrote:
| > moral degradation is off the charts
|
| Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm wondering how long it's going to take people to see the
| bigger picture and start connecting the dots.
|
| "Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an
| isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the
| financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything
| that's touched by this gets worse.
|
| Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of
| the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the
| young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next
| generation.
|
| Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in
| healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money
| by denying people life-saving care.
|
| Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can
| gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP
| in the US is a municipal ISP.
|
| Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with
| me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy"
| are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer
| sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not
| creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We
| can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos.
|
| A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers,
| particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something
| they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have
| dynamic pricing on _everything_. Instacart got caught doing it.
| Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive
| behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is
| designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive.
|
| And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of
| course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party
| does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are
| just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for
| their children and so on. All of the systems to select
| politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the
| system. If there are such people, it's because that system has
| failed, which it occasionally does.
|
| Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that
| companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get
| to your money. I think tha's true.
|
| So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you
| consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly
| sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because
| the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you
| ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much
| money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to
| you or themselves.
|
| But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more
| financialization.
| loeg wrote:
| https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/546/187/fb1...
| bspammer wrote:
| Just to play devil's advocate, I have found prediction markets
| genuinely useful despite never placing a bet.
|
| In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US
| election was going to go the other way. I have left wing
| politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It
| was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype.
| Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election
| wasn't going to go the way I hoped.
|
| Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was
| happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real
| never went above 25%. It's extremely useful to be able to look
| at that as a layman and go "ok this probably isn't real".
| tombert wrote:
| I've hated the idea of Polymarket for about as long as I've
| known about it.
|
| It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech
| will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling
| over things that involve the death of people. Things like
| missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans
| and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| you need to learn a little finance, i.e. that subset of
| economics dealing with financial markets. Markets
| "crowdsource" values in the face of changing needs,
| preferences, probability and volatility, and that's an
| incredibly useful thing.
|
| yeah, you can treat investing in markets as a game (fallacy:
| stock markets are gambling casinos), but people who are
| serious don't do that, so don't lay the sins of insincerity
| on markets.
| mlsu wrote:
| Moral degradation? Buddy think about how much money can be made
| here. Eye on the ball. Try to think about what's truly
| important in life: making money by _monetizing every difference
| of opinion_.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...
| Zigurd wrote:
| You will no doubt find some rational sounding arguments in
| favor of prediction markets here. Lots of useless and harmful
| things are fascinating. The math behind cryptocurrency, and
| things like the difference between proof of work and proof of
| stake are fascinating. But that doesn't make cryptocurrencies
| good. The genetics of tulip bulbs must be fascinating too.
| fwipsy wrote:
| Prediction markets are a separate concept from
| cryptocurrency. You can run one on cash within the typical
| KYC regime. If the arguments in favor of prediction markets
| _sound_ rational, maybe they _are_ rational?
|
| I'd argue that prediction markets are more like stock
| markets. Very useful, but they also create opportunities for
| abuse which will need to be addressed. If they are eliminated
| later because the current administration refuses to regulate
| them, that would be a huge shame.
| enoint wrote:
| The point is that _fascination_ is unrelated to value. I'd
| even argue that attention is unrelated to rationality. But
| attention is certainly related to profit.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Up to this point nobody has staked out a territory that
| exists between securities on the one hand, and wild
| anything goes betting markets on the other hand. Requiring
| the use of national currencies does nothing to prevent what
| are effectively tontines incentivizing murder, or other
| perverse outcomes.
| fwipsy wrote:
| Aren't death markets explicitly banned?
|
| Stock markets also incentivize murder. Short a company,
| then kill the CEO. Boom, profit.
| basisword wrote:
| We need to stop with the "prediction markets" bs naming.
| They're gambling websites with a larger variety of things you
| can gamble on.
| gzread wrote:
| They don't call themselves that, because online gambling is
| illegal. It's a bit like all the piracy websites being "an
| archive of Nintendo content to preserve it for future
| generations"
| red_admiral wrote:
| They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander
| predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are
| not in the wider rationalist community.
|
| Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take
| place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place,
| and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community
| in general.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| They didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would
| take place because sports betting was illegal almost
| everywhere in the US until 2018.
| thesquandered wrote:
| Christie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would
| even look on something like this.
| creatonez wrote:
| You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist"
| "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong
| about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.
| emsign wrote:
| They WANT to think in absolutes which is a red flag in a
| person.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| That's not been my observation at all. Rationalists are
| some of the only people to really embrace fuzzy and
| probabilistic thinking. Am I missing something?
| danny_codes wrote:
| Maybe rationalists aren't homogeneous? Unfortunately
| there are a rather concerning amount of news articles
| detailing cases where some subset of the rationalist
| community has gone off the deep end.
| unmole wrote:
| > most of them are eugenicists.
|
| [citation needed]
| creatonez wrote:
| Covered in detail here:
| https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-
| biod...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not
| aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was),
| and they were a decent source of information leading up to
| the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a
| handful of lives). Just because they're _almost_ always
| aggressively wrong, that doesn 't mean they're aggressively
| wrong about _everything_.
| gzread wrote:
| It does mean you probably shouldn't listen to them,
| because the expected value of listening to them is
| negative.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It means I shouldn't listen to them _in general_. The
| LessWrongers are mainly wrong about things they think
| they understand: when they _aren 't_ overconfident, their
| improvisational skills tend to be decent. They were an
| excellent source of information about COVID-19, but
| they're a terrible source of information in the areas
| where they think they have expertise.
|
| When there's a crisis, it's still worth checking in to
| see what the LessWrongers are saying about it, because it
| _might_ be very useful, and it 's pretty easy to tell:
| you just check whether it looks like they're doing
| science, or Rationalism(tm)(r), and only investigate
| further in the rare cases where it's the former.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I lost most of my respect for g...n when i noticed he he
| was one of those IQ guys
| blell wrote:
| What does that mean? People who believe in IQ?
| zone411 wrote:
| Rationalists were right about everything that mattered:
| crypto, AI, COVID... HN commentators, by contrast, were
| wrong about everything that mattered.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The failure of the rationalist community is they mistook
| rationalization for rationality.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Why make better predictions, when you can make better
| excuses, and be wrong in much more sophisticated ways?
| uoaei wrote:
| I may use different definitions than you, but I put it as
| "they conflate rationality and reason".
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| It really is a sad, provincial spectacle. Reminds me of the
| embarrassing "movement" where people called themselves
| "Brights". I expect we'll soon have a new movement called
| "The Smart People".
|
| A weird synthesis of the goofy, the immature, the
| delusional, and the grandiose shot through with mental
| illness.
| everdrive wrote:
| >once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the
| wider rationalist community.
|
| It's important to remember that for a brief time, people
| argued that gatekeeping was generally and usually a bad
| thing.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or
| pressure
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Cool it with the moral outrage. Even if I did believe that
| prediction markets are bad, "easily the worst things to grace
| the internet by far" is such a ridiculous hyperbole that it
| strains any belief.
| abustamam wrote:
| Someone on HN suggested that prediction markets would be
| interesting if only politicians were allowed to participate.
| For example, politician says that this bill will make the
| economy better (insert tangible metric here). Well Mr
| politician, put your money where your mouth is. If you indeed
| believe this is best for your constituents, bet on it, and if
| you're right, you'll reap the benefits of your legislation. If
| not, you're either incompetent or a liar; in either case, your
| people deserve to know.
|
| Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a
| fun thought experiment.
| seydor wrote:
| Yep, far worse than cryptocurrency
| colesantiago wrote:
| AI is 1000%+ far worse to be fair.
|
| Cryptocurrency (although I hate it) you don't have to
| participate, so no harm done.
|
| Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm
| done.
|
| With AI, you're participating whether you like it or not.
| Layoffs, Job displacement, etc. There is no opt out here.
|
| Once you're replaced with AI, that is it.
|
| At least with cryptocurrency and prediction markets you _can_
| make money but it 's obviously risky.
|
| Ultimately with AI it would just push people to
| cryptocurrencies and prediction markets.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Dude, stop.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Do you have a positive defense of betting markets? You're
| spraying defensive whataboutism all over this thread and
| lowering the discourse.
|
| > Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no
| harm done.
|
| Harm: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-
| athlete...
|
| Harm: https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-
| analyst-ma...
|
| Harm: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/prediction-markets-
| merkley-b...
| colesantiago wrote:
| Why did you send in an article that was completely
| irrelevant that has nothing to do with prediction markets?
|
| What you're showing me is a death threat, which has existed
| for time in humans.
|
| Betting markets of all kinds have existed for a long time
| and haven't been banned.
|
| Banning on particular betting market prediction markets
| altogether and pushing it underground would make things far
| worse.
| zbentley wrote:
| Many kinds of betting markets are or were banned all over
| the world. The sky didn't fall, and what underground
| markets existed didn't lead to huge gang wars or
| whatever.
|
| Given that the article is discussing some of the bad
| behavior typically associated with dark markets (death
| threats, extortion, fixing) happening in the light, what
| makes you think that banning them would make things
| worse?
| tasuki wrote:
| > Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no
| harm done.
|
| What if there's a prediction market on your life? Would you
| say you're still "not participating, so no harm done" ?
| zbentley wrote:
| > Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no
| harm done.
|
| Did you read the article? It is about a journalist getting
| death threats from members of a prediction market.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Wait until they ban prediction markets, then they will re-
| appear, and you will have to use cryptocurrency :)
| zbentley wrote:
| I'd be surprised if there wasn't already a huge crypto-only
| dark market where lots of rich criminals bet huge sums.
|
| If you're in _that_ telegram channel, though, I imagine the
| threats on your life are a lot more credible than the ones
| discussed in TFA.
| input_sh wrote:
| Polymarket _already_ only accepts cryptocurrencies. :)
|
| Kalshi is worse in a sense that it also accepts fiat
| payments.
| seydor wrote:
| not easy because you d need a trusted central to settle the
| outcomes. So far, crypto has only solved the betting part
| somelamer567 wrote:
| Cryptocurrency itself was designed to enable crime. Why else
| would one want an end-run around governments and law-
| enforcement, unless one were a criminal wanting to prey on
| others risk-free?
| hollerith wrote:
| So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and
| holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against
| any government's law or order?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment
| and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes
| against any government's law or order?
|
| That's not how I read GP; "Why would you want to do an end-
| run around the government when using currency?" is
| different to, well, whatever it is you are saying (I'm not
| sure I can decipher it well enough - seems to be "using
| currency is bad when it goes against laws", but I think
| that's fine too, so not really sure what your message is -
| maybe you can clarify?)
|
| Using legal tender is not a problem. Using barter (which is
| what using crypocurrencies boils down to) is also not a
| problem. Lack of reporting your income to the tax
| authorities _is_ a problem. Most bartering systems are too
| small to warrant the attention of tax authorities, but
| cryptocurrencies facilitate bartering at scale, which
| _does_ warrant interest.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Not paying taxes and not declaring your assets is always
| bad, yes.
| 8-prime wrote:
| A statement made from either privilige, ignorance or both.
|
| Just because you might agree with the actions and behaviour
| of your current government enough, that you don't mind them
| being able to have a hand in your currency, doesn't mean that
| can't change.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| > a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free
|
| E.g. a Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Not all governments are good, trustworthy or even exist at
| all. For people in an oppressed or even full out broken
| society, being this level of criminal is acceptable.
|
| But yes, something used to work around bad governments, will
| also be used against good governments. Every legit tool can
| be also abused.
| fnands wrote:
| At least cryptocurrencies had some nice ideas behind them. Just
| sad they almost immediately got co-opted by swindlers and
| criminals.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Prediction markets also have very interesting ideas.
|
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr.
| ..
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Not really.
|
| 1. As pointed out in the comments, you can inflate your
| prediction success rate by predicting things that are 100%
| to happen. There are plenty of 99.9% bets on Polymarket
| with degens betting on some 0.01% lottery event trying to
| strike a jackpot against the odds, and those will inflate
| the perceived accuracy.
|
| 2. All you're really doing is paying insiders to leak
| information a few hours ahead of time. Insofar as
| Polymarket is unusually accurate on things that aren't
| ~100% to happen, it's likely because in the 12-hour-window
| that post measures is when all of the insiders place their
| last-minute bets telling you what will happen. This is
| _extremely bad_ for society. It 's wealth redistribution
| from stupid people to unethical people[1], and it could
| completely compromise national security when eg. an insider
| tells you 12 hours ahead of time that the US is about to
| launch an invasion of Venezuela. There is no societal
| benefit to this.
|
| [1] Even if you have no sympathy for idiots who bet their
| life savings on markets without having insider information,
| gambling addiction has extremely detrimental effects on
| society and _directly_ results in increased crime rates,
| divorce rates, etc. as people lose all of their money and
| do bad things in desperation, so it is a problem that
| becomes everyone else 's problem.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| 1. That is not how prediction market calibration plots
| work! Calibration is measured across the range of markets
| with different forecasted odds.
|
| https://calibration.city/introduction
|
| https://manifold.markets/calibration
|
| 2. That is just obviously not all these markets are
| doing. They're aligning incentives and aggregating
| information in the same way other markets do.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| The source is a company that works with Polymarket and
| sells Polymarket data (as well as Kalshi and other gambling
| platforms).
| Hammershaft wrote:
| The findings are consistent with academic research that
| these markets are well calibrated.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Could be, you should reference the academic research
| then.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Marginal revolution has been talking up prediction
| markets since before they existed. In fact polymarket
| probably was created after its founder read Cowen's
| thoughts on prediction markets.
| fnands wrote:
| > 12 hour ahead prediction
|
| As the comments on that article rightfully point out,
| restricting the data analysed to 12 hours before the
| resolution feels like cherry picking.
| localuser13 wrote:
| It may be cherry-picking, but I think some commenters
| misunderstand this (or maybe I do).
|
| The implication seems to be "12 hours before the
| resolution things are obvious anyway". But if that were
| the case, then I could pick some wager that is obviously
| true but has, for example, 70% chance, and putting my
| money on that. If it was true that "12 hours before the
| resolution it's obvious what the result is", everything
| would be in 0% or 100% buckets. I believe getting event
| with 30% confidence right exactly 30% times is impressive
| no matter if that's 12h or 120h before.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't know much about prediction markets,
| just what I understood from the blog post.
| epolanski wrote:
| Prediction markets need to be banned globally ASAP, but it
| would've helped the article to bring proof of:
|
| - the emails
|
| - the whatsapp messages
|
| - the discord messages
|
| - the X messages
|
| Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing,
| in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but
| it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his
| information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his
| direct threats, some of those public like X replies.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Why does everything you don't like need to be banned?
|
| Downvoters:
|
| I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned
| anything in the history of technology.
| dwroberts wrote:
| Why is everything you like protected from being banned?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Prediction markets on death are an assassination market.
| That's why they're against the rules even on Polymarket and
| Kalshi.
|
| Prediction markets on terrorist attacks and wars are one step
| back from that, but similar negative side effects are
| possible. And, regardless of what people are betting on, the
| corruption incentive appears where it did not previously,
| resulting in things like this.
|
| (I don't think there's literally an Iranian missile operator
| opening Polymarket, taking out a position for "missile lands
| on Israel", and then pressing the launch button, but
| ultimately that's what uncensored markets with uncensored
| movement of money would enable)
| epolanski wrote:
| 1. It's not something I don't like, it's something plain
| illegal in most of the world, including the US under the
| Dodd-Frank act, which the current executive has decided to
| not enforce.
|
| 2. The reason it is illegal it is beyond obvious: basic
| economics and game theory explain you how dangerous it is
| tying real world events with financial incentives.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Illegal or not, trying to ban it won't work.
|
| You'll just push it underground and it will get even worse.
|
| The cat is out of the bag.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this
| until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the
| only way paying out these bets at scale is possible.
|
| "Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of
| bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
| qsera wrote:
| >"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of
| bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
|
| But don't you think that will be the "good" majority? And
| the "bad" minority will continue using the underground
| version?
| zbentley wrote:
| > the "bad" minority will continue using the underground
| version?
|
| ...which they already did before this market was made
| mainstream.
| epolanski wrote:
| You don't need to "try to ban it", you ban it.
|
| If your argument is "people are going to bet and
| influence world events on the dark web", the argument
| ignores economics.
|
| The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives
| exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to
| access and liquidity is small.
|
| E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their
| iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to
| influence the events at the same time, let alone how
| complex would such a system be.
| zbentley wrote:
| I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the "it'll
| just go underground" claim seems silly. The negative
| effects of driving a gambling market to the economic
| fringe are _already happening_ in the mainstream market:
| fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.
|
| What makes you think that driving betting underground
| (which means far fewer people will participate) would be
| worse than the status quo?
| mpalmer wrote:
| Why do you apparently like a system that lets people bet on
| atrocities and then take steps to make said atrocities more
| likely?
| colesantiago wrote:
| And you think banning it would 100% work?
|
| and where did I say I liked it?
| mpalmer wrote:
| I'm not responding to your gish gallop BS.
|
| Why do you (obviously) think betting markets are good?
| qsera wrote:
| So you are saying that if business entity starts a pharma
| company that creates a drug for some kind of novel disease,
| but the disease does not currently exist, they will take
| steps to make an epidemic of it more likely?
| camgunz wrote:
| This is an argument against all laws, which probably deserves
| more than a couple sentences.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Journalists do not normally work like that. That might be how
| beefs are fought on social media, but of course screenshots are
| easy to fake anyway.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't understand what your point is.
|
| What is the reader assumed to do about an article that does
| not bring any proof?
|
| The video of the missile exploding is also easy to fake, but
| it's an important element behind the reporting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'm assuming you've never read a news article before,
| because news articles routinely contain reported speech
| without having to provide extra evidence of that speech
| having taken place.
| epolanski wrote:
| You're being dismissive and aggressive while dodging the
| questions.
|
| I routinely read the news, and I've been taught in school
| that critical reading involves doubting and focusing on
| facts, sources and proofs. No sources and verifiable
| proofs? No facts.
|
| Which is why the journalist put emphasis on his sources
| behind the missile attack: he knows how much sources and
| proofs are important.
|
| If you can fake screenshots, why not fake them, which is
| something that can be at least analyzed for tampering?
|
| Even more: the author mentions X public replies, where
| are the links?
| zbentley wrote:
| Narrowly (skipping the question of whether _this_
| journalist should have included copies of evidence), GP
| is right: most journalists with verified source material
| quote it /assert what it contains, rather than linking or
| copying it verbatim. That's how serious journalism has
| always worked. The reputation of a newsroom is understood
| to back up a reporter's assertion about their source.
|
| Whether or not it _should_ work that way is a separate
| question. But claiming that raw sources not being
| included is cause for suspicion is incorrect.
| zbentley wrote:
| Addendum: A significant exception to that rule is when
| the journalist themselves _is_ the source or an involved
| party in the story, e.g. when Jeffrey Goldberg from the
| Atlantic was included in a Signal chat with US government
| officials discussing war plans: https://www.theatlantic.c
| om/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-a...
|
| In such cases, the journalist likely will publish raw
| data/screenshots, since they're functioning both as the
| source and the reporter.
| arrrg wrote:
| Making up sources as a journalist and being found out will
| result in a professional death sentence. It's simply
| completely irredeemably unacceptable. That's why it can be
| a convention that journalists don't provide their raw
| sources.
| vintermann wrote:
| That is correct, but it's not to media's credit. Most
| journalists say basically, "Trust me, I'm the authority, I
| wouldn't be allowed to say this if it were simply lies. I
| could prove it to you but I won't, at worst I'll be forced to
| prove it to my peers. (And you aren't one, peasant)." They
| practically never link to the scientific paper they just
| reported on, certainly not to anything that could let us
| check politically controversial claims ourselves.
|
| And how could it be otherwise? You aren't the customer. Ads,
| or worse, billionaire political patronage, is what pays the
| bills for media companies. Their authority - the _blind_
| trust people have in them - is what makes them valuable for
| their actual customers. They 're not doing science, the last
| thing they want is to make it easy to check their work
| (although, maybe I'm too charitable to scientists too here,
| if they make it easier to check their work it's often the
| bare minimum, but I digress).
|
| One of the original points of WikiLeaks was to make a kind of
| journalism where claims were easy to check from the sources.
| But you can see how controversial that was.
| echoangle wrote:
| Quoting vs providing screenshots makes exactly 0 difference
| regarding level of proof. Faking an email or WhatsApp message
| is about 2 minutes of work.
| epolanski wrote:
| 1. Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and
| questioned and they are regularly debunked.
|
| 2. The author mentions X replies, those are public, where are
| they?
|
| I'm gonna stand by my opinion: you deliver information, you
| provide all the evidence that is sensible to share. That's
| what journalism, especially investigative journalism does,
| and OSint can go a long way in helping.
| echoangle wrote:
| > Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and
| questioned and they are regularly debunked.
|
| How? If I get two phone numbers and send myself a message
| and make a screenshot, how are you going to debunk that?
| It's a legit screenshot, you have no way of verifying
| anything.
|
| And I can also just import self written emails into
| thunderbird and take a screenshot. There's nothing to
| analyze.
|
| I agree that he could have linked the Public stuff though.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Prediction markets have value for people as a source of
| reliable information because they tend to be very accurate
| compared to any other human mechanism for creating forecasts.
|
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...
| leshenka wrote:
| I wouldn't be able to say this with a straight face after
| reading this article.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Why? We have years of experimental evidence that these
| prediction markets are well calibrated (ie accurate).
| epolanski wrote:
| There is no evidence that people betting on whether Iran will
| strike Israel on March 15th has any benefit. Who would be the
| beneficiary of that?
|
| Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to
| hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?
|
| Nor there's evidence that providing information about the
| fact that US will strike Venezuela does it either.
|
| What value any of that has? None, especially considering the
| perverse incentives on the other side of acting on the
| outcome probability for financial gain which has _already
| happened_. US executive insiders have definitely bet on US
| attacking Venezuela on Polymarket.
|
| You see this as "information discovery", I see it as the fact
| that I can lobby for dangerous events to happen just for
| financial gain.
|
| Future markets have some value in some scenarios where you
| can hedge the outcome.
|
| E.g. a farmer hedging crop prices can de risk his operations.
|
| There is a hedging and the hedge works as insurance.
|
| What's exactly the value of betting on elections or military
| strikes? What's being hedged?
|
| How can you not see the financial incentives?
|
| We have a long history of regulating both futures,
| derivatives and betting for very specific reasons.
|
| But now we've relabeled it all as information gathering and
| price discovery.
|
| How can you not see how the financial incentives here are
| speedrunning terrible events to happen?
|
| I'm gonna rephrase it like that: would you like for a
| contract to exist on whether you'll be sent to hospital
| tomorrow in a crash accident?
|
| Are you gonna tell me: "well, it's information discovery and
| it's valuable that I can wake up knowing the odds have
| increased!" while ignoring that there are now people out
| there financially motivated to make this happen?
| philwelch wrote:
| > Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able
| to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?
|
| Yes, of course! If you had some advance warning your home
| town was likely to be struck with missiles soon, are you
| seriously saying you can't think of a single thing you
| could do to prepare? I would, at a minimum, make sure I was
| stocked up on first aid supplies, water, and food that I
| could eat without needing power or gas to cook it.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Are you suggesting it hasn't occured to people in Tel
| Aviv that they could be bombed, and that the prediction
| market is providing this function?
| epolanski wrote:
| And don't you see the other part of the medal?
|
| That there are economical incentives to make it happen
| just to make money?
|
| Such events have little-to-no "wisdom of the crowds"
| those events decided by a handful of people. And their
| consequences catastrophic.
|
| What if there was a derivative for whether you will be
| hit by a car tomorrow?
|
| What would you say if there was a contract on whether
| your county will burst in flames this month?
|
| Are you happy because you can hedge this event, or don't
| you realize the obvious peril?
| kqr wrote:
| > That there are economical incentives to make it happen
| just to make money?
|
| I don't see how there is. The liquidity in a prediction
| market is not high enough to compensate for the expense
| of going to war.
|
| The war was going to happen irregardless of the
| prediction market. The prediction market only let us know
| when it was going to happen with some hours to spare.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| I live here, I don't need Polymarket to know that there
| will be missiles tomorrow. In fact, that's why I'm on HN
| now even though it's just past midnight here. Because
| it's a well known law of nature that just as I drift off
| to sleep my phone will violently alert me with this
| horrid bzzhhh-bzzhhh sound that missiles are incoming.
| Then I'll turn on the TV, any news channel, and see the
| "polygon of uncertainty" overlaid on a map of the
| country, updating in real time, and I'll decide how fast
| to put my shoes on. Polymarket odds ain't got nothing on
| that.
|
| More seriously - I used to think this was a good
| argument. But the night before the war broke out, I
| checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also
| checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I
| made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-
| bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to
| move fast to get closer to shelter.
|
| Yes, it's anecdata, etc etc
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I think people & companies get value from these markets
| because they are able to plan on the basis of accurate
| forecasts for scenarios like potential wars and election
| results.
|
| I agree that these markets also create bad incentives, I
| just think that on net the information provided tends to be
| more valuable.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Are you talking about the same thing everyone else is?
|
| Imagine the conversation went like this:
|
| A: "Maybe we shouldn't sacrifice 500 virgins to the Aztec God
| to predict the harvest next hear?"
|
| B "Why not? Killing virgins to predict the harvest are well
| calibrated (ie accurate).."
| mpalmer wrote:
| I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your
| morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.
| RGamma wrote:
| Psychopaths don't care about ethics, much less if money is
| involved. At best they feel indifference, at worst enjoyment.
| Pay08 wrote:
| Same way anyone working at a traditional casino does, I'd
| imagine.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I would bet it's some combination of
|
| 1) "I believe in what we're doing as a mostly positive force in
| the world"
|
| 2) "Eh, the money is good"
|
| Probably the same way FB people feel, probably the same way
| Palantir people feel, etc etc
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| 3) If I won't do it, someone even worse will.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What the heck does the company (Polymarket) have to do with any
| of this?
|
| There's nothing wrong with a prediction market. There are a lot
| of reasons why they're helpful in judging the probability of
| future events more accurately than any single analyst, and are
| therefore a net benefit to society, no different from
| newspapers and stock markets.
|
| These are just individuals making criminal threats. They're the
| bad guys here. They don't work for Polymarket or anything. Your
| comment is like saying you can't imagine how anyone could go to
| work at the Olympics after Nancy Kerrigan got struck by Tonya
| Harding's ex-husband. Something criminal happened, but the
| Olypmics are not the one responsible.
| Zambyte wrote:
| What are the risks involved with the newspaper versus the
| risks involved with Polymarket?
|
| Answer this and I think you'll discover that "no different"
| is actually quite different.
|
| Regarding the stock market: nobody sane uses the stock market
| as an indicator for the future. People predict the stock
| market, not the other way around.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _What are the risks_
|
| I don't have the slightest idea what point you're trying to
| make with this. Journalists make lots of people unhappy
| with their reporting, if you're referring to risks to
| journalists? Indeed that's part of the job of being a truth
| teller.
|
| > _nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for
| the future_
|
| I don't think you understand. If you think you can do a
| better job of predicting the future than the stock market,
| you will become extremely wealthy. So how exactly do you
| think it isn't basically the best publicly available
| indicator of the future, specifically the net present value
| of future expected profits?
|
| Sophisticated analysts _absolutely_ use current stock
| prices /market value for modeling the future.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Making people unhappy doesn't cause them to declare
| bankruptcy and become homeless. People may lose their
| reputation by reporting falsehoods in the paper (though
| probably not). People might read incorrect information in
| the newspaper. People may directly lose access to food
| and shelter due to gambling. The risks are no where close
| to equivalent.
|
| > I don't think you understand. [...]
|
| I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario:
| the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been
| trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of
| weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
|
| Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of
| GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%.
| What does that tell you about the future?
|
| You can try to derive information out of a stock market
| price, but _it is not a prediction tool_. The newspaper
| and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the
| context of prediction tools, because they both tell you
| exactly what they predict.
|
| The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of
| Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for
| obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the
| function is completely different.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| same as you. wake up, go to work, waste your day on hackernews,
| collect a big fat pay check, take a 2 week vacation to Disney
| world with the stacks your bringing in.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The gambling market is really bringing out the worst of us.
| gcr wrote:
| B-b-but futarchy and unbiased decisionmaking means well-
| calibrated markets could be a net good for society!! /hj
| fnands wrote:
| Ugh, the sophistry (or at least self-deceiving arguments)
| people throw around to defend these markets makes my stomach
| churn.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a prediction-market person to
| understand something, when their stock-options and IPO
| depends upon them not understanding it."
|
| -- Cyborg Upton Sinclair
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I don't know, man, looks like we are now literally gambling
| on whether people die today or tomorrow. This is even worse
| than underground sports gambling.
| zbentley wrote:
| Yeah, that claim was always ludicrous to me too. Wisdom-of-
| crowds isn't an unbiased decision making strategy, it's quite
| biased. Crowd-wisdom works best as a _limiter_ on the bias of
| _other_ decision making strategies--this is why democracies
| use representatives rather than direct votes for most
| decisions.
|
| And polymarket isn't even the wisdom of crowds lol. At its
| greatest possible adoption it's still the wisdom of internet-
| connected (mostly) white men with time and money to spend on
| gambling.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| If you believe Polymarket odds are wrong in a systematic
| way then you are free to make a lot of money out of it.
| Unlike the stock market, where "Markets can remain
| irrational longer than you can remain solvent", any such
| irrationality will become irrelevant at settlement time.
| gcr wrote:
| The argument isn't about whether prediction markets can
| stay well-calibrated.
|
| The argument is that prediction markets incentivize
| insider trading and backroom power brokership. The
| "potential energy" behind surprise upsets is most
| profitably exploited when the outcome sharply differs
| from the public calibrated consensus, so these two
| incentives - calibration vs potential for exploitation -
| are in fundamental tension. I think this tension
| undermines the whole purpose of prediction markets IMO.
| indymike wrote:
| Reply of the year. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or
| cry.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| The question isn't whether futarchy isn't perfect, it's
| whether its better than our existing democracy.
| gcr wrote:
| Well, we're discovering some really fascinating and
| pervasive failure cases of proto-futarchy. Please update
| your priors.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Anything that requires a ton of criminal law, regulation, and
| enforcement around it should have to meet some kind of standard
| of societal benefit.
|
| The entertainment value of betting does not meet that standard,
| in my opinion.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Years ago I was friend with a guy who played tennis at
| international levels (say top 1000 players). He regularly
| received death treats on social networks from people Gambling
| on him to win/lose (and the opposite happened)
| astura wrote:
| Getting death threats from aggrieved gamblers, MLB players
| starting to fear for their safety
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-
| nigh...
| rkomorn wrote:
| Doesn't help when some MLB players also apparently
| participate in the gambling outcomes, too.
|
| https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/46906636/guardians-
| emman...
| NickC25 wrote:
| Still happens at all levels of professional sport. Even the
| top women get messages on their IG accounts all the time by
| degenerate gamblers pissed off after a loss.
| cael450 wrote:
| I feel like America is re-learning why gambling was so widely
| outlawed. It just ruins everything it touches. At least casinos
| are mostly contained. I'm tired of seeing gambling ads on every
| sport and hearing the news talk about prediction markets.
|
| Not to mention, they all prey on people. When I was younger, I
| worked in a gas station, and people would come in regularly and
| drop everything they had on scratch-offs. And a lot of these
| people clearly did not have the money to spare. It's gross.
| civvv wrote:
| Online (foreign based, read: tax and regulation havens)
| gambling casinos are flooding the social media feeds of
| children with AI slop or memes that have their logo/branding
| slapped on it. They are posting thousands of videos per day,
| trying to get kids to gamble on their casinos. Who are
| behind? The owners of gaming communities/e-sport brands like
| FaZe Clan etc. Basically, if you were a large youtuber in the
| 2010's, the goto seems to be get in on some kind of online
| gambling site for kids.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| The marketing is what bothers me the most. These books market
| very aggressively in app: Take Daves 5 leg parlay; Share your
| picks! 30% profit boost if you do a 4 leg parlay that'll
| never hit. Its constant engagement. Contrast this to a real
| bookie: Open app. Place bet. Meet once a week in parking lot.
| Small chatter. Pass envelope.
| 1024core wrote:
| Reminds me of this wild story:
| https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-
| le...
|
| Basically, a fake "Cricket league" was setup up in rural
| India, complete with online streaming, play by play
| commentary, etc. just to fool gamblers in Russia. Worth the
| read.
| boelboel wrote:
| Many people just think certain things in history were
| outlawed because of 'stupid religious people'. Most of the
| time there's genuine reasons for banning things even if they
| weren't perfect or brought other harms with them. Something
| like usury was banned in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and
| it wasn't because people prior to 1900 were imbeciles, these
| things can cause immense instability.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I feel like this is worse then gambling even, because it's
| not only luck. You can actually influence an outcome without
| cheating, hence credible deaths threats
| postalrat wrote:
| Replace gamblers with futures market and I agree.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Commodities futures markets have an actual purpose, which is
| to make business inputs (or outputs) more predictable. Like
| if I know I need ten tons of corn next year, it's safer to
| buy futures now than to wait and see how the price of corn
| fluctuates over that time, potentially sabotaging my business
| operation. (Of making corn chips.)
| postalrat wrote:
| Similar business cases can be made for futures from
| polymarket. For example if I start a business in the USA I
| may want to hedge by buying some futures Jesus will not
| return before 2027.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Do we typically [0] have a problem with people sabotaging
| industries to manipulate the futures market?
|
| [0] Edit: Originally wrote "currently", but then I remembered
| the current White House, whose various crimes are being
| studiously ignored by the Republican congress.
| alpineman wrote:
| Day trading too, and day trading led us down this path.
| Everyone is a gambler now. All morals are out the window.
|
| On a side note, I find it incredible crypto trading/day
| trading/meme stock trading etc is not recognised as a bigger
| societal problem. It is 100% gambling and has the same negative
| externalities associated with it. But none of the tools
| gambling companies need to abide by (blocklists, warnings,
| limits, etc) apply to trading.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| I do not know about daytrading, but trading in the long term
| works, if you have a (technical/IT) system.
|
| Regarding meme stocks: I do not see how this should work
| compared to the "real market", as on the real market you have
| clear signals when it is useful to enter a position (e.g.
| institutional attention), but on the meme "stock" market
| lacking those features it is much much harder to make any
| money - unfortunately, a lot of young people are trying their
| fortuna
| fnands wrote:
| Man, something like this is going to be a plot point in a
| movie/tv series soon.
|
| Could work in some crime procedural.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| This is an old plot, done already in dozens of different
| variations.
| fnands wrote:
| I think there are lots of plots that revolve around rigging
| sports betting (e.g. sub-plot in Pulp Fiction), but I can't
| really think of a case where it is not so much about
| manipulating the actual act that occurred, but rather the
| news reporting of the act.
| V__ wrote:
| Bond's Casino Royal had a stock short sell bet with a planned
| attack.
| defly wrote:
| FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in
| Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-
| november-an-isw-analyst-ma...
| varjag wrote:
| (as reported by Quincy Institute, a thoroughly pro-Russian
| think tank)
| zarathustreal wrote:
| (Ad-hominem is not a counter-example btw)
| loeg wrote:
| Nothing about GP's comment is ad-hominem; it's neutral,
| factual context. Unless you dispute the factual claims?
| culi wrote:
| It's counterfactual. The think tank has nothing to do
| with Russia and official denounces the invasion and
| upholds Ukraine's territorial rights. They have simply
| written critically about the role NATO has played in
| making this conflict inevitable and the history of NATO
| sabotage of peace negotiations.
| loeg wrote:
| > The think tank has nothing to do with Russia and
| official denounces the invasion and upholds Ukraine's
| territorial rights.
|
| GP did not claim it was associated with Russia or that it
| had made specific claims about the invasion.
|
| > They have simply written critically about the role NATO
| has played in making this conflict inevitable and the
| history of NATO sabotage of peace negotiations.
|
| That seems aligned with the original claims.
| culi wrote:
| In their own words
|
| > We categorically condemn Russia's illegal invasion of
| Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine's self-
| defense.
|
| How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
| varjag wrote:
| Literally in the same piece:
|
| _It has been suggested that QI's approach is
| insufficiently critical of Russia. A cursory search of
| our writings and our website shows this to be false._
|
| I wonder why would anyone suggest that, and frequently
| enough they have to get out of their way to write a
| disclaimer?
|
| > How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
|
| Mate it's 2026, your gaslighting doesn't work for a few
| years now.
| waffleiron wrote:
| ISW confirmed unauthorised edits were made, and fired a
| staffer over it. Not sure why you feel the need to comment
| this. Classic lowbrow dismissal
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248
| varjag wrote:
| Your link points to a 2012 discussion of "Why an Airline
| That Travelers Love Is Failing". Not super convincing.
| verteu wrote:
| It's a pg comment explaining "middlebrow dismissal."
|
| Why not look at the primary source evidence yourself?
|
| > It has come to ISW's attention that an unauthorized and
| unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia's
| invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November
| 15-16 EST
|
| https://understandingwar.org/newsroom/statement-on-isw-
| mappi...
|
| https://polymarket.com/event/arch-will-russia-capture-
| myrnoh...
|
| > Settled as: Proposal: Yes
|
| > This market will resolve to "Yes" if, according to the
| ISW map, Russia captures the intersection between
| Vatutina Vulytsya and Puhachova Vulytsya located in
| Myrnohrad by November 15, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET.
|
| The intersection station will be considered captured if
| any part of the intersection is shaded red on the ISW map
| (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496d
| e641...) by the resolution date. If the area is not
| shaded red by November 15, 2025, 11:59 PM ET, the market
| will resolve to "No".
|
| https://oracle.uma.xyz/settled?project=Polymarket&transac
| tio...
| DrProtic wrote:
| And ISW is tied to Victoria Nuland.
| senderista wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely
| correct.
|
| https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ukraine-war-isw/
| stefan_ wrote:
| They are being downvoted because Nuland is an utterly
| insignificant diplomat, but serves well as a dog whistle
| for people who subscribe to the belief that the Maidan
| revolution in Ukraine was really some Obama organized
| coup. This is a story peddled by the Russian government,
| which of course is where Yanukovych promptly fled after
| having protestors shot. At the same time Russia was busy
| staging troops and material for the actual coup they were
| planning.
| culi wrote:
| Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the
| invasion
| varjag wrote:
| You're welcome to find a piece of their writing where they
| unequivocally support Ukraine without ifs, buts, and NATO-
| didits.
| culi wrote:
| In their own words:
|
| > We categorically condemn Russia's illegal invasion of
| Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine's self-
| defense.
|
| https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-
| position...
|
| Also, having nuance and historical context does not mean
| they are "pro-Russia". We should be celebrating
| institutions that challenge propaganda narratives with
| context not hunting down anyone that doesn't fall in line
| with a narrative that requires you to believe history
| started last year
| senderista wrote:
| ISW is a shill for neoconservatism (just look at their
| board!) and is funded by US defense contractors. They try to
| give the appearance of neutrality via technical jargon etc.
| but are anything but.
| culi wrote:
| Please give me a single example backing up the claim that
| Quincy Institute is "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"
|
| On their page "Quincy Institute's Position on Russia-Ukraine"
| they say at the very beginning:
|
| > We categorically condemn Russia's illegal invasion of
| Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine's self-
| defense.
|
| https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-
| position...
| varjag wrote:
| _It has been suggested that QI's approach is insufficiently
| critical of Russia._
|
| https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-
| position...
| carefulfungi wrote:
| Athletes are also receiving death threats from gamblers.
|
| * https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
|
| ... and many, many other stories.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I don't understand how this isn't an immediate open and shut case
| for the police, assuming certain facts are verified
| independently. At the point that you're making death threats to
| strangers you should be removed from civil society.
| pjc50 wrote:
| If the gamblers are outwith Israel, there's not a lot the
| Israeli police can do. They're not going to go full Operation
| 'Wrath of God' for this guy.
| ryan_j_naughton wrote:
| I agree. This involved should be investigated and prosecuted.
|
| Just a pedantic, nit pick: you said "should be removed from
| civil society" but I think you just mean "removed from society"
| as in prosecuted and imprisoned.
|
| "Civil society" has a specific meaning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Thanks. I'm not trained as a lawyer so sometimes make these
| types of mistakes. I'm happy to learn.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > I agree. This involved should be investigated and
| prosecuted.
|
| Cool! Since you know who the involved persons are (as you
| agreed with it being an "open and shut case"), why don't you
| let the rest of us know, too? And while you're at it, tell
| the police as well. I'm sure it will help their
| investigation!
| TheDong wrote:
| Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?
|
| Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address.
|
| Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real
| identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit.
|
| The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on
| the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in
| different jurisdictions.
| xvector wrote:
| Polymarket's founder is Shayne Coplan, 27-year old "youngest
| self-made billionaire" (why do all billionaires seem devoid
| of ethics?)
|
| A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal
| betting market implements KYC.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >A sane system would just throw him in jail.
|
| <facepalm>
|
| A capricious system that interprets based on whim, politics
| and influence is a large part of how we got here.
|
| People like this and their less than moral path in which
| they further their endeavors succeed specifically because
| of this environment.
|
| Polymarket is basically a platform to monetize petty stuff
| while also being able to monetize bad stuff. There is soooo
| much pressure to monetize bad stuff that once you poke a
| hole it's an uncontrolled leak. Polymarket recognized this,
| used it to scale, and then wisely used that money to get
| the legitimization and buy in that they needed to make the
| system (capriciously) say "this is fine for now you can
| keep going".
|
| They basically pulled a "actually Mr. Banker, I owe you so
| much money that it's your problem" but for insider
| information. The other metaphor you could use if people
| with a steady supply of prescription opioids don't turn to
| street drugs.
| nickspacek wrote:
| There's probably a useful middle ground between tossing
| people in jail and rewarding with great wealth, power,
| and influence those people whose main drive appears to be
| accumulation of said things without regard for their
| fellow citizens.
| xvector wrote:
| It is not capricious to hold C-suite legally accountable
| for their choices. Lots of corporate scandals would
| simply not have happened if decisionmakers had skin in
| the game.
|
| If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches,
| CEOs can have personal liability for intentionally
| creating an illegal platform.
|
| Instead we reward these people with billions for
| degrading the fabric of society.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| We need either a "corporate death penalty" of sorts, more
| personal liability for c-suite execs, or some combo of
| the two. Too many people fail upwards to trust the system
| to sort out the "bad ones."
| DANmode wrote:
| > If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches
|
| Where's this, now?
| happyopossum wrote:
| In the US it's a legal battle currently being fought.
| CISOs have been charged by the SEC and other agencies,
| with varied success. Some cases have been deemed over-
| reach, some have not. And other were a case of a CISO
| doing ostensibly illegal things in their capacity (in
| some cases paying ransom demands have been interpreted as
| such, especially when disguised as other things).
| laurentiurad wrote:
| yea just throw the CEO of microsoft in jail too because
| illegal transactions are set via Xbox live.
| xvector wrote:
| Betting markets are legally required to have KYC. If you
| or I operated a casino illegally we would ABSOLUTELY be
| thrown in jail.
|
| Do you seriously think fraudulent Xbox live transactions
| are on the same level of the heinous insider trading
| going on in betting markets?
|
| Or do you just think C-suite should be legally immune
| from accountability overall?
|
| Polymarket's decentralized and anonymous nature was an
| _intentional_ choice by its creator precisely because it
| enables illegal, anonymous transactions.
| laurentiurad wrote:
| How is the ceo responsible for operating under the
| current legal framework which allows his platform not to
| require KYC? Unless they are breaking the law, why should
| anyone arrest him?
|
| It's the responsibility of the lawmakers to make them
| illegal or force them to do kyc.
|
| If you fantasize about China or Russia way of doing
| things you should move there.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| He _is_ breaking the law, and was under DOJ investigation
| for it until he bribed the president 's son to call them
| off.
| laurentiurad wrote:
| If he's breaking the law and there is proof to that, then
| he will and should be arrested.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| From where has it entered your mind that they don't do
| KYC?
|
| Anybody can send anonymous threats, that has nothing to
| do with any betting company, unless they are sent through
| that platform.
| xvector wrote:
| Trivial to make a polymarket account without KYC
| carlosjobim wrote:
| And what is the relevance to the death threats mentioned
| in the article?
| polytely wrote:
| unironically yes, I think with the huge payday they get
| for being responsible for Microsoft they should also
| carry an equivalent responsibility when they cause social
| harms. Billionaires have gotten way too comfortable.
| laurentiurad wrote:
| I hate them too, but arresting them for something that
| they simply cannot prevent due to technical limitations,
| since they cannot scan in realtime all the conversations
| happening on their platform, is Russian-style government
| action, not rule of law.
| wang_li wrote:
| If you can't do a thing safely and without harm, perhaps
| you should not be doing the thing? It blows my mind the
| number of tech people who just say "it's too hard to do
| it safely and without harm so we'll just do it anyway and
| externalize the damage to other people." Lazy, greedy,
| amoral douche bags.
| blacklion wrote:
| Cars? Airplanes? Motorcycles? Child birth? Life itself?
| Nothing could be done 100% safely and 100% without harm.
| Obsession with safety is what helps governments become
| totalitarian even in traditionally-democratic countries.
| Obsession with safety is the reason terrorists win.
|
| Edit: Personally I think betting on war is immoral and
| should be condemned by all sane people, but saying that
| everything needs 100% safety and 100% no harm is very
| naive.
| munk-a wrote:
| The items you've listed are all quite safe and palatable
| in their harm when contrasted with the benefits they
| bring. I'm not seeing the same picture when looking at
| polymarket - I don't see the great gain we're
| accomplishing as a society in exchange for an addicting
| platform that breeds organized crime. Some inventions are
| just plain dangerous and a bad idea.
| munk-a wrote:
| Before they built the platform this danger did not exist.
| There is no law of nature that says massive social media
| platforms that are too large to moderate effectively need
| to exist.
|
| If they have built a thing they can't maintain that isn't
| bully for them and we should feel sorry that their best
| efforts aren't working well enough - it's proof that that
| thing (or at least the way they built that thing) isn't
| feasible.
| twodave wrote:
| Putting aside this is sort of a knee-jerk reaction, if this
| was actually implemented you'd just see the role of the CEO
| change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy. People in
| those positions today would vacate them for quieter roles
| behind the scenes, and corporations would put greater
| effort forth to hide their decision making processes. I
| don't think it would be a better system.
| xvector wrote:
| Sure, and we can deal with that problem when it comes to
| it. For now, there are people at these companies that are
| clearly responsible and can be held accountable.
| tclancy wrote:
| >you'd just see the role of the CEO change to basically
| be a highly-paid fall-guy.
|
| That seems to be assuming a world where CEOs actually
| face meaningful consequences and that feels like a good
| start.
| twodave wrote:
| "Meaningful consequences" in this case means "throwing a
| CEO in jail until they de-anonymize their platform,"
| which sounds ripe for abuse to me.
| tclancy wrote:
| In this specific case, perhaps. In most it means
| "throwing a CEO in prison or fining them extensively for
| crimes they have committed".
| twodave wrote:
| In what instance is a CEO not liable for their own
| crimes? At least in the US, they are still criminally
| liable for anything they do. If anything is at issue
| here, I think it's whether it can be proven a crime was
| committed and who can be proven guilty of it. I think
| often civil penalties end up being the answer because
| they're just easier to make stick (AIUI the burden of
| proof is lower in those cases).
| williamdclt wrote:
| > why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?
|
| why do all NBA players seem so tall?
| civvv wrote:
| >(why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?)
|
| The type of person at the top of a hierarchical system is
| always a direct reflection of its play rules. In late-stage
| internet capitalism you win by being the most unhinged and
| un-emphatic. Today's young adults grew up on twitter,
| 4chan, video game gambling and with influencers telling
| them that the only thing that matters is material wealth
| and status. This culture has moved more and more into the
| mainstream in the last decade.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > late-stage internet capitalism
|
| This isn't a thing.
|
| Capitalism is just capitalism.
| civvv wrote:
| I don't know. Certainly the underlying mechanisms of
| capitalism remain the same, but it does not hurt to
| clarify the context that it exists within. The world is
| very different today, than say the 1960's, but the
| "rules" were the same. Capitalism has been accelerated a
| lot by the rise of information technology, specifically
| the internet, and today it is a whole different beast
| with unique "opportunities" and consequences.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| The only things that's true now is that there's more
| laxity around consolidation of power in big business. The
| core tenets of capitalism haven't changed in thousands of
| years.
| civvv wrote:
| I would be reluctant to say that capitalism, as we have
| had after the industrial revolution, has existed in the
| same form for thousands of years. That just seems silly.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| What seems silly about it? Labour is certainly more
| efficient but the principles and the outcomes remain
| largely the same.
| civvv wrote:
| I think you are right in that the primary mechanisms
| remain the same, or at least similar, but that was not my
| point anyways. The surrounding adjectives describe more
| the context of which capitalism exists within.
|
| The effects and consequences of capitalism under
| feudalism or the age of slavery is, for example,
| fundamentally different from capitalism under a freer
| modern democracy. A slave or serf did not have the
| opportunities of capitalism, which changes how the system
| behaves and its effects.
|
| The term "capitalism" becomes kind of meaningless,
| because it just describes a broad set of mechanisms. In
| the case of the question in this thread it is much more
| descriptive to include the context of which it exists
| within.
| cardanome wrote:
| Capitalism only exists for like 500 years. In some places
| of the world it did not fully develop until the 20th
| century. It is very young.
|
| Are you confusing capitalism with class society in
| general? Yes, class society exists since the neolithic
| revolution. Those economic systems had barely anything in
| common with capitalism though. Even medieval feudalism is
| very different.
|
| And yes, late stage capitalism is a term. It was coined
| by Lenin in his book about Imperialism. You might not
| agree with the term but that doesn't mean it is not real.
|
| I think it is very obvious that 20th and 21st century
| monopoly capitalism is qualitatively different to 18th
| and 19th century free market capitalism.
| gzread wrote:
| The current financial system, which is integral to the
| current form of capitalism, only existed since 2008.
| LargeWu wrote:
| I think the differentiating feature is that capitalism
| used to be tethered to producing things that were useful.
| The current model of wealth acquisition, so called "late-
| stage" seems to have shifted more towards rent seeking
| and extraction.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Pretty sure every single economist would disagree with
| you
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Happen to have any links?
| Supermancho wrote:
| Please dont sealion. You can start simple and work from
| there to make your case. It's not compelling to declare
| facts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I'm not sure what that wiki article has to do with a
| criticism of the oblique "late stage" capitalism term.
| Particularly when the only reference is a link to the
| relevant late stage capitalism article which mentions the
| term isn't all that clear cut or even used with any
| degree of consistency, which is why I'm asking for proof
| that "every single" economist agrees.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| You said
|
| > Capitalism is just capitalism.
|
| If you want to just debate the validity of the specific
| term "late stage capitalism" then sure go ahead, but
| that's not all you did in your prior comment. Capitalism
| comes in many forms and variations.
|
| That being said, late stage capitalism is such a common
| term now that to say "it isn't a thing" feels more like
| something you feel should be the case than anything else.
| The fact that everyone in this conversation is able to
| understand the phrase without anyone needing to explain
| it is pretty indicative of that.
| axus wrote:
| When power is concentrated to the government, the
| corruption is concentrated with it. Incarceration and the
| end of privacy don't restore the victims. A consumer
| protection bureau could bring a civil suit against
| Polymarket to pay the journalist.
| xvector wrote:
| A lawsuit would just be the "cost of doing business" for
| Polymarket. Until there is no skin in the game, there
| will be no change or accountability.
|
| If CISOs can be held criminally liable for data breaches,
| the rest of C-suite can be held criminally liable for
| their own decisions as well.
|
| In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting market
| that illegally does not require KYC.
| logicchains wrote:
| >In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting
| market that illegally does not require KYC.
|
| It's not illegal where he is. You can't go around
| arresting people in other countries just because they
| don't follow your country's law.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| On the other hand, what often happens with high level
| corruption cases in my country is that people go to jail
| for a few years, but none or next to none of the money is
| ever recovered. So quite a few crooked politicians and
| business man just accept prison as nothing more than an
| unpleasant bump on the way to getting extremely rich, and
| roll with it. So you actually need a combination of both
| money and personal fault for really fixing some of this.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law
| only exists for the lower class.
| squidbeak wrote:
| > When power is concentrated to the government, the
| corruption is concentrated with it.
|
| This is a hackneyed neoliberal fundamentalist myth.
|
| If power is concentrated anywhere, it should only ever be
| in government - where it's answerable to the public
| electorally.
|
| Governments become corrupt when they are weak, and turn
| to serving private interests rather than the public they
| represent.
|
| Corruption in general is far more prolific and fruitful
| where government is weak (the neoliberal ideal) - which
| is one of the reasons corrupt private actors look to
| weaken government - for instance by undermining public
| trust in it or lobbying for its parasitization by private
| entities. Or by stuffing their acolytes minds with
| foolish neoliberal fundamentalist myths.
| redeeman wrote:
| KYC is nothing sane. in what world does anything give you
| or anyone else the right to decide to probe people up their
| rear end just because they want to do business? people like
| you are extremely dangerous.
|
| loads of banks all over the world now demands to know what
| you plan to spend the money on just to withdraw a bit cash.
| Some will even deny you saying "well.. you shouldnt buy a
| new car anyway". all the KYC shit. how about just no?
| xvector wrote:
| > in what world does anything give you or anyone else the
| right to decide to probe people up their rear end
|
| A world in which these people bet on heinous things while
| insider trading/influencing those very things.
|
| Privacy in gambling or insider trading is not a
| constitutional right.
| logicchains wrote:
| Insider trading itself is only a crime when someone's
| betraying their fiduciary juty to an organisation, e.g.
| their employeer. There's nothing morally or legally wrong
| with using one's private information to make informed
| bets on other things, and economically speaking it
| produces better market prices/predictions because they
| reflect more information.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| A sane system doesn't "throw" human beings in jail for
| flippant and arbitrary reasons. Sociopaths exploit this, to
| be sure.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| The reasons are neither flippant or arbitrary.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| What is the law being broken?
|
| "Lack of regulation clarity on your part does not
| constitute a crime on mine". Why is that not a valid
| defence?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What is the law being broken?_
|
| "In most jurisdictions, death threats are a serious type
| of criminal offence" [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_threat#Legality
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, I think they should implement KYC pretty darn quick,
| and perhaps there's more they can do. But he didn't make
| the death threats.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| And what do you think KYC would help with? The threats
| were made on WhatsApp, not Polymarket.
|
| It would make more sense to campaign for better
| background checks on WhatsApp. A case can be made that a
| chat system with discoverable identities should have
| better safeguards. If the incentive to make a threat is
| financial gain rather than a pure desire to kill,
| restricting the means in which a threat can even be made
| (or identifying the participants) would help silence the
| noise and give actionable insights to law enforcment.
|
| I'm generally opposed to KYC and similar measures, but if
| a platform is already collecting massive amounts of user
| data, it should at least use that data to help protect
| the people who become vulnerable because of it.
| gzread wrote:
| Polymarket is a set of blockchain smart contracts. It's
| banned in most countries but you can still use it by
| interacting with the blockchain directly.
| skybrian wrote:
| WhatsApp would be more direct, but if they're
| uncooperative then knowing who is betting might provide
| some clues.
| Terr_ wrote:
| That might help in some cases, but even if there are
| 10,000 people with bets of >$X on an outcome, that won't
| be much help determining _which one_ is making anonymous
| death threats.
|
| There is a fundamental architectural problem here with no
| easy band-aid fix, and the companies involved are
| desperate to deny it because their founders have personal
| fortunes riding on it.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Same with Kalshi's founders. As if becoming rich, off
| gambling and speculation, is supposed to inspire some kind
| of admiration.
|
| The lunacy of the mysticism of money.
| logicchains wrote:
| >A sane system would just throw him in jail until his
| illegal betting market implements KYC.
|
| There's nothing sane about KYC, it's a fundamental assault
| on the right to financial privacy. And the people with
| power can always bypass it; only the little people suffer.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it's important to look at the context of the
| discussion around this comment. Someone has received
| credible death threats - clearly the current situation is
| one where the little people are already suffering.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Someone has received credible death threats
|
| 2 points - 1) "credible" is carrying a lot of water in
| that statement, and 2) your implication is that _any_
| activity which could eventually or conceivably involve a
| lunatic making a death threat is not compatible with any
| level of privacy.
|
| The second is incredibly disturbing - people have made
| death threats over E2E encrypted chat channels, therefore
| we must remove any privacy built in to such a model?
| munk-a wrote:
| I'll just dodge 1 for the moment since we're discussing
| an article about those threats. For the second point -
| I'm not saying that death threats should invalidate
| privacy concerns I just wanted to stress that the little
| people are already seeing quite a few downsides so it's
| important to view this issue with more nuance than a
| Facebook-like scenario when the privacy only comes at the
| cost of ad-revenue.
| munk-a wrote:
| > (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?)
|
| Because no ethical person would accumulate a billion
| dollars. An ethical person would share the wealth they're
| creating with those around them instead of hording that
| wealth.
|
| What can you do with 100 million that you couldn't do with
| 10?
| munk-a wrote:
| Just as a note - I feel like there's a lack of
| understanding of how difficult it is to get a billion
| dollars. It isn't something you can just trip into and I
| think the concentration of that much wealth really goes
| against something in most people's approach to the world
| where generosity increases as you gain more wealth. To
| capture that much wealth as a business owner you have to
| be extremely stingy with compensation to those who
| accompanied you along that path which is not how most
| people tend to operate - more often people share that
| wealth and make sure those around them also benefit from
| the work even if the structure of corporations may
| technically entitle the owner to 100% of the upside.
| superfrank wrote:
| Polymarket is banned in most first world countries
| (including the US). It's not particularly tough to get
| around with a VPN, but they do enough that they have
| plausible deniability. I'm sure if the US wanted to they
| could go after them and prove that they're still letting US
| customer sign up, but it's not the open and shut case
| you're making it out to be.
|
| Polymarket US is starting to roll out in the US and other
| countries where Polymarket cannot operate, but that's a
| separate company and they do abide by KYC laws similar to
| Kalshi.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?
|
| Subpoena Meta for all of the IPs of the account. Subpoena the
| ISPs for data who was using the IP. Bring in the likely
| people who were sending the message for questioning.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| And when the people sending the messages turn out to be in
| a different country?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Then work with local law enforcement.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Maybe they are all in North Korea and beyond any
| extradition. But police broadly defined don't even try
| very hard when it comes to certain crimes.
| gzread wrote:
| Polymarket runs on Polygon, which, like most blockchains, has
| public history. If the user wasn't very careful about how
| they got their money into the system, it traces back to a
| public cryptocurrency exchange with KYC records.
| irq-1 wrote:
| ...so then trace the transfer to each identity? How does
| knowing the first person in the chain help identify the 2nd
| and 3rd, etc? What if there are 50 identities and the coin
| has a dozen origins?
| gzread wrote:
| That's the part about the user being careful how they got
| their money into the system.
|
| You're also assuming Ethereum-clone chains work the same
| way as Bitcoin. They do not. An Ethereum wallet has a
| single long-term identity.
| tgv wrote:
| That's the BS reply that always comes when (in particular)
| bitcoin is associated with crime: that it is traceable.
| Well, it hardly is. And for the average policeman/woman,
| even less so. And when the owner has taken some care, as
| you admit, practically impossible even for experts.
| sentrysapper wrote:
| It's not BS though? That's what companies like
| Chainalysis professionally. This was covered in graphic
| detail as to how they caught a pedo ring in Andy
| Greenberg's book Tracers In The Dark.
| senderista wrote:
| In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in
| Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in
| Israel.
| echoangle wrote:
| It's probably an open and shut case regarding being illegal but
| prosecution could be hard. How are you going to find the
| person?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't like that the internet can be used to harm you
| without any recourse.
| breppp wrote:
| The Israeli police can contact Google, Meta, etc and get the
| user details.
|
| The question is whether they deem this case important enough,
| this is a journalist so there is a higher chance but I don't
| think this specific journalist carry a lot of weight locally
| wmil wrote:
| Reporters for The Times of Israel get a lot of death threats. I
| doubt this was the author's first one.
|
| So it's common and hard to prosecute because the person
| threatening is most likely in another country.
| Pay08 wrote:
| Especially since a lot of the quotes in the article sound
| like Google-translated Hebrew.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Honestly this behavior is pretty representative of the place,
| in my experience.
| AngryData wrote:
| US cops don't care about solving crimes or making people safe,
| they only care about making a profit. And harassing random
| motorists on the side of the road is way easier and safer
| profits than trying to deal with real crime involving people
| with money that can afford their own lawyers to fight back.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Does the "Continue without disabling" button on the adblock popup
| just not do anything for anyone else?
| newAccount2025 wrote:
| The site is completely unusable. Even with reader mode it
| somehow aggressively refreshed. Gave up in disgust.
| ajross wrote:
| So, just to point it out: people don't get violent and criminal
| magically because they made a bet. They get violent and criminal
| to backstop a _bet they can 't cover_. The story here isn't that
| horrible criminals are using Polymarket. It's that Polymarket
| bettors are overleveraged, and at the margin some of them turn to
| crime to avoid losing their shirts.
|
| We've all been looking around for the trigger for the market-
| crash-we-all-know-is-coming. Seems like "too much betting on a
| stupid war of choice" is just dumb enough to fit the timeline
| we've been trapped in. Very on-brand.
|
| In other news: I'm almost entirely out of volatiles in my own
| portfolio right now. Cash and bonds until this pops. Frankly the
| chances are that _today_ will be the day[1] are about as high as
| they 've ever been.
|
| [1] Trump, sigh, basically went on camera and capitulated,
| telling the world that there is no plan, the US doesn't have the
| capability to ensure trade through Hormuz and that Iran will deny
| access until _Iran_ decides otherwise. Markets don 't like
| uncertainty, but they _really, really_ hate losing wars.
| ambicapter wrote:
| This argument is sophistry, the nature of gambling is that
| gamblers over-leverage themselves compulsively.
| ajross wrote:
| So... no, it's not? You're saying everyone who makes a bet on
| anything is doing so compulsively? Literally everyone has bet
| on _something_. The absolutely overwhelming majority of
| "bets" placed (via whatever definition you want to give them)
| are basically benign and don't reflect mental illness.
|
| But even so, you're missing my point: even _compulsive_
| gamblers don 't as a general rule resort to criminal
| extortion to cover their losses. The interpretation here
| isn't about the psychology of the criminals, that's sort of
| speciously true.
|
| It's that the fact that "regular bettors" become "criminals",
| and are doing so at scale, is a proxy measurement for the
| amount of leverage in the system.
| amelius wrote:
| Gambling is bad anyway because it increases the wealth gap.
| And wealth is increasingly used to take away wealth from
| the less fortunate. (See e.g. housing market, where price
| pressure is caused by wealth).
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is said with very high authority, and nothing whatsoever
| to back it up. Sure, not all, nor even the majority, nor even
| the plurality or a large minority of gamblers resort to
| criminal behavior.
|
| But what evidence do you have that only over-leveraged gamblers
| resort to criminal behavior? Why do you think that some rich
| person who bet, say, $1 million they can actually afford will
| not still seek to recoup their investment, especially if it
| only takes some bribes and threats?
| ajross wrote:
| > Why do you think that some rich person who bet, say, $1
| million they can actually afford will not still seek to
| recoup their investment, especially if it only takes some
| bribes and threats?
|
| Because "only bribes and threats" are crimes for which people
| go to jail, and most "rich people" in the west, even in our
| authoritarian corruption hellhole timeline, are unwilling to
| engage in that nonsense because the benefits don't outweigh
| the risks.
|
| Do I get to demand you cite evidence here, too? Has a wealthy
| person ever been caught in criminal extortion trying to goose
| a losing position that they _could_ cover? I don 't think
| that's ever happened, honestly.
|
| I mean, yeah, it's my opinion. My gut says that the "bro"
| markets are all overleveraged right now, there aren't any
| easy winning positions at the moment (even AI stock
| valuations seem to have topped), and now the loans are coming
| due. Something's going to pop, and we're all looking for
| proxy measurements. This is one.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, the Epstein files prove quite clearly that there
| exist rich people who perform blatantly illegal acts that
| can put them in jail for a looooong time, even when they
| don't stand to lose any money whatsoever by not committing
| said crimes. And they also show that said rich people
| generally don't face any legal consequences even when their
| crimes become public knowledge.
|
| So any argument that starts from the assumption that rich
| people don't commit crimes for relatively low gains, and/or
| that they would be caught and put in jail if they did
| commit crimes, is obviously false.
|
| I think the Epstein files even have specific examples of
| blackmail among said rich people (e.g. Epstein's letter
| draft to Bill Gates).
| ajross wrote:
| Sigh. I didn't say the wealthy don't commit crimes. I
| said the wealthy don't commit crimes to avoid paying
| routine investment losses.
|
| Actually what I really said is that _no one_ does this,
| because it 's insane. So I therefore infer that the
| people doing this are looking at losses that are _not_
| routine, they 're faced with bets they can't cover.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're claiming that the wealthy don't value their money
| enough to commit crimes for them, while knowing that they
| value their sex drives enough to do so. I don't see how
| this is a tenable position.
|
| People routinely commit crimes for money, rich and poor
| alike, often for relatively irrelevant sums - and very
| often for money they don't even have yet. The incentive
| to commit crimes to prevent losses is even higher, given
| the well established loss aversion bias in all people.
|
| And we don't even have to discuss losses. Many people
| commit crimes to get money quickly, from murder to
| insider trading to insurance fraud. If you agree that
| many people would be willing to kill for a few thousand
| or million dollars, you have to admit they'd be willing
| to threaten and blackmail a newspaper editor or
| production crew to try to fix a bet - especially when the
| internet brings them anonimity, and even if they bet a
| small sum that they wouldn't even care to lose.
|
| If you don't believe this, try to go to a betting place
| in a poorer area and offer 1000:1 odds that no one
| punches you in the face hard enough to break your nose (a
| crime which could easily land whoever does this in
| prison). According to you, as long as you don't allow
| anyone to bet more than, say, $1 on this, it should be a
| very safe bet for you, surely no one would be insane to
| risk prison time for losing just $1, right?
| ratg13 wrote:
| One has to wonder if the people placing these bets didn't have
| some plans of their own.
|
| A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| A million dollars is high stakes, but not extremely high. We've
| seen much much higher wagers.
| giarc wrote:
| Iran could fund their war by manipulating these markets.
| dangus wrote:
| As I read through the article it seemed more and more as I read
| like this issue has actually very little to do with gambling or
| the gamblers on polymarket.
|
| The issue at hand is that Israel has made itself one of the most
| hated countries in its region and in the world.
|
| Trying to be an honest fact-based journalist for Times of Israel
| is like trying to be an honest journalist for Fox News. Even if
| you have the best intentions, don't be surprised when nobody
| believes you or respects you.
|
| In my opinion, Israel has largely made its own bed due to their
| own actions against their neighbors. If I were an Israeli citizen
| I would be rip-roaring mad at my government for endangering me by
| being positively moronic for the last half century.
|
| Netanyahu's extremist rule has been normalized so much. It wasn't
| that long ago that, like Trump, he was seen as a dangerous threat
| to the region if he won election. Now that those men are in power
| the situation has been massively sanewashed.
|
| We in the West have spent decades dehumanizing innocent civilians
| on the other side of our resource wars as "insurgents" and
| "terrorist affiliates" and yet here we are with a journalist
| "affiliated" with the obvious terrorist aggressor in the last two
| conflicts being upset that people on the Internet are doing just
| that. A trained, educated journalist should understand exactly
| what's going on. Like, hello, wake up, look up satellite/drone
| photos/videos of Gaza. Your country did that!
|
| Can I really get mad if someone on the internet is upset with me
| as an American for my country's sins? They may send me empty
| death threats but my country bombed an elementary school just
| this year, as a part of an illegal unauthorized war that my
| country's leaders can't even explain coherently.
|
| Downvoters of my comment seem like they're ready and suited up to
| fight the AIPAC War and Operation Epstein Fury! I'm doing my
| part!
| hersko wrote:
| I think you need a break from the internet.
| dangus wrote:
| Excellent job criticizing the content of my comment.
|
| I see you've decided to use the strategy of an ad hominem
| attack. This is a really great classic one! I applaud your
| efforts. Since it's too hard to refute the substance of my
| comment you can just point out how I'm some crazy person.
|
| If you're open to it I invite you to pick just one point I
| made and see if you can find some kind of logical flaw in my
| reasoning.
| arduanika wrote:
| Can you name anything about this news story that couldn't
| have happened in a non-Israeli context? Or does the Israel
| angle just draw you in like a moth to a flame, until it's
| the only word in the whole article you can really read?
|
| And to GP's point: Can you point to one paragraph in your
| original post that does _not_ cry out that you need to log
| off? I sure can 't.
| bhouston wrote:
| An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are
| engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to
| prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on
| their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely
| to control the narrative:
|
| https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
|
| This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near
| term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in
| the near term, it could be obscured.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when
| I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack
| thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the
| end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later
| invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of
| gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.
| bhouston wrote:
| This comment was originally upvoted to +6, and then all of a
| sudden this was at 1 point, oh, now -1. Strange voting pattern.
| Nobody even voiced disagreement with this post.
| caminante wrote:
| Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines.
|
| Here's the actual headline:
|
| _> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill
| me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story_
| Bender wrote:
| echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing
| to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story' | wc -c
| 107
|
| HN also forces editorializing to less than 81 characters. I too
| sometimes struggle to editorialize the title to something that
| fits and ideally does not lose context.
| caminante wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| I'd trim the bit about Polymarket to get under the cap.
|
| _> Gamblers [...] are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite
| an Iran missile story_
|
| You'll lose a little topical/karma sizzle (with no
| "Polymarket" keyword), but it's higher fidelity.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I'd trim the bit about Polymarket to
|
| Heck no, that's removing _the important part_ of the news!
| Specifically, that a new kind of unregulated anonymous bet-
| making is leading to new kind of violence against
| journalists.
|
| In contrast, the piece isn't really about Iran, or about
| Missiles, although those underscore the gravity or
| perversion of what's going on.
|
| _____________
|
| Such a cut isn't necessary either, compare the original
| versus this 79-character version:
| Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to
| kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story
| Gamblers on Polymarket vow to
| kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story
|
| The assumption that Gamblers care about winning a bet
| should be obvious and implicit, so that's an obvious thing
| to omit. The ongoing nature of the vowing is also
| unnecessary when simply having past cases is bad enough.
| caminante wrote:
| even better headline golf!
| user982 wrote:
| That original headline is longer than what HN accepts. What
| editorialized message are you accusing the shorter _"
| Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile
| story"_ of inserting?
| tantalor wrote:
| > Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill
| me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story
|
| > Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile
| story
|
| These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.
| caminante wrote:
| You're saying that after having read the article.
|
| A priori, you'd get different impressions between a regular
| journalist death threats and someone engaging to re-write an
| article leading to death threats.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| I'd suggest that you brush up on HN character limits before
| playing hall monitor.
| caminante wrote:
| How'd you get to here and miss all of the discussion?
| logicallee wrote:
| This part of the story stood out for me:
|
| >More emails arrived in my inbox.
|
| >"When will you update the article?" one was titled. The email
| had no text content, only an image -- a screenshot of my initial
| interaction with Daniel.
|
| >Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a
| fabricated message that I had not written.
|
| >"Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF
| Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for
| editing, it will be fixed shortly," I supposedly wrote. (To be
| clear, I wrote no such thing.)
|
| this seems to be a main issue.
|
| Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and
| the first party email providers could verify specific quotations?
| This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news
| would disappear.
|
| I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable
| when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists
| could also set their responses as quotable by default.
|
| What do you think, could this help this issue?
| htrp wrote:
| isn't this basically the crypto oracle problem?
| dandanua wrote:
| Yes, and BTW this problem is another proof that crypto doesn't
| solve any of the real world issues apart from avoiding (very
| natural) institutional regulations.
| mypgovroom wrote:
| Literal yawn
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar
| binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Alan Kay had a great quote: "The best way to predict the future
| is to invent it." A quote that many technologists and inventors
| have used as inspiration over the years as they create things.
|
| It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction
| markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on
| something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider
| trading.
|
| But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten
| / bribe someone into _lying_ about what really happened. That's
| the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of
| prediction markets has gone negative. You've no longer got a tool
| that helps predict reality, you've got a new way to reward people
| for lying about what is real and not real.
| _wire_ wrote:
| When "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is
| combined with crime it seems clear that betting on crime is
| acting as an accessory. A business facilitating betting on crime
| is a criminal enterprise, in the sense of RICO.
|
| Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:
|
| War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent
| of the governed is a criminal enterprise.
|
| Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its
| mechanism.
|
| In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic,
| making war fundamentally a racket.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Same thing has been happening with sports bets for years, this
| particular point (threats) isn't unique to political betting.
| Pay08 wrote:
| Good news, Polymarket also does sports betting, but since it's
| a "prediction market", it's not covered by gambling laws.
| pindab0ter wrote:
| I think time and time again that incentives are most important in
| determining how a market and by extension a society behaves.
| These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in
| humanity.
|
| These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign
| country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point
| where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves
| incentivized to make that happen.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Technically you can't bet on the demise of a person, at least
| in the US, as participants recently discovered when the
| previous supreme leader of Iran was killed and their
| "leadership change" bet did not pay out.
| thrance wrote:
| There are bets like " _X_ out of function by april " which
| are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.
| ptsneves wrote:
| This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi
| voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets
| are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it
| should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..
| loeg wrote:
| Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though,
| arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in
| violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).
|
| [1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether
| Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he
| didn't, at least in part because he was dead.
| fer wrote:
| Polymarket doesn't operate in the US.
|
| https://docs.polymarket.com/api-reference/geoblock
| loeg wrote:
| Polymarket is headquartered in NYC; it's a US company; it
| has many US customers, and it knows that, even if it did
| a wink-wink dance "disallowing" that prior to 2024. Since
| then, it has explicitly expanded into the US market[1].
| It is unambiguously subject to US regulations (if we had
| a regulator who chose to enforce those regulations).
|
| [1]: "Following the end of the investigations, Polymarket
| announced the acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed
| derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million.
| The acquisition allowed Polymarket to legally operate
| within the United States under regulatory compliance. The
| company received an Amended Order of Designation from the
| CFTC in November 2025 and began actively expanding in the
| United States market."
|
| https://www.axios.com/2025/07/21/prediction-market-
| polymarke...
|
| https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/polymarket-
| receives...
| noitpmeder wrote:
| As I understand it they operate as two separate entities
| -- polymarket US and polymarket INTL.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer
| bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are
| morally corrupt and we having given them too much space
| in our society already.
| scoofy wrote:
| >These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in
| humanity.
|
| Just call it gambling. They aren't "prediction markets,"
| they're just gambling. Gambling incentivizes the absolute worst
| in humanity.
| fritzo wrote:
| We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction. We're talking
| about gambling as big players paying participants to throw
| fights, paying referees to call shots, and the players are
| the real world and the referees are journalists.
| scoofy wrote:
| I agree.
| fritzo wrote:
| Just checking :) Didn't want to confuse two totally
| different equally compelling reasons to ban prediction
| markets
| Invictus0 wrote:
| That's fundamentally wrong
| scoofy wrote:
| >That's fundamentally wrong
|
| If you have an argument, please share it. If you don't,
| please don't waste everyone's time.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| if you can't tell the difference between a game of pure
| chance and predicting real world events then there is
| simply nothing to say
| scoofy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
| hashstring wrote:
| If there's something that screams late-stage capitalism any
| louder, I don't want it...
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm
| not enjoying living in it.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Delphi markets feature prominently in Shockwave Rider by John
| Brunner. It's an important book, and Brunner is amazing if
| you've never read him before.
|
| He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores.
| Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the
| Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy
| of G.E.B.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a
| recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in
| before getting distracted by something else. I should give
| Brunner another shot.
| natechols wrote:
| "The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand
| on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book
| predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone
| users, ubiquitous privacy violations, and governments run
| by criminal gangs; the other is like if Paul Ehrlich wrote
| a sci-fi novel. I don't think "The Shockwave Runner" is as
| well written as any of the other cyberpunk classics, but as
| a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would
| look like, it's almost freakily realistic. (Although it
| feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times -
| familiar tech described with alien words.)
| nvader wrote:
| Look everyone, this person believes talking Tortoises are
| real!
|
| In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge
| a given used book store?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Prediction markets remind of the "Safety Training" episode[1] of
| the Office where Kevin and others are betting on the outcome of
| various situations. It was pretty funny and absurd back then.
| Didn't expect it to be so prescient.
|
| [1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Safety_Training
| sharp_runner_84 wrote:
| this was kind of inevitable once prediction markets got large
| enough. when traders have millions in open positions on
| geopolitical events, they have direct financial incentive to
| suppress or promote specific narratives. same dynamic as short
| sellers attacking companies, but applied to real-world events
| instead of stocks. the whole prediction market thesis assumes
| information flows freely into prices -- breaks down when
| participants start trying to influence the information itself
| phkahler wrote:
| The pull quote "The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to
| change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and
| will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not
| be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings" misses
| something. If the reporter changes his story, then the people on
| the other side of the bet might start harassing him. OTOH
| individual betters anger will depend which side of the odds
| they're on.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Also that journalists are paid for their work, often by someone
| with political interests, so they are already subject to
| pressure to modify their reporting. Hopefully not usually
| threats of violence though!
| Terr_ wrote:
| I think this is way worse. Traditionally violence towards
| journalists comes from (A) predictable entities and (B) they
| are curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and
| deniability.
|
| In contrast:
|
| 1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit
| violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like
| whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.
|
| 2. The violence can arrive _from all sides_ , simultaneously.
| Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one
| way to ensure an existing report is _not_ revised is to put
| the journalist out of commission.
|
| 3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal
| coordinator for _subcontracting_ the violence, with a new
| bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or
| before $TIME?"
| ordu wrote:
| It is a sad story, showing why all these bright ideas about using
| hive-mind to predict a future are not going to work. It is sad,
| and I can feel the author worries, but still I want to laugh. It
| was so fucking predictable and prediction markets didn't predict
| it.
| alkonaut wrote:
| So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a
| single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In
| fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet
| heavily myself if I were the reporter.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| There exists a sensible way to handle this. It is to require at
| least three independent news outlet reports of an event (as
| defined in the bet).
|
| A related issue is that war news is heavily censored in Israel;
| it's difficult for news outlets to report it.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It's really hard I think. I mean if we assume sports
| betting is never going away (Outside of the US at least,
| sports betting is barely controversial and is basically
| now, unfortunately the oxygen of a lot of the whole sports
| industry).
|
| A lot of the large sports betting orgs (Unibet, Bet365,
| Ladbrokes, etc) allow betting on at least some contests
| that aren't sports. Like elections, Eurovision song
| contests and so on. So it becomes difficult to draw a line
| between the things that are legal to bet on, and those that
| aren't.
|
| And as we know, even if two things are clearly on either
| side of what should be legal but you can't make a good
| distinction of what makes one of them illegal, it tends to
| be the case that both remain legal.
|
| I think the easier short term fix for this is to have KYC
| laws and actually enforce them.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| It already is not accessible in the US, although ideally it
| should be in the same of freedom. If you are from the US
| and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it,
| as it is a core tenet of what is American.
|
| Making death threats to a journalist or anyone already is
| illegal. There is zero reason to ban betting considering
| the sensible mitigation that was noted.
| jbxntuehineoh wrote:
| > If you are from the US and don't value personal
| freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet
| of what is American.
|
| "Everyone I disagree with is Not A Real American and
| should just leave the country. Who's a Real American?
| Well, someone who agrees with my personal political
| views, of course."
|
| utterly idiotic worldview
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Pursuing personal freedom is highly self-consistent;
| there is nothing idiotic about it. Those who seek to
| repress will on the other hand soon find themselves
| repressed.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
|
| Ban it where exactly? If you've got personal knowledge of
| where these knuckleheads reside, speak up. It's entirely
| possible that it _is_ banned where they are and they just
| got a VPN and did it anyway.
| maxerickson wrote:
| And the people taking the other side of the bets. You have to
| kind of be a fool to take an anonymous bet with an outcome that
| can more or less be chosen.
| banannaise wrote:
| If you can keep the public misinformed for long enough, you can
| gradually sell off your position instead of losing the whole
| bet.
| postexitus wrote:
| Not even that. It is settling a bet on voting. But you are
| taking a bet on voting on the right side of the outcome. This
| is independent on the actual bet - this is outcome voting. You
| make very little money if you vote on correct outcome, and lose
| a lot if you vote on wrong outcome. So there is an incentive on
| voting on correct outcome.
|
| https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...
| fer wrote:
| Not going to defend Polymarket, but that's usually the case
| for markets that should never existed that depend heavily on
| opinion and/or reporting.
|
| For example, "Will Trump talk Macron before 31 of March?".
| Someone is going to get scammed no matter what: the market
| rules will set some basic resolution scenarios, but you'll
| find sources saying it was a letter, or sources several
| countries and in several languages saying that it was an
| exchange between their offices/assistants, or smoke signals,
| or god knows what, while a single US source will say they
| talked without any further detail, or it is simply reported 1
| month after the fact when the money has long moved wallets,
| and then people vote based on the combination of factoids
| they've been exposed to. In principle the perverse incentive
| of voting wrong to earn money will make you lose money on the
| UMA itself (unless there's a coordinated effort, which has
| already happened, but IME it's rather rare).
|
| Other markets are indisputable bar black swan events, like,
| "how many Oscars will X win", if it's 6 it's 6 and no source
| will say 5 or 7. That makes opening disputes 100% a money-
| losing option.
| evklein wrote:
| I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the
| same time:
|
| You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by
| these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or
| not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and
| how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of
| human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some
| point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important
| variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual
| material interests.
|
| A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally
| known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's
| fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday
| happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people
| in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if
| it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more
| towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues
| to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom
| A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will
| subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue
| annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of
| kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their
| power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or
| manipulating things in one direction.
| dbspin wrote:
| Unfortunately what you're describing is precisely the opposite
| of the meaning of 'democratised'. A more accurate term would be
| commoditised. In this case the capacity to manipulate events
| becomes as tied to wealth as it is to access to information.
| evklein wrote:
| Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that
| there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that
| influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the
| case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it
| actually is.
|
| If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the
| floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding
| but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side
| of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision
| making?
| alistairSH wrote:
| We're sort of already there... there were several reports about
| massive "wins" in these "markets" on betting on the day the US
| would strike Iran.
|
| It's not democratized, in the sense that everybody can play.
| But, the markets are for sure giving people with
| power/access/money reason to vote (in the markets) and vote (in
| whatever org they hold power).
|
| It's disgusting.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Sooner or later a college athlete is gonna get killed for missing
| a shot.
|
| Freedom ain't free I guess.
| dlenski wrote:
| Yes. Or for _making_ a shot.
|
| If you read some of the now-copious reporting about gamblers
| targeting athletes with death threats, you'll see that they
| have people screaming at them and threatening them violently
| _both_ for performing badly _and_ for performing well.
|
| Truly unhinged and alarming that gambling has been legalized
| and marketed so quickly and so extensively, in so many forms.
| elicash wrote:
| Related to your comment, see Nate Silver's take on the NBA
| gambling scandal.
|
| "Player props are inherently more subject to manipulation
| because only one player needs to be involved in rigging the
| outcome. [...] Even as someone more sympathetic to gambling
| than most people you're probably reading on this story, I'm not
| sure I'd really care if player prop bets were banned entirely.
| They produce abusive behavior toward players. They also often
| put team and individual performance into tension with one
| another..."
|
| https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...
| Lliora wrote:
| Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-
| stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous
| company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48
| hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent:
| above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to
| abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k
| and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this
| worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.
| eek2121 wrote:
| Definitely an unpopular opinion: The whole with the internet is
| anonymity. Keep in mind, I support an anonymous internet,
| however, political interests, corporate interests, hate groups,
| etc. are all using it to undermine society.
|
| Example: When Twitter ("X") suddenly started showing the
| locations of accounts, a lot of folks with MAGA talking points
| were shown to be anywhere except the U.S. Accounts with
| millions of followers and tons of influence have never even set
| foot in the U.S.
|
| Another Example: Polymarket (not the "US" one) is anonymous.
| Because of this, events like the headline talks about happens.
| Certain government leaders worldwide could easily be seeding
| the bets, and playing the market, and you would never know.
|
| Anonymity is nice, however, it is being taken advantage of for
| power plays. This is why we can't have nice things.
| ubj wrote:
| There was an interesting article in the Atlantic recently where a
| journalist spent a year participating in sports gambling. Part of
| the article discusses the effect it had on his psychology towards
| participants he had put his money on.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...
|
| Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation
| towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.
| gcr wrote:
| Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is a great game, I highly
| recommend it to anyone in this thread.
|
| It opens with a content warning saying that the player will
| likely become very angry at least once when a baby who you are
| financially incentivized to watch crash and burn pulls their
| life together, and that's okay.
|
| I appreciate that they're explicitly covering this
| psychological phenomenon.
| emsign wrote:
| Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with
| Eurasia!!!
| banannaise wrote:
| I would expect a dramatic rise in things like this, because they
| can be (1) monetized, and (2) scaled.
|
| Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome
| (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there
| is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than
| other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't
| think people have really noticed that profit is also available if
| you can _influence other people 's predictions_ to manipulate the
| price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress
| information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to
| journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do
| that at scale? Agentic AI can help.
|
| We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or
| there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and
| we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.
| RevEng wrote:
| The same thing already happens with the stock market.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Why is everyone assuming at face value that the threats are
| actually coming from gamblers, and not from the Israeli
| government trying to downplay the domestic impact of the war?
| tptacek wrote:
| Probably because it's 100% par for the course for online
| betting, unless you think it's Israel sending death threats to
| French tennis players for blowing people's prop bets.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Because that's a silly idea. When missiles are flying over
| people's heads and everyone is running into bomb shelters,
| Israel would get approximately no benefit from nitpicking a
| single story, certainly not enough to justify a harassment
| campaign involving lots of people with cover stories. On the
| other hand, gamblers have a very concrete motivation and a long
| history of doing unhinged things to get it. There's no reason
| to look for depth.
| litoE wrote:
| Because it's in the Israeli government's interest to make the
| threat from Iran look bigger, rather than smaller?
| eknkc wrote:
| I believe this is the bet in question:
| https://polymarket.com/event/iran-strikes-israel-on
|
| This caught my attention today as it was in dispute and there
| were a lot of comments (moslty angry). I like browsing polymarket
| (never placed a bet myself but it is fun to see the prices).
| Always thought this would kill someone someday..
| nusl wrote:
| Polymarket and similar platforms are a cancer and need to be shut
| down. This is an early symptom of something that will become
| much, much worse in an increasing manner. Stories like these make
| more people aware of the platform, adding users and further
| degrading humanity.
| tootie wrote:
| It's gambling which has been a bane forever. It poisoned the
| NBA even before the internet.
| padjo wrote:
| It's far worse than regular gambling
| nusl wrote:
| People are getting death threats for writing news articles as
| part of their job. How is this comparable?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Profession athletes get threats for winning games which is
| part of _their_ job. It 's exactly the same.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/sport/athlete-abuse-
| betting-s...
| logicchains wrote:
| It's impossible to shut them down without implementing
| completely totalitarian internet controls that would make even
| the Chinese government blush. That's the nature of the defi
| ecosystem.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Making them illegal is perfectly sufficient. Underground
| gambling has always existed, it's just not accessible so few
| people do it. A couple high profile convictions for criminals
| like the polymarket guy should help to limit bad actors
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate
| a poly market bet by 2040.
| kahrl wrote:
| Already happened.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Source?
| awakeasleep wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned that there was no safe course
| of action for the journalist because there was money on both
| sides of this outcome.
|
| No matter what he reported, he would have the other side
| threatening him.
| ntonozzi wrote:
| Perhaps because he is a journalist whose job is to report
| reality, not avoid threats?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Avoiding threats is non-optional for most Israeli
| journalists:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor
| yonixw wrote:
| The reason no one responds to this list is because it's
| just one big gish gallop
|
| It's enough to see that you brought a link to the Israeli
| Military Censor to hint at a conspiracy, to understand who
| you're dealing with.
|
| But even if you go into the list, you'll see at the top
| that those who were shot were in the middle of the battle,
| where Israeli forces were surprised, to the point of
| massacre alongside civilians. And there, it turns out, they
| didn't shoot to save themselves by the skin of their teeth,
| but simply wanted to kill journalists.
|
| Also, a quick search shows that "Mohammad Jarghoun"
| ("mvkhmd g'rgvn") was not a journalist at all, but a media
| worker, that according to the CPJ [1], during wartime he
| receives journalistic status. (Also not mentioned in AJ
| [2]. what a surprise...)
|
| Another comment to the pantheon of "the most logical
| failures, in the fewest words". And then no one understands
| why the ICC will never consider such reports..
|
| [1]: https://www.the7eye.org.il/501320
|
| [2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/10/at-least-
| six-pales...
| bigyabai wrote:
| There's no conspiracy, free press does not exist inside
| the State of Israel.
| yonixw wrote:
| Another "banger" comment that shows you did not read your
| sources links, here is one from the the wiki (Israeli
| Military Censor):
|
| https://www.academia.edu/10481823/The_Israeli_paradox_The
| _mi...
|
| Maybe your third comment will finally succeed...
| bigyabai wrote:
| Both researchers in that paper are Israeli residents. Do
| you have an independent report that corroborates their
| findings?
| yonixw wrote:
| The wiki sources FROM YOUR LINKS, are suddenly not enough
| once they are against you?
|
| Now now... one may mistakenly think you have some
| inconsistencies in your theory... and you out to revisit
| them first before demanding more..
| bigyabai wrote:
| The link corroborates my claim; the State of Israel does
| not protect press freedom.
|
| I am asking you to cite a better counterarguement, if you
| want to disprove it. Or concede that Israeli journalists
| are regularly threatened by their government.
| abracadaniel wrote:
| Until they start trying the carrot instead of the stick. Then
| it becomes a bidding war to determine the "reality"
| asdff wrote:
| Always is. 'Reality' is a subjective accounting.
| heisenbit wrote:
| > No matter what he reported, he would have the other side
| threatening him.
|
| That is why modern reportings best practice is to always
| support both sides. /s
| smadge wrote:
| I found it interesting that the bettors who threatened the
| journalist accused him of being motivated to manipulate the
| market. The journalist was motivated to report honestly, the
| bettors were the one trying to manipulate the market by changing
| the reporting.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I note the photo of the author wearing a "PRESS" vest. I'm sure
| he won't be shot or blown up by the IDF like so many non-Israeli
| journalists.
| keeda wrote:
| Conspiracy theory: the missile hit an unpopulated area. Would it
| have been possible for someone in charge of intercepting incoming
| missiles to have been in on this bet? I know these things are
| automated, because human control would be too slow... but I
| wonder if there's an angle here. Won't be the first time someone
| on the inside made money on classified Israeli plans:
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-indicted-for-using-classif...
|
| Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in
| these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could
| fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones
| required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
| unstyledcontent wrote:
| I don't know the case of this particular situation, but its
| certainly plausible that people will make decisions based on
| trying to secure a certain bet outcome. The prediction markets
| are clearly not a passive presence...
| gus_massa wrote:
| My unsupported non-conspiracy opinion:
|
| A) They notice that it would land in the middle of nowhere and
| decided to not destroy it. It's better keep the interceptors
| for one that is going to hit an important target.
|
| B) They partially intercepted it, perhaps only broke the motor
| or a fin, but the explosive head was intact. So instead of
| going to an important target, it crashed and exploded in the
| middle of nowhere.
| dlenski wrote:
| (A) is extremely plausible. It is well-known that Iron Dome
| specifically avoided targeting rockets for interception when
| they not going to land in areas with people or
| infrastructure.
|
| The main reason for this is because the interceptors are very
| scarce and costly.
| emsign wrote:
| The gamblers would have had a much easier time convincing a
| journalism LLMs that their article was "a lie".
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| Reminiscent of Jim Bell and his idea for an assassination market:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell
|
| Except this is even crazier because the bets aren't on people
| dying, it's about a reportable event. Any of Polymarket's silence
| in voicing whether the outcome was determined by this unwilling
| participant's writing makes them complicit. When there's a single
| source of truth, it makes a target for vested parties that
| doesn't benefit from the security the platform and their
| employees get from hosting the bet.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This is a major example why we can't have these things,
| unfortunately. It sucks because they can be powerful tools, but
| you're never going to be able to fully police this behavior as
| one of these platforms.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Gambling has a heavy association with criminality. By allowing
| open gambling we must also accept the externalities.
|
| Or we could, you know, not legalize gambling.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I do not think it is so clear cut as legalize/not legalize.
| Current legislation often doesn't even consider this gambling
| - however, even if you took the viewpoint that making it
| illegal helps, you then have to accept the externalities that
| arise - crime rings will develop that offer the services, and
| now their users are criminals and completely vulnerable to
| any amount of bad/malicious practices there.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here
| --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public
| really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be
| called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what
| they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive
| amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols
| where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but
| no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the
| outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal,
| etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to
| predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability
| to "copy trade"
| geor9e wrote:
| Surely I am misreading what you mean here. But your comment
| very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March
| 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on
| March 10. I'll search the space of other interpretations in the
| mean time, but if you could help me out here and clarify...
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The
| problem with prediction markets that has been talked about
| for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an
| indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so
| much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines
| the outcome not the other way around
| geor9e wrote:
| Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the
| outcome of an event?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw
| something at X basketball game" and then someone kept
| doing it, etc
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Here's one:
|
| https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/coinbase-ceos-bizarre-
| final...
| anonym29 wrote:
| I'm not parent commenter, but any example of an event
| that actually matters?
|
| Elections, wars, the economy, healthcare systems, laws,
| court cases?
|
| The example you provided does look like some insider
| trading type of stuff, just like how 1v1 professional
| sports players will sometimes intentionally lose after
| receiving a bribe to do so, but both your example and
| sports don't really seem to have any kind of meaningful
| impact on anything or anyone who isn't gambling, no?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I don't know. I imagine if someone was going to adjust
| the timing or targets of strikes in a war in response to
| a prediction market bet, or the decisions of a high-
| profile court case etc, they wouldn't say so in public
| the way the CEO of Coinbase did on that earnings call.
| It's pretty rare that someone would actually claim
| they're taking an action specifically with the purpose of
| altering the outcome of the prediction market bet, rather
| than giving some other reason. So even if it were
| happening, the only evidence I might expect to find would
| be suspicious prediction-market trades around low-
| probability events.
|
| In situations like this, where you wouldn't expect to see
| evidence of something even if it were happening, you're
| basically left to make a judgement based on prior
| probability. So here that would come down to: is the
| financial incentive provided by the prediction market
| high enough relative to the decisionmaker's perceived
| risk and penalty of being caught? IMO, the answer is
| currently 'no' for most high-profile cases, but in a
| future where more money is riding on the bets, or where
| decisionmakers are insulated from consequences, that
| could swing to 'yes'.
| anonym29 wrote:
| The decision-makers don't need change their decision
| whatsoever to corruptly profit from it, though, they can
| just place bets on the timeframe or outcome of whatever
| decision they originally intended to make. Why risk
| operational disruptions and a greater chance of getting
| caught when you can still profit exorbitantly from
| insider trading on your knowledge without incurring those
| unnecessary risks?
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > I'm not parent commenter, but any example of an event
| that actually matters? Elections, wars, the economy,
| healthcare systems, laws, court cases?
|
| I think the point is more that if it's already happening
| at this level of adoption, and these are only the ones we
| know about, surely there are many more where this is
| happening and we don't know, and as adoption increases,
| it will get worse and worse since the liquidity on the
| line will be much higher.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| How can we possibly find an example, if the names of the
| betters aren't public? There are public bets on
| activities from the IS government that can easily be used
| by people that control the outcome.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn93292do
| lordnacho wrote:
| Not Polymatket, but there's a humorous case of the Sutton
| FC goalkeeper eating a pork pie on TV, thus resolving a
| bet on whether he would do so.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| > But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran
| strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact
| caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10
|
| I don't know how you extrapolated that from the parent's
| comment. It literally said nothing about the cause and effect
| of this particular event.
|
| Knowing the odds in a prediction market IS a big part of the
| problem brought up in the linked article though (and the bets
| themselves). Knowing how much can be made from being right
| creates an upper-bound on what a financially-rational
| malicious actor will spend in trying to change the outcome.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Their comment proposed something that would "be the answer
| here".
|
| What does "here" mean? It's logical to expect "here" to
| refer to a scenario that includes cases like the one in the
| article. If it's some scenario that excludes cases like the
| one in the article, then it's not actually relevant to the
| discussion.
|
| (Tangents are OK. It's just confusing if they're introduced
| with phrasing that makes them sound like they're not
| tangents.)
| Mogzol wrote:
| "here" in that comment is not referring to any specific
| scenario. It is referring to the problem discussed in the
| sentence immediately following it, that public prediction
| markets can shape the outcome of the events they are
| predicting.
| geor9e wrote:
| >how you extrapolated that
|
| I wasn't extrapolating - it was the literal meaning of the
| words. The context was that someone commented "shouldn't be
| called prediction markets, they should be called outcome-
| shaping markets" in direct reply to "Polymarket gamblers
| threaten to kill me over...[the prediction market "Iran
| strikes Israel on March 10"]. I interpret that as
| polymarket gamblers outcome-shaped Iran striking Israel. It
| was at 25% odds when they struck. I don't think the
| commenter actually meant that literally, which is why I
| asked them to clarify. I'm just doing my best here.
| asdff wrote:
| Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence
| factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting,
| at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or
| coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in
| between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on.
| Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a
| players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going
| into a free agency period.
|
| This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet
| placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the
| raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving
| forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market
| activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge.
|
| https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-
| suspici...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I was confused as well: After further consideration, I
| realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event
| outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and
| credibly reports on those events and their resolution
| criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more
| reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the
| outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the
| behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg.
| national militaries.
|
| "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to
| force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel's
| military correspondent or other credible sources reports that
| Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating
| or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't
| cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it
| did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information
| campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money.
|
| In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets
| estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination
| markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious
| crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to
| bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who
| got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is
| going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to
| prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast
| guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded
| offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the
| crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully,
| your worst crime is publishing a fictional news
| article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to
| risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and
| getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the
| same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market
| resolution criteria that something happened.
|
| Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the
| colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks",
| where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome
| may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet
| isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the
| Internet through another financial instrument.
|
| [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-
| the-rul...
| lordnacho wrote:
| I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up
| controlled news sources. You get people who have an
| official press card to report on things as you need as part
| of the reporting manipulation business.
|
| "Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing
| happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
| malfist wrote:
| Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or
| payout?
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| A lot of people habitually make bets out of addiction without
| thinking carefully about the expected payoff.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing
| them don't know or care about the odds.
| gcr wrote:
| One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This
| only works if your intuition is better than the market's
| current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big
| splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently
| betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any
| particular knowledge.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| > but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side
| until the outcome executes
|
| This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets,
| where you can get information about the probability of an event
| based on how much people are betting on it.
| andai wrote:
| >outcome shaping markets
|
| I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are
| websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone
| is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them
| assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for
| assassinations.
|
| When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places
| a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they
| win the bet by default.
|
| Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such
| websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to
| wonder about the model itself.
|
| I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an
| idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is
| validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it.
| (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to
| actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get
| divided between them for prototypes.)
|
| For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink
| laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining
| for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is
| there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your
| wallet.
|
| Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for
| a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope
| they will launch something you're interested in. But what if
| you could push?
|
| I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side
| of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people
| actually do know what they want.
|
| And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and
| services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in
| government as well.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You are describing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
| casey2 wrote:
| Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away.
| Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them
| from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with
| open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that
| increases the amount of money behind assassinations.
|
| Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and
| death, but seriously, grow up.
|
| [0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their
| occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount
| bluGill wrote:
| Kickstarter exists. The real problem is most things cost more
| than the average person should dare risk. Some widget today
| is worth more than the same tommorow. Most people should not
| back your eink laptop even though if it existed they would
| pay more for it.
| andai wrote:
| Yeah it's about trust and risk.
|
| I'm not sure how to align the incentives on that.
|
| For the consumer the ideal case is that the money is not
| released from the escrow until their product actually
| arrives.
|
| But that would be overly restrictive, and limit development
| to companies with significant funds.
|
| Kickstarter has a balance where, you only pledge money
| after deciding you trust the company.
|
| I think we could do it so the initial fundraiser is
| provisional. And then everyone would know that some portion
| of that would fall through. Over time you would learn what
| the ratio is. If a million is pledged, maybe you can expect
| 200k to be committed in the final round.
|
| We could even divide it further. There is some portion of
| users which are more open-minded and enthusiastic. They
| might be happy to fund a round of crappy prototypes. So in
| this way smaller players could gain trust and credibility.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if
| such websites actually exist or are just rumors.
|
| polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on
| people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently
| inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a
| mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was
| traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran
| https://www.npr.org/2026/03/01/nx-s1-5731568/polymarket-
| trad...
| jacquesm wrote:
| > and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of
| the bombing of iran
|
| Oh, trump made some money?
| ciaranmca wrote:
| I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a
| lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some
| pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you
| can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain
| point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market
| of validated ideas and could submit a 'bid' before a set
| deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the
| funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best
| product.
| hcs wrote:
| > But what if you could push?
|
| There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this
| for software, I don't know how well any of them work.
| sporkland wrote:
| I assume a lot of people don't know the fundamental odds of
| something happening but have a vague sense on if Mr. Market has
| gone bananas or not.
| janalsncm wrote:
| That wouldn't solve the issue in the article. The gamblers
| threatening the journalist know how much money they
| individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how
| much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to
| alter reporting in their favor.
| dlenski wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense...
|
| If you want to bet on a binary outcome _without_ knowing how
| much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes,
| that 's a bookie, not a prediction market.
|
| The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets
| "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is
| that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and
| credible way.
|
| (And that's even before we get to the fact that _any_ kind of
| betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize
| outcomes like the death threats reported here.)
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should
| exist on websites that are publicly accessible.
|
| If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or
| LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to
| them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of
| the type of people who make death threats to journalists.
| patcon wrote:
| Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in
| societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this,
| taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities,
| local governance, and very effective communication across
| boundaries between communities, since they have an event
| horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside --
| where you never want to be known too much as an individual
| outside your circle of community.
|
| I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just
| don't like how it gets there
| poontunia wrote:
| How about the new supreme leader in Iran is gay? I'd have made
| millions on a $1 bet on that one! But now the secret is out and
| no payday
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| "who decides" whether a fact is true or not - Apparently, this is
| an unsolved problem. Also, I'm curious, who actually decides in
| this case? Someone who works at Polly market, who is immune to
| propaganda no doubt?
| Legend2440 wrote:
| No, they have a decentralized crypto-based system where people
| propose a resolution to the bet, then token holders vote.
|
| https://docs.polymarket.com/concepts/resolution
| waffletower wrote:
| I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments.
| Polymarket's existence is a symptom of the ubiquity of Adam
| Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you
| wilt"), "free" market thinking. We ought to take it to its
| natural extreme -- where Polymarket encourages gambling on when
| specific celebrities, politicians, or even random individuals
| might die (there is already a name for this: "death pools"). I am
| sure if they followed through on this openly there would still be
| advocates and defenders of the practice and counter-claims "there
| wasn't unequivocal evidence that Polymarket influenced their
| murder" etc.
| slashdev wrote:
| There are lots of bets on Polymarket about when certain
| politicians cease to be the leader of the country. Trump,
| Netanyahu, Putin, Mojtaba Khamenei, Zelensky, etc. If they die,
| those markets are resolved in a predictable way. Death pools
| already exist, and it's a matter of time before we see an
| assassination attempt motivated by it.
| waffletower wrote:
| It is a lot simpler and fairer to tax payers, due to high
| litigation costs, to simply make adhoc SaaS betting, as
| Polymarket provides, illegal. Why should tax payers have to
| pay for the regulation costs and, more broadly, society pay
| for the obvious disruption vectors arising from arbitrary
| speculation?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| We're already seeing "insider gambling" from the current
| administration so I'm pretty convinced we'll see
| assassinations motivated by polymarket gains alone soon
| enough.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We could gamble on when Polymarket's operators die.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| This comment is art
| kqr wrote:
| If I propose odds based on US insurance life tables for
| people of their age and gender, which side of the bet would
| you like to take?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| The over. Rich people live longer.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| Even when there's a polymarket bet on their heads?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes. I add that google says: "controlling for substance
| abuse reduces the gap by about 60% for men and 36% for
| women". I couldn't get it to quantify the effect of
| obesity.
|
| There are other imponderable factors at work. For
| example, does not-wealthy cause substance abuse or does
| substance abuse cause not-wealthy?
|
| We are all the sum of our choices.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or whether the company will fail or have a bad IPO.
| kqr wrote:
| If I propose odds based on survival tables for other
| companies of that age (I think for six years, the annual
| risk is 9 %), which side of the bet would you like to take?
| Terr_ wrote:
| The, uh, _earnestness_ of your reply makes me suspect you
| missed the subtext.
|
| We're not interested in expected value or winning the
| bet. If anything, it's the opposite: The "goal" is to
| _lose_ the bet due to a situation _caused_ by the pattern
| of betting, with something beyond any actuarial tables
| because it 's not an independent event.
|
| If I can presume to speak for up-thread commenters, we've
| agreed the system is inherently exploitable and harmful,
| and we're either (A) imagining the schadenfreude of using
| that same evil to harm the people who promote it, or at
| least (B) imagining them forced to _fear_ the monster
| they 're unleashing on others, so that they take steps to
| limit it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, obviously it is about the fear. If everybody takes a
| 100000:1 bet for a buck then that reserves the next 30
| years or so. It's a lottery of sorts, someone will earn
| quite a bit.
| SamBam wrote:
| How about something that they would see more as a genuine
| threat?
|
| Bet on whether they get into a car accident, and then see
| what happens if all of a sudden that number starts spiking
| towards 100%.
| scoofy wrote:
| Look, it's not the point your making, but _Adam Smith was not a
| laissez-faire capitalist._ If you want to do the "capitalism
| bad" thing, I would suggest learning a bit of history, or at
| least understand that the " _laissez-faire_ " in laissez-faire
| capitalism is a political ideology, not an economic ideology.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-gu...
|
| More to your point... I don't think economic theory has
| anything to do with it. I'm a capitalist and I think that
| "prediction markets" is just an idiotic rebranding of
| "legalized gambling" and generally speaking, gambling more than
| a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly
| because _any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the
| mountains of externalities it brings._ Yes, this includes the
| obvious incentives to threaten random people. It 's bad for
| society, so it should be effectively banned. The only reason
| why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is
| because many states have found themselves under mountains of
| deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues
| however they can without raising taxes. It's shameful.
| waffletower wrote:
| Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we
| largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.
| scoofy wrote:
| You're connection between an economic system with some kind
| of an amoral political view is a non sequitur. You could
| trivially operate gambling institutions in a socialist
| system. The gambling existing has nothing to do with the
| economic system itself. It has to do with the political
| climate.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Clearing up the incorrect connections you made is helpful.
|
| Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore
| mistakes.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say,
| less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any
| benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of
| externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious
| incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society,
| so it should be effectively banned.
|
| I agree with you in theory, but remember that people
| frequently do illegal things, just illegally. If we assume
| that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's
| legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime
| free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and
| regulate. That would be the same thing which happened with
| alcohol during Prohibition and which happens now with the
| many illegal drugs fueling today's Mexican cartels and US
| gang networks.
|
| > The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere
| in the US is because many states have found themselves under
| mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise
| revenues however they can without raising taxes.
|
| And because of a SCOTUS ruling overturning a federal
| prohibition on states' ability to legalize sports betting,
| but otherwise yes.
| scoofy wrote:
| >If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether
| or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by
| organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to
| oversee and regulate.
|
| I don't see why we should assume that. Making something
| annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of
| people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate,
| you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would --
| by definition -- have limited scope.
|
| It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use
| fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's
| that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to
| get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional
| barriers _to prevent people from becoming addicted in the
| first place._
|
| The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly
| regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno,
| a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with
| gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone,
| and not tempted to engage in the vice.
| lokar wrote:
| The approach of allowing a limited amount of some "vice"
| (or otherwise disfavored activity), highly regulated,
| combined with stiff penalties for illegal use is a pretty
| common approach to greatly reduce anti-social activity.
| scoofy wrote:
| Yes... harm reduction approaches can be effective. The
| point is that they also need a "very annoying"
| _frictional element_ to prevent harm reduction from
| creating worse outcomes than prohibition.
|
| The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had
| previously effectively achieved this goal by making any
| gambling habit include regular travel, which itself
| prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly
| activity.
|
| "Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to
| the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe
| consumption site, where you have to go through harm
| reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely
| have things like blood work done to check for potential
| disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.
|
| The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be
| annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the
| process, whereas addicts would go through the process
| trivially.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether
| or not it's legal
|
| Except it's not the same gambling in both cases, they have
| qualitative differences beyond simply where they're
| happening. My unhinged neighbor who'd threaten a journalist
| probably doesn't have an invite to the Underground Gambling
| Den.
|
| Even if he did, when a court case happens there's no
| presumption of normalcy. He can't say: "Pshaw, _everybody_
| legally gambles on all sorts of things there, the fact that
| I bet big on the journalist _not_ having his fingers broken
| is just coincidence. "
|
| The immediate illegality of the gambling is also a check on
| corruption, since it's _already disqualifying_ for Judge
| Stickyfingers McBriberson to be on the platform, let alone
| "betting" on the outcome of cases he presides over.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does
| not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much
| closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads
| (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically,
| as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):
|
| > "You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so
| is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As
| is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your
| destiny."
|
| But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous,
| opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of
| topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not
| sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.
| scoofy wrote:
| This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be
| conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of
| someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like
| Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley
|
| Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which,
| hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing
| off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the
| scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also
| did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of
| non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an
| important part of Western culture (even if commonly
| underplayed by mainstream academia).
|
| Technology, science and the occult have always had an
| interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in
| addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for
| founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know,
| inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of
| Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big
| of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic
| tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even
| Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a
| student of Crowley).
|
| It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley
| work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find
| Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the
| work of Western esotericism on the history of the West
| would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of
| the Middle East.
| nickburns wrote:
| Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious--but how does
| legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue?
| Bookie licensing?
| scoofy wrote:
| Why on earth would you think it's untaxed? A legalized
| gambling business trivially creates taxable income.
| nickburns wrote:
| Ah, right. These legalized bookies should be paying
| income tax to the jurisidictions they operate in (albeit
| probably happening as reliably as winning bettors are on
| their winnings).
| casey2 wrote:
| Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad
| for society
|
| People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird
| populations and many people are infected with pathogens
| carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each
| year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0
| harm activities.
|
| Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and
| regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is
| just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to
| regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a
| total copout. You know what else creates negative
| externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt,
| besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just
| fine!
|
| Do you have a religion that works on
| systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause
| the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic
| failure
| lokar wrote:
| We have a system. Free speech, public debate and democratic
| elections.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a
| "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant
| capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying
| to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can
| believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their
| relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a
| digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."
|
| You are, quite succintly, a _liberal_ in your beliefs here.
| This is _not_ liberal in the CNN /Fox News sense, in case
| this comes off offensive.
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm a "capitalist" in the sense that I think markets that
| allow people to exchange private capital create the better
| outcomes for society for society than other types of
| economic systems.
|
| I'm also a "liberal."
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Ha! I see, well, I'm clearly in the wrong here then.
|
| May all your capital provide the most good it can!
| Godspeed.
| db48x wrote:
| > ... libertine ...
|
| Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you
| thesaurus them into your ideas.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| On one hand, it isn't all that different than derivatives and
| other established securities. On the other, the extremes of
| gambling are deterimental.
|
| You can either take the libertarian view that it should be
| allowed until someone is put in harms way, or take the
| prohibitionist view that it should all be illegal.
|
| With the latter approach, you will be doing more harm than good
| potentially, because it will just become an underground betting
| market, fully unregulated and with the worst of people abusing
| it.
|
| I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match,
| or who will become the next presidential race nominee. At least
| no more than options trading, or betting on the price of oil,
| or a poker match.
|
| I agree that betting on someone else coming into harms way, be
| that violence or other types of harm (loss of property,
| livelihood, wellbeing,etc..) shouldn't be allowed. A sports
| team losing, or your preferred politician losing are not
| someone coming into harms way.
|
| I've commented on these lines before, but reactionary extremist
| approaches will always do more harm than good.
|
| also, politicians shouldn't be allowed to bet in even so much
| as a poker game!
| swid wrote:
| > I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports
| match...
|
| I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses
| intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss
| or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit?
|
| I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in
| Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so
| murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on
| who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily
| change a game result. With so much money on the line, it
| doesn't seem like a good mix.
| rescripting wrote:
| Athletes (both college and professional) frequently receive
| threats from sports betters. Since the betting apps let you
| make specific wagers such as whether a specific player will
| make more than 6 three pointers in a game the harassment can
| become quite targeted.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social
| benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a
| sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in
| the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce
| things many people might benefit from (how well that works is
| another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net
| negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely
| positive to them. Imagine if your next door neighbor dropped
| a cash-filled envelope that you found - lucky you? And if
| that was your neighbor's rent money? Like a lot of scams, the
| 'value' is only accrued by fleecing rubes, and it also
| creates a new class of super-bookies, which also not
| positive.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| One major utility of prediction markets is to get good
| estimates of probabilities of future events.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| The social benefit is that it gives a controlled outlet for
| the need to gamble when managed by the government.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > libertine
|
| I think you mean libertarian. Unless there's some spicy details
| of Adam Smith's life that the history books left out.
| rectang wrote:
| Dollars to donuts that "libertine" was just as deliberate as
| the "satanic" that followed it.
| unmole wrote:
| > Adam Smith's libertine
|
| What on earth does this even mean?!
| gac23 wrote:
| For some reason people tend to forget the most important part
| of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", I guess
| it because the words "Love is the law, love under will" doesn't
| sound _satanic_ enough. If you take the time to actually read
| some of his material you 'll be surprised how much he (the
| 'satanist' Crowley) talks about God and angels (as positive
| forces).
| westk01 wrote:
| They won't understand friend.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Adam Smith's libertine didn't allow the concept of rent-seeking
| entities. It sure as well wouldn't allow polymarket gamblers
|
| "As soon as the land of any country has all become private
| property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where
| they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural
| produce."
|
| "[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with
| which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and
| the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
|
| "The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the
| supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is
| generally an addition to this original rent. Those
| improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the
| landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease
| comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the
| same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his
| own. "
|
| "RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is
| naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the
| actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord
| endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than
| what is sufficient to keep up the stock"
|
| "[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue
| costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it
| were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project
| of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of
| the ease and security of their situation, renders them too
| often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of
| mind"
|
| "[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord,
| however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind,
| demands a rent for it"
|
| "every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends...
| to raise the real rent of land."
|
| - Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a
| highly relevant reddit thread(0)]
|
| Adam Smith has wrote _extensively_ about how much he disliked
| Landlords. It 's a great tragedy that most people consider him
| with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what
| I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that.
|
| So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against
| polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague
| sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the
| weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic
| nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket
| gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article
| talked about)
|
| (Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the
| fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith,
| the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking
| practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how
| large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on
| their platforms/algorithms too)
|
| A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the
| existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too.
| My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by
| what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and
| crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when
| he was so against the practices of rent-seeking.
|
| (0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who
| didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they
| were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of
| mind." :
| https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I can understand how you would call inside traders rent
| seekers. I don't understand the connection for some guy
| betting a hundred bucks. What's "parasitic" about the median
| person on the site?
|
| (Also landlords only gain all the surplus when the entire
| system is super biased. It's not inherent to the concept of
| landlording. What's the alternative to having landlords
| anyway?)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I feel like my point more than anything (in the scope of
| this discussion) is that, relevant to the discussion
| (Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile
| story)
|
| > What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?
|
| The median is kinda skewed to be honest. The median you and
| I think is very few percentage points in my opinion.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Let me say "typical" then?
|
| Second most malicious quintile?
|
| I'm avoiding "average" because one bad actor will spoil
| the average. But if you exclude the worst ten percent,
| what's wrong with everyone else?
|
| The people in the article are in that worst bunch. But
| you critiqued basically everyone on the site.
|
| Also did you finish your first sentence?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| There are definitely some (very few) people who can maybe
| use the platform in a "decent manner" but I feel like its
| 1 out of 20 type situation but sure theoretically I have
| nothing against those people actually.
|
| > But you critiqued basically everyone on the site
|
| My apologies in the sense, that I mean to critique the
| 19/20 people. I did think when writing the first comment
| that maybe I should've highlighted it more but I already
| partially did it by writing "degenerate" etc. words
|
| So I definitely agree with you on that aspect. Not
| everyone especially not the people you are talking about
| now are parasitic in that sense but key point being the
| people mentioned in the article being the worst bunch as
| you mention.
|
| > Also did you finish your first sentence?
|
| Yea, I re-read it, it feels incomplete but in essence, I
| sort of agree.
|
| TLDR: I can agree with ya in the sense that there are
| definitely some people on the platform who can use it in
| a _decent_ manner but the people mentioned in the article
| aren 't the ones. Also even with that being said, I feel
| like the platforms can push the people with decent
| manners to indecency.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay, so we basically agree on the principles but have
| very different estimates for what percent of people on
| the site are acting decently.
|
| Good enough, maybe somebody is working on a study of
| that.
| margalabargala wrote:
| As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair
| point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not
| fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
|
| The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a
| game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem.
| The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of
| surface area.
|
| My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you
| really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the
| outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
|
| The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to
| throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely
| encourages people to try to make X come about.
|
| Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix
| this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then
| bombing that company's HQ.
| derf_ wrote:
| _> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially
| fix this._
|
| There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR SS 40.11
| prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war,
| gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or
| Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for
| enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in
| doing so [1].
|
| [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/40.11
|
| [1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9183-26
| margalabargala wrote:
| Yeah, regulations are only as strong as the consequences
| given those who break them.
|
| If people can threaten journalists for money and get away
| with it, they will. If people who threaten journalists over
| money are sent to prison, then after a brief transition
| period it will mostly stop.
| tuple wrote:
| It's braindead easy to anonymously threaten people on the
| internet. It's getting easier to steal identities or
| create new ones out of whole cloth and cypto wallets
| means you can't functionally know where the money comes
| from. I'm not sure attempting to punish people you can't
| realistically identify can be considered an effective
| strategy.
|
| Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
| rtkwe wrote:
| At least with sports betting it's limited in scope.
| Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of
| politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and
| difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or
| players are altering their play to make or break bets but
| ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited.
| And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of
| potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily
| monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source
| monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly
| impossible to enforce.
| bnlxbnlx wrote:
| > there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar
| sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports
| betting.
|
| not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the
| whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating
| each others' humanity.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I honestly don't know what your point is. The best I can
| come up with is:
|
| "The whole point of sports (in my opinion) is X good thing
| therefore _betting_ on sports is more acceptable "
|
| Making bets on good things doesn't make the betting better.
| Just because Polymarket would allow you to bet money that
| the infant homicide rate goes down next year, doesn't mean
| it's a good thing to allow betting on.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and
| similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g.
| sports betting.
|
| > Strong regulation and legal consequences...
|
| Functionally, you are correct.
|
| But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19)
| have successfully argued that they are technically a platform
| that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the
| CFTC - not gambling.
|
| Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns
| HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying
| muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to
| maintain this status quo.
|
| It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to
| (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the
| same donor event XD.
|
| [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/little-tech-
| startup...
| margalabargala wrote:
| Which is of course a blatant abuse of our legal system,
| since they are doing nothing different than a casino's
| roulette or blackjack tables.
|
| "Red futures pay out at 2:1!"
|
| "Get your future here on whether the dealer's cards are
| higher than your own!"
| lordnacho wrote:
| Banning it sends it underground into the hands of organised
| crime, which will still have access to modern technology.
|
| There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to
| regulate it than have another war on drugs.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| We should definitely ban advertising it.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets
| misrepresented.
| waffletower wrote:
| It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is
| misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept
| and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't
| be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his
| thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not
| correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it
| would have been best to have just said laissez-faire
| capitalism instead of invoking his name.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he
| didn't consider its shadow/consequences_
|
| Smith wrote about the political economy. He absolutely
| considered the balance between public and market interests.
| Most people talking about _The Wealth of Nations_ have
| never read it.
| TZubiri wrote:
| A hint is in the name, it's called the wealth of nations
| not the wealth of the sovereign individual.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You'll not find "the invisible hand" in wealth of nations
| as a major concept. It was a throw away phrase that wasn't
| a central part of his writing.
| waffletower wrote:
| So many Smith apologists. I don't believe he should be
| demonized, and perhaps I am guilty of this by mentioning
| his name and 'satanic' in the same sentence, but he
| decidedly should not be lionized either. So many are
| drunk with history and shirk the work to evolve and
| transcend it. It doesn't matter if Adam Smith had
| morality and consideration, those are not ideals his
| writing ultimately bred, what matters are the free market
| ideals he clearly encouraged long ago, are now wildly out
| of control.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| He described a natural process, he didn't invent it.
|
| The invisible hand in markets is a natural property with
| an effect that's dependent on the environment the market
| operates within. He may be the first person to describe
| the process in writing (that we know of), but human
| beings have been experiencing the effects of this since
| we first attempted to trade with one another.
| cortesoft wrote:
| He didn't encourage free market ideals, though! He warned
| us about them!
| arduanika wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether you've misrepresented him? It
| doesn't matter whether the ideas you cite to him are ones
| that he actually held?
|
| Are there any cases where truth matters to you? I hope that
| this is just a rare exception, but I struggle to see how
| it's a principled one in any way.
|
| Anyhow, I guess I can't stop you. "Do what thou wilt",
| indeed.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he
| didn't consider its shadow/consequences
|
| This is just completely false. Wealth of Nations spends a
| HUGE portion of the text to talk about the negative
| consequences of the 'invisible hand'. Why would you say he
| never considered its consequences? What about his famous
| quote from Wealth of Nations:
|
| > People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for
| merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a
| conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to
| raise prices.
| casey2 wrote:
| Yes famous libertine Adam Smith, up there with Marquis de Sade
| and Ami Perrin
|
| Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your
| argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore,
| regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG
| you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you!
|
| Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural"
| extreme?
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I don't think "regulate all their actions, imprison them,
| kill all humans" is the logical conclusion of "prediction
| markets incentivize antisocial behavior".
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral
| defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and
| criticized state run gambling.
|
| _" The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have
| of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd
| presumption in their own good fortune, is even more
| universal."_
| aerhardt wrote:
| Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another
| classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross
| misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very
| critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral
| philosopher first and an accidental economist second.
| zymhan wrote:
| There are far better examples they could use.
| infinitewars wrote:
| There is a reason Peter Thiel started Polymarket... You
| need as much liquidity as possible to capitalize on
| privatization of national intelligence w/ Palantir.
| infinitewars wrote:
| I really wonder what kind of person downvotes this
| without commenting
| waffletower wrote:
| I do take Adam Smith out of context, that is the precise
| point -- the invisible hand of self-interest is the salient
| idea that has endured and shaped modern Hypercapitalism. It
| doesn't matter if he is rolling in his grave at audio
| frequencies due to my and, more importantly, society's
| alleged misappropriation of his work and misunderstanding of
| his many moral considerations. He was effectively soundbited
| centuries ago and we are still struggling to manage the
| implications. Saying he was a good guy makes it more
| difficult to fix the problem.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Much like Marx, who had a lot of very insightful
| observations.
|
| Whether what was done in his name is or isn't directly
| attributable to his writings is somewhat academic. That has
| taken on a life of its own, and overshadowed all his other
| ideas.
|
| It has also certainly made talking about class in America
| very difficult.
| waffletower wrote:
| Very good comparison. I do have more respect for Marx,
| the modern concept of life/work balance owes much to his
| concept of estranged labor ("Life itself appears only as
| a means to life"), as I haven't had to live in a society
| afflicted by his excesses and misappropriations, unlike
| the case of Adam Smith.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Adam Smith mentions something similar as well. He talks
| about how the worker's attachment to the work is
| different when he's working in a super specialised part
| of a production process rather than making the whole
| product like an artisan.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nobody is making you live in a free market society.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Where exactly would he go to escape it?
| cortesoft wrote:
| It's not about whether he is a good guy or not, it is about
| what we can learn from his writings.
|
| I know he is always associated with the 'invisible hand of
| the market' idea, but a lot of his writings were about the
| PROBLEMS that arise because of this invisible hand. He had
| a lot of good insights into what we have to be careful of
| when the free market does what it does. We should actually
| take some of those lessons to shape policy to protect us
| from the invisible hand.
| frereubu wrote:
| There's a great podcast about Adam Smith here, debunking some
| of those oversimplifications:
| https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-
| with-...
| _doctor_love wrote:
| I don't know you, but I do know that you haven't studied Adam
| Smith.
|
| edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of
| Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.
| noname123 wrote:
| My apologist response would be that Polymarket isn't the root
| cause--it's more of a mirror. It simply makes the incentives
| and speculation already present in late-stage capitalism more
| transparent and accessible for anyone to participate in.
|
| You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about
| things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already
| heavily monetized--think Page Six, Access Hollywood,
| livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor
| Swift's personal life.
|
| Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a
| significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal
| to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more
| accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next
| U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made
| available to the wider public?
| lokar wrote:
| I don't think it is a mirror, quite the opposite. I think
| most Americans (and probably europeans?) think a lot of this
| is in fact very bad, and should be stopped.
|
| The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the
| voters want.
| kortilla wrote:
| > I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the
| comments.
|
| This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the
| conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the
| first place.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be
| surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over
| shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market
| apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing
| any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a
| stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.
| People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting on
| the outcome of the war, but in practice they are.
| eek2121 wrote:
| Hard disagree. In most countries, you can not anonymously
| trade stocks, for starters, where you can anonymously bet on
| Polymarket.
| thephyber wrote:
| > Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a
| Polymarket prediction.
|
| But can you short a stock if you are a director at that
| company?
|
| The problem people have with betting markets isn't that you
| can bet on an event. It's that the event's outcome might be
| shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who
| actually shape the event.
|
| This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets
| on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time
| Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is
| attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in
| their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking
| into the Situation Room.
|
| Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the
| sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for
| violating these rules. I'm still not sure what changed (other
| than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
| arduanika wrote:
| This is a serious news story that should be concerning to all
| sides, including people who are generally pro-markets. Thus, I
| wish that we had produced a top comment that was critical of
| Polymarket without being deranged. (Libertine? Adam Smith for
| totally unfettered markets? _Satanic_?)
|
| If the prediction markets cannot produce a satisfactory
| solution to this problem, then their license to operate should
| be seriously cut back by regulators. Bets on a vast set of
| propositions that involve journalistic judgement should be
| banned, if they can't be blackmail-proofed. The social utility
| of these markets as info aggregators is marginal at best, and
| it is dwarfed by the harm of threats to reporters.
|
| It is in Polymarket's court to figure out how to resolve this
| amicably. Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side
| of the market to the Israeli police. If your KYC has neglected
| to gather that info, then freeze all money on that side of the
| market until each bettor has identified themselves. Or some
| other means of fixing it, I don't know. Figure it out.
|
| If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's
| time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on
| Americans using VPNs. And if it comes down to it, I'm pretty
| sure that Shayne spends most of his time in the US, and we have
| extradition with Israel.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Polymarkets should be banned altogether or as highly regulated as
| casinos.
| asdff wrote:
| Wait until you find out the most profitable casinos are on
| reservation land not subject to state gaming regulation.
| Polymarket might consider a similar play.
| Daves wrote:
| A reminder that Donald Trump Jr is an advisor to both Kalshi and
| Polymarket (with his firm also investing in Polymarket).
|
| Gambling (yes, this is gambling yet not subject to its industry
| regulations) is a public health crisis and the US government is
| too corrupt and intentionally ossified to react.
| masklinn wrote:
| > the US government is too corrupt and intentionally ossified
| to react
|
| The trump administration is not too ossified to react, it's in
| full support of. It dropped two investigations into polymarket
| mid-2025, and polymarket is crypto-adjacent, a field which the
| trump family takes full advantage of.
| Eufrat wrote:
| I mean, all of these behaviors:
|
| - Blatant insider trading
|
| - Angry people who were invested in an outcome
|
| These are just a few of the reasons why such prediction markets
| were not permitted in the first place. It's just incredibly toxic
| and creates vicious externalities. There is no way that it is
| healthy if you allow people to put gobs of money on any outcome
| because it just incentivizes toxic behavior in an endless
| positive feedback loop.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| Polymarket heads think they're so smart as they simultaneously
| reveal a total lack of awareness about feedback loops.
| kqr wrote:
| Many of the comments in this discussion remind me of that
| Rothchild analysis in the second half of the 1800s when France
| had problems with a revolution.
|
| > A friend asked Baron Rothschild what he was doing in response
| to Paris Commune:
|
| > "Why," replied the famous banker musingly, "French government
| bonds are selling at sixty-five. I bought five millions
| yesterday."
|
| > "What!" exclaimed the friend. "Bought bonds? Why, France is
| without a government, and the sewers of Paris are running red
| with blood!"
|
| > "Yes, it is deplorable," remarked the baron, "but if the sewers
| of Paris were not running red with blood, I could not buy bonds
| at this price. France will survive this terrible calamity, as she
| survived the Revolution, and the seven coalitions against her of
| all the powers of Europe. Her credit will again be the highest of
| any nation, and her bonds will sell again above par."
|
| People who oppose gambling tend to see this as a foreign
| capitalist selfishly making money off of the dire situation of
| the French people. People who do not oppose gambling see it as
| financial support of the French in their times of trouble when
| others have abandoned them.
| bhickey wrote:
| This has nothing to do with opposing gambling. It has
| everything to do with, say, opposing gamblers poisoning horses
| to win bets.
| cbluth wrote:
| You applied the razor very well here.
|
| There will always be a market.
| arduanika wrote:
| Surely you can see the difference between dealing in a
| legitimate asset like a government bond, which requires a
| market of buyers and sellers, versus this new extraneous layer
| of prediction contracts, where the only defensible economic
| purpose is some weak information signal.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Gambling is degenerate and inclined to cause crime and criminal
| behavior. Ban this shit already, decriminalization of gambling is
| a failed experiment.
| elicash wrote:
| Here's what a spokesperson for Polymarket said:
|
| "Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at
| Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior
| violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or
| anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of
| independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter
| their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the
| markets themselves."
|
| https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/polymarket-bett...
|
| (I'd prefer if it said they were evaluating whether to limit the
| types of bets accepted to make the possibility of harassing
| journalists less likely.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _whether to limit the types of bets accepted_
|
| Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats
| concentrating around certain bet genres?
| elicash wrote:
| Yes in sports. NCAA is trying to specifically get _player
| prop bets_ banned in part because they are more likely not
| just to be corrupt, but also they specifically mention player
| safety.
|
| https://www.ncaa.org/news/2026/1/15/media-center-ncaa-
| urges-...
|
| I linked this elsewhere, but I found Nate Silver's take
| interesting here. He specifically takes on the problem of
| player prop bets and says they produce abusive behavior
| toward players.
|
| https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-
| explai...
|
| I think it's reasonable _to research_ if there 's some
| equivalent to player prop bets in other contexts, like
| anything that might hinge on what a reporter writes. There's
| the safety angle and there's also just the "more likely to be
| corrupted" angle. Like I said in my original comment, I'd
| just like them to evaluate this.
| mayneack wrote:
| "this violates our TOS" is a classic Accountability Sink.
| "Polymarket has a rule against harassment, so we obviously did
| all we could!"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
| Thoreandan wrote:
| This reminds me of the 9/11-era
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market
|
| ...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators
| condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".
| ryoshu wrote:
| I have a theory that prediction markets will becomes hyperstition
| engines. This is a rather... violent example.
| aussiegreenie wrote:
| Australians gamble more than anyone on Earth but the idea that
| people "invest" huge money, whether or not missiles explode in a
| country at war is crazy.
|
| It was said Australians would bet on two flies climbing up a
| wall. But this is madness.
| kkfx wrote:
| That's the limit of smart-contracts: they can't know the real
| world, so they depend on "Oracles"/external sources who can be
| corrupted or coerced, and so even if the foundation is guaranteed
| in the code, what the code uses as a reference is not...
| coppsilgold wrote:
| At the time of the threats the odds were likely very skewed, as
| in over 99% to one side.
|
| For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems
| like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to
| manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of
| success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the
| expected value[1] may be high.
|
| Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they
| are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game:
| Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80%
| chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually
| 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but
| their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if
| it continues to rise they may even buy the other position.
| Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard,
| having insider information will greatly help here - it need not
| even pertain to the event itself, just something that will
| improve your model.
|
| [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value>
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > Most people on Polymarket are gamblers
|
| Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Some people are insiders though.
| November_Echo wrote:
| I think they mean "most people are gamblers _who_ have no
| idea what they're doing"
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-16 23:00 UTC)