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 upon 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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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…
> 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.
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
> 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.
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?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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?
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> (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?
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.
> 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!
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
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."
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" ("מוחמד ג'רגון") 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..
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I think in most of those cases it would be the threat of violence from (A) somewhat predictable entities and (B) they would be somewhat curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.
This is so much worse since:
1. Any number of arbitrary bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have anticipated.
2. The violence can simultaneously come from multiple sides simultaneously! After all, one way to ensure an article isn't revised... is to put the journalist out of commission. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your friends.
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?"
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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?
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).
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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 ;-)
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.com/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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 .
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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. :-(
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."
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.)
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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".
Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too.
He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level.
Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show.
We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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_.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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?
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 upon 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.
> Adam Smith's libertine
What on earth does this even mean?!
We could gamble on when Polymarket's operators die.
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?
[delayed]
This comment is art
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!
> libertine
I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.
> … libertine …
Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.
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"
>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.
> 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...
You are describing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
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.
> 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.
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.
Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or payout?
A lot of people habitually make bets out of addiction without thinking carefully about the expected payoff.
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…
> 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.
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
Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the outcome of an event?
Here's one:
https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/coinbase-ceos-bizarre-final...
> 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.
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?
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'.
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
many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw something at X basketball game" and then someone kept doing it, etc
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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?
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.
In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in Israel.
>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.
And when the people sending the messages turn out to be in a different country?
Then work with local law enforcement.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
WhatsApp would be more direct, but if they're uncooperative then knowing who is betting might provide some clues.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?
why do all NBA players seem so tall?
A sane system doesn't "throw" human beings in jail for flippant and arbitrary reasons. Sociopaths exploit this, to be sure.
The reasons are neither flippant or arbitrary.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
> If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches
Where’s this, now?
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.”
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?
> 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.
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.
yea just throw the CEO of microsoft in jail too because illegal transactions are set via Xbox live.
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.
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.
He is breaking the law, and was under DOJ investigation for it until he bribed the president's son to call them off.
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.
Trivial to make a polymarket account without KYC
And what is the relevance to the death threats mentioned in the article?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>(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.
> late-stage internet capitalism
This isn't a thing.
Capitalism is just capitalism.
Pretty sure every single economist would disagree with you
Happen to have any links?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The current financial system, which is integral to the current form of capitalism, only existed since 2008.
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.
What seems silly about it? Labour is certainly more efficient but the principles and the outcomes remain largely the same.
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.
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.
>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.
"Meaningful consequences" in this case means "throwing a CEO in jail until they de-anonymize their platform," which sounds ripe for abuse to me.
In this specific case, perhaps. In most it means "throwing a CEO in prison or fining them extensively for crimes they have committed".
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).
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.
> (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?
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.
Especially since a lot of the quotes in the article sound like Google-translated Hebrew.
Honestly this behavior is pretty representative of the place, in my experience.
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
Thanks. I’m not trained as a lawyer so sometimes make these types of mistakes. I’m happy to learn.
> 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!
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.
It’s probably an open and shut case regarding being illegal but prosecution could be hard. How are you going to find the person?
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
I don't like that the internet can be used to harm you without any recourse.
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.
>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.
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.
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..
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.
Polymarket doesn't operate in the US.
https://docs.polymarket.com/api-reference/geoblock
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...
As I understand it they operate as two separate entities -- polymarket US and polymarket INTL.
There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.
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.
Perhaps because he is a journalist whose job is to report reality, not avoid threats?
Until they start trying the carrot instead of the stick. Then it becomes a bidding war to determine the "reality"
Always is. 'Reality' is a subjective accounting.
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
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" ("מוחמד ג'רגון") 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...
There's no conspiracy, free press does not exist inside the State of Israel.
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...
Both researchers in that paper are Israeli residents. Do you have an independent report that corroborates their findings?
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..
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.
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...
(as reported by Quincy Institute, a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank)
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.
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
Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the invasion
(Ad-hominem is not a counter-example btw)
Nothing about GP's comment is ad-hominem; it's neutral, factual context. Unless you dispute the factual claims?
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.
> 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.
And ISW is tied to Victoria Nuland.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely correct.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ukraine-war-isw/
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.
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.
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...
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.
If you can keep the public misinformed for long enough, you can gradually sell off your position instead of losing the whole bet.
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.
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.
Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I think in most of those cases it would be the threat of violence from (A) somewhat predictable entities and (B) they would be somewhat curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.
This is so much worse since:
1. Any number of arbitrary bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have anticipated.
2. The violence can simultaneously come from multiple sides simultaneously! After all, one way to ensure an article isn't revised... is to put the journalist out of commission. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your friends.
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?"
I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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..
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.
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.
Man, something like this is going to be a plot point in a movie/tv series soon.
Could work in some crime procedural.
This is an old plot, done already in dozens of different variations.
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.
Bond's Casino Royal had a stock short sell bet with a planned attack.
Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.
Polymarkets should be banned altogether or as highly regulated as casinos.
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.
Same thing has been happening with sports bets for years, this particular point (threats) isn't unique to political betting.
Good news, Polymarket also does sports betting, but since it's a "prediction market", it's not covered by gambling laws.
Yep, far worse than cryptocurrency
At least cryptocurrencies had some nice ideas behind them. Just sad they almost immediately got co-opted by swindlers and criminals.
Prediction markets also have very interesting ideas.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...
The source is a company that works with Polymarket and sells Polymarket data (as well as Kalshi and other gambling platforms).
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.
The findings are consistent with academic research that these markets are well calibrated.
Could be, you should reference the academic research then.
> 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.
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.
Wait until they ban prediction markets, then they will re-appear, and you will have to use cryptocurrency :)
Polymarket already only accepts cryptocurrencies. :)
Kalshi is worse in a sense that it also accepts fiat payments.
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.
not easy because you d need a trusted central to settle the outcomes. So far, crypto has only solved the betting part
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?
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.
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.
> a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free
E.g. a Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks?
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?
> 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.
Not paying taxes and not declaring your assets is always bad, yes.
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.
> 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" ?
> 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.
Dude, stop.
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...
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.
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?
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 ;-)
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...
The gamblers would have had a much easier time convincing a journalism LLMs that their article was "a lie".
Sooner or later a college athlete is gonna get killed for missing a shot.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
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.
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.
The same thing already happens with the stock market.
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.
> 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.
I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).
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.
It's gambling which has been a bane forever. It poisoned the NBA even before the internet.
People are getting death threats for writing news articles as part of their job. How is this comparable?
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...
It's far worse than regular gambling
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.
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
“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?
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
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.
Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia!!!
Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate a poly market bet by 2040.
Already happened.
Source?
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.
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.
A million dollars is high stakes, but not extremely high. We’ve seen much much higher wagers.
Iran could fund their war by manipulating these markets.
Does the "Continue without disabling" button on the adblock popup just not do anything for anyone else?
The site is completely unusable. Even with reader mode it somehow aggressively refreshed. Gave up in disgust.
The gambling market is really bringing out the worst of us.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
Getting death threats from aggrieved gamblers, MLB players starting to fear for their safety
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nigh...
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...
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.
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.
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
B-b-but futarchy and unbiased decisionmaking means well-calibrated markets could be a net good for society!! /hj
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.
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.
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.
Ugh, the sophistry (or at least self-deceiving arguments) people throw around to defend these markets makes my stomach churn.
"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
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.
Reply of the year. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.
The question isn't whether futarchy isn't perfect, it's whether its better than our existing democracy.
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.
Replace gamblers with futures market and I agree.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.com/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.
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.
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.
Quoting vs providing screenshots makes exactly 0 difference regarding level of proof. Faking an email or WhatsApp message is about 2 minutes of work.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>"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?
> the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?
…which they already did before this market was made mainstream.
Why is everything you like protected from being banned?
This is an argument against all laws, which probably deserves more than a couple sentences.
Why do you apparently like a system that lets people bet on atrocities and then take steps to make said atrocities more likely?
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?
And you think banning it would 100% work?
and where did I say I liked it?
I'm not responding to your gish gallop BS.
Why do you (obviously) think betting markets are good?
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...
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?
> 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.
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?
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).."
I wouldn't be able to say this with a straight face after reading this article.
Why? We have years of experimental evidence that these prediction markets are well calibrated (ie accurate).
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.
isn't this basically the crypto oracle problem?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Same way anyone working at a traditional casino does, I'd imagine.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
3) If I won't do it, someone even worse will.
Psychopaths don't care about ethics, much less if money is involved. At best they feel indifference, at worst enjoyment.
If there’s something that screams late-stage capitalism any louder, I don’t want it…
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.
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.
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.
They WANT to think in absolutes which is a red flag in a person.
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?
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.
Rationalists were right about everything that mattered: crypto, AI, COVID... HN commentators, by contrast, were wrong about everything that mattered.
I lost most of my respect for g...n when i noticed he he was one of those IQ guys
What does that mean? People who believe in IQ?
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.
It does mean you probably shouldn't listen to them, because the expected value of listening to them is negative.
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™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.
> most of them are eugenicists.
[citation needed]
Covered in detail here: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biod...
>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.
The failure of the rationalist community is they mistook rationalization for rationality.
I may use different definitions than you, but I put it as "they conflate rationality and reason".
Why make better predictions, when you can make better excuses, and be wrong in much more sophisticated ways?
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.
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.
Christie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would even look on something like this.
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)
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.
> 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.
But you have to go to Nevada for that.
You don't have Nevada 24/7 in your pocket. Or you shouldn't.
> 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.
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.
50% chance of winning, but there is a rake from the site.
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.
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
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.
In my heart of hearts, all gambling is equally degenerate: from stock markets to assasination markets.
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.
Reminds me of the cheap bets casino from National Lampoons Vegas Vacation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byfewcZsug4
How is that different from roulette?
The regulation behind who can operate such establishments legally and who can participate, etc.?
Roulette uses a physical process and is not compromised.
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.
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.
But if that physical process were somehow complicated, why, you could break the bank at Monte Carlo!
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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 .
Unless you do insider trading, which can be pretty easy on prediction markets depending on your job...
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.
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.
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.
Some fraction of people that start out that way end up addicted and spending way more money on gambling then they should.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How would you define degenerate?
> At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).
Only fair until the manufacturer of said lootboxes gets in on the action. This is why gambling is so highly regulated in all jurisdictions.
> 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.
slot machines are truly random. the rigging is in the pay table.
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).
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. :-(
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."
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.)
The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
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.
> 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.
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.
Will it pay out if it is shut down though?
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)
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
For me that feels like the difference between insider trading and market manipulation.
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.
This notion that price discovery is only possible with insider trading is demonstrably false yet somehow surprisingly pervasive.
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.
> insider trading is the point
Says who?
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.)
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.
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).
> 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...
Companies can issue new shares to take advantage of positive public sentiment.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
Even in stock trading you can get away with it for a long time. See Epstein.
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)
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.
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".
Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too.
https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey
He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level.
Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show.
We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
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?
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."
You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.
It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.
>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.
Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
Conan hosted the Oscars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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...
Already banned in several European countries, mostly because of the betting on political events.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>There is a whole class of urban legends like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_by_catastrophe
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".
Sounds like a urban legend.
>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior
Why "can look", "but", "just"?
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.
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.
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.
So, because it's a human behavior, that means it's okay that there's a huge company out there amplifying that behavior and profiting off it?
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).
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.
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.
That’s not an explanation or an excuse at all.
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?
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...
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
By far?!
There's a very long list.
I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos
But wait, there is more: Assassination market
bet that someone will die by certain date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sports betting seems worse? Easily lumped in to the same category, though.
Prediction Markets is such an invented phrase.
Its a sports book.
A sports book of alternatives.
It's absolutely bonkers but hey, the grifters need a new costume, the crypto one is practically strings at this point
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.
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”.
Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure
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.
> 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).
Referenced here: https://risk-engineering.org/concept/history-of-insurance
I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.
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.
One has nothing to do with the other and it's a poor argument to defend prediciton markets.
The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.
That existed before the internet.
> moral degradation is off the charts
Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.
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.
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.
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.
Or from the death of family and friends.
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.
We need to stop with the "prediction markets" bs naming. They're gambling websites with a larger variety of things you can gamble on.
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"
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.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/546/187/fb1...
Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days
Easily the worst thing and it’s not even close? Really?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
This argument is sophistry, the nature of gambling is that gamblers over-leverage themselves compulsively.
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.
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).
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?
> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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)
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
There is a clip embedded within the article that corroborates what the journalist 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.
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
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.
> 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:
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.even better headline golf!
I’d suggest that you brush up on HN character limits before playing hall monitor.
How'd you get to here and miss all of the discussion?
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?
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!
I think you need a break from the internet.
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.
Literal yawn
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
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
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?
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.
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.
Because it's in the Israeli government's interest to make the threat from Iran look bigger, rather than smaller?
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.
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.
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.