As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.
My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
At least with sports betting it's limited in scope. Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or players are altering their play to make or break bets but ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited. And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly impossible to enforce.
Was I a sucker for believing that Kalshi was going to [e.g.] help farmers hedge against drought years or is the problem just morally bankrupt selection of events?
If they said that and you believed it kinda. There are already markets and insurance schemes to allow farmers to do that though through crop insurance, it's a very old and even government subsidized to keep the prices down in many countries. Farmers in need of that can already insure their crops to make $XXX amount of money to make sure they break even on the crop for the year for example there's no real need to bet on the amount of rain to reach that same goal.
We already have an extremely complicated system of farm insurance and commodity futures for that.
Yep Kalshi is at best only shrinking the scale of things a farmer could bet on instead of getting proper old style crop insurance (either yield or revenue). It's just cloaking a weather slot machine in "we're helping farmers" language. Agri-washing their betting market if you will.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this.
There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].
Yeah, regulations are only as strong as the consequences given those who break them.
If people can threaten journalists for money and get away with it, they will. If people who threaten journalists over money are sent to prison, then after a brief transition period it will mostly stop.
It's braindead easy to anonymously threaten people on the internet. It's getting easier to steal identities or create new ones out of whole cloth and cypto wallets means you can't functionally know where the money comes from. I'm not sure attempting to punish people you can't realistically identify can be considered an effective strategy.
Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
> Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
We don't seem to have much luck getting it to happen. The larger the corporate entity the more unlikely they'll see any meaningful punishment.
Seems like bets on missile strikes would violate that...
This is the sanest reply on the thread.
During WW2 when Britain captured all incoming german spies and ran a fake german spy network, they could redirect the german V1 or V2 bombs, by misreporting what they did or didn't hit.
Allowing bets on acts of violence allows the perpetrators to assess their success rate...
They do. It's moot, though, because Polymarket isn't subject to US law.
There has been an ongoing controversy over the fact that Kalshi (which is subject to US law) chose to comply with the law over the market on Khomeini "leaving office", when the bettors assumed that it wouldn't.
What happens if someone bets on a terrorist attack in an unlikely place and then puts the bomb himself? This can turn ugly very easily.
Well that is a high enough level even the bet would probably be enforced. But the point is valid, this is a slippery slope and there's a reason these bets are illegal.
> As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.
In a nutshell, these platforms operate by classifying their bets as 'futures contracts' with 'meaningful real world economic consequences' rather than traditional gambling, allowing them to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than stricter state gambling laws.
It's going to take strong push from lawmakers to close the loophole, and even stronger push from the platforms to stop anything meaningful being done.
> there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating each others' humanity.
I honestly don't know what your point is. The best I can come up with is:
"The whole point of sports (in my opinion) is X good thing therefore betting on sports is more acceptable"
Making bets on good things doesn't make the betting better. Just because Polymarket would allow you to bet money that the infant homicide rate goes down next year, doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow betting on.
His point is pretty simple. Sports don't inherently involve life or death, the whole point is that it's a competition that "respects each other's humanity", eg not a competition to the death.
The same can't be said for war (bombings), which Polymarket allows betting on.
Seems like a fundamental difference to me.
[deleted]
Sports just delay the death or move it to injury instead, and people bet on the injuries just the same.
> Seems like a fundamental difference to me.
one is more culturally taboo than the other, but they are fundamentally the same activity
... if I post a multi-paragraph long reply on the incentives created by betting on less infant homicide, am I going to find out that you understand perfectly well what the incentives are, and that was the entire point of your comment?
The actions people have taken in accordance with sports betting incentives is everything up to and including murder. The moral ideal the parent commenter associates with sports doesn't make that okay.
If you have a point to make about how the age of the person being murdered means it's a categorical difference rather than a difference of degree I'll read it.
Just checking that you knew betting on good outcomes was how you incentivized bad ones.
Eg, to be rid of a turbulent priest, you'd place a bet that Thomas Becket will live to see the year 1171, which is a "good" outcome to bet on happening.
Glad we're both clear on which one of us missed the other's point...
[dead]
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
I wouldn't say one in the last decade is "tons of people"
> I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences...
Functionally, you are correct.
But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.
Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.
It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.
Which is of course a blatant abuse of our legal system, since they are doing nothing different than a casino's roulette or blackjack tables.
"Red futures pay out at 2:1!"
"Get your future here on whether the dealer's cards are higher than your own!"
Well the real insight here is that most "investing" is gambling.
[deleted]
Yeah, but unfortunately its probably going to keep going until people actually die before they will be stopped.
Banning it sends it underground into the hands of organised crime, which will still have access to modern technology.
There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.
As someone who at first embraced the idea of prediction markets and is now ambivalent, sending them underground vastly reduces their harm. First, because discoverability is an issue. Second, there will be much less liquidity. Third, any gains will have to be laundered or hidden, making it even more difficult.
Maybe prediction markets are net positives, or maybe regulating them will make them so, but banning them does resolve most of their negative effects.
> First, because discoverability is an issue.
I can't believe how many betting ads I see or hear every time I consume US media. It's worse then all the ads about drugs they want you to request from your doctor.
Underground is where it belongs. The less visible it is to the general public, the fewer people will be drawn into it. And it being taken over by organized crime is just another way of saying that law enforcement will be able to make arrests and throw them in prison, which they can't effectively do if it's being run legally.
This is only true if people's want for it exceeds their want to not break the law.
For illegal drugs, people who want them want them a lot, so them being illegal isn't a strong deterrent; although, legalization has still absolutely increased the number of users (i.e. legality was acting as an effective deterrent for some.)
For illegal gambling, sure _some_ people won't be deterred by legality, but most people aren't hardcore gambling addicts; they're just engaging as a form of "harmless fun." They're not looking to go to jail to toss $20 on a sports game.
It was only a few years ago that sports betting was significantly more heavily regulated and limited, and stuff like Polymarket didn't exist (just non-monetary forecasting sites like Metaculus.) Even if there was more demand for "underground gambling" before these changes, the net negative to society was still significantly less.
There were other prediction markets like Intrade which was founded in 1999. I had coworkers who made a significant amount of money doing prediction market arbitrage for the 2012 election.
Intrade confuses me. It was illegal to use Intrade as a US citizen; in fact, some people I personally know who were into that scene had to maintain foreign bank accounts.
What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
> What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.
Giving it to you straight: GOP SCOTUS court packing via denying Obama’s nomination led to 6-3 supermajority, and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue. Sports gambling startups ate sports right up, then, innovators like YC funded companies that said “that, but for everything” and collided with a shameless pay-to-play administration, not the general “politicians take donations from companies” kind, the “name don jr as your strategic advisor” kind. (Kalshi) Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this) is de facto law of the land.
> and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue.
What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.
(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)
> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.
You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?
Fair point that PASPA was the exception, not the rule, and that the anti-commandeering / "states rights" argument isn't some novel theory. It does happen to be deployed often in cases where businesses don't want to be regulated. (and, the elephant in the room, more famously....never mind, let's not go there)
I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.
But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.
We can ban online betting and betting advertising though. If you want to bet on ponies go to a racetrack. No apps, no phones.
Not sure about other countries but in Australia at least, betting was only allowed at race courses on race days. That has obviously changed though.
This was the case in Italy too until a few decades ago, except for some specific locations with a casino license, and a national kind of sport lottery.
Since sport betting became legal the issues with gambling addiction have skyrocketed but the state is addicted to the trickle of provents from it and can't cut it back.
There was an attempt to limit sport bets advertising, and that was widely sidestepped (you advertise for bet.news instead of bet.com, with the former linking to the latter)
Maybe we dedicate specific buildings to gambling, so it's legal, regulated, and localized. Call it a "casino".
We should definitely ban advertising it.
Yeah, sports betting is also bad. I guess polymarket casts a wider net, and the fact that everything is fair game means you cannot avoid hearing about it
Ban it on which grounds?
I have never in my life placed a sport bet, nor a polymarket bet. It strikes me as one of the dumbest things to do with your money and time.
But a lot of people seem to genuinely enjoy it. Gambling is part of human heritage. Regulate? Sure! Ban? I don't understand why
> Ban? I don't understand why
Many things that people enjoy are banned because it causes harm to other individuals or to society as a whole.
Not a difficult concept to understand.
That's why I was asking for a rationale. The devil is in the details. Otherwise motorcycling will be next, alcohol, excessive gaming, etc. etc.
Motorcycling does not cause immediate harm to society or to the individual, and is a regulated activity anyway.
Alcohol and tobacco are regulated too. Perhaps less than it should, in no small part for cultural reasons. I say this as someone that enjoys the occasional whiskey and smoking a pipe.
I am unaware of evidence of gaming causing harm to society. Maybe it exists. I can't comment on it.
I generally share the same perspective but the article provides a good rationale for doing otherwise.
I do not think so. We can hold these people accountable otherwise, there are laws for that already.
I think there is a fundamental difference between betting on a sports event and on a war.
What would that difference be?
Well, one involves two teams of consenting players involved in a game.
The other involves the brutal deaths and suffering of exponentially more innocent people than those who want to be involved.
No, that's the fundamental difference between a sports event and a war. Which is obvious and not what was asked.
The question was, what if any is the fundamental difference between betting on a sports event vs a war?
Add “profiting from and encouraging the exacerbation of” to the start of my explanations.
Then your attempted explanation is wrong.
Plenty of people have been murdered over sports betting. It's more than your reductive "oh it's just consenting players".
[dead]
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
The existence of something in no way encourages someone to commit a crime. That is victim blaming (if the concept of 'sport' can be a victim in this case). Sport and people who enjoy sport and people who enjoy gambling on sport don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to materially gain from it. If you banned sports those people would just move on to some other criminal enterprise to get rich with minimal effort.
In what's happening in the story the fact that people are gambling on a war is certainly quite grim, but it's not really a problem. People do distasteful things all the time. The problem is that they're issuing death threats to someone. That's not really anything to do with gambling.
The existence of incentives can encourage crime. Why would anyone throw a game if there wasn't an upside? Nobody does anything for "free", and by creating a market you are providing liquidity leading to more "labor". A market for whether or not someone will die within x date sets up a financial incentive to kill that person. That is encouragement.
Saying that people who enjoy sport/ gambling "don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to gain materially from it" is a false dichotomy. It's nature. Ask yourself, would you throw a game in your sport of choice in a hobby league for 100 million dollars or whatever? Why not, no one gets harmed, it is a lot of money, it's not even a proper league. This applies to all levels of real world consequences, some people have a larger apetite for risk.
Ah, the old "let's not have gun control, criminals can always find a gun" again. Except that when there are fewer guns around it is manifestly harder for more criminals to find.
In a very strict sense, you are right. But people influence other people, and people who wouldn't act this aggressively otherwise find themselves inspired to after taking a bet.
Ah, the old "let's not have gun control, criminals can always find a gun" again. Except that when there are fewer guns around it is manifestly harder for more criminals to find.
That's not my argument though. Gambling is not the equivalent of a gun in this situation. Gambling is the catalyst, sure, but the crime is making death threats. Removing all the reasons why people might make death threats in order to stop the death threats is going to be tricky.
If you want an analogy it's like the argument is 'Let's not have banks because they only encourage bank robbers!', and I'm here arguing that really we just need to make bank robbery a crime.
But the argument for not having cash so that it does not encourage robberies is a real argument and it does indeed work.
ATMs have long had devices that stain cash if you try to steal from them. Bank cashiers used to have "we don't have the keys to the vault" signs. Vaults that open at fixed times beyond the control of the cashiers are a thing.
Regulation and enforcement are important but removing opportunity and motive are also important.
Things are not black and white, clear cut, absolutes.
The problem can indeed be "the asshat contingent", but at the same time, it's not blaming the victim to say that certain situations open up opportunities.
A lot of our laws are in place to prevent people from taking advantage of such opportunities. That's why some laws seem bizarrely harsh, where you can earn more jail time than physically assaulting someone, for a financial crime. Or computer hacking.
The logic is "this is an easy way to break the law", and "we'll have to make the penalty worse to compensate". That's not blaming the victim. In fact, it's an attempt to protect the victim.
This sensible approach is akin to what you'd do if you entered certain 'sketchy' sections of many cities, at 2am. You certainly wouldn't walk around carrying a big box of 100 iphones, and people would say you were nuts to go into that area at 2am and do so.
Yes, the asshats who assaulted you, beat you unconscious, and stole your $100k worth of iphones were wrong. But, you'd certainly be considered a little dim for doing so I'd think. Why?
Because you're ignoring reality for a catch phrase.
Reality is just that.
[deleted]
If it becomes commonplace for existing prediction markets to get undermined by this kind of manipulation, won't that just be an opportunity for people to create better prediction markets that are less vulnerable to manipulation?
And doesn't that just mean more resources and energy is going into solving the problem of determining the truth of past events (and, as a result given that these are prediction markets, the likelihood of future ones?)
And isn't that a good thing?
If those prediction markets are patronised by people who want to manipulate it, what drives customers to the new ones?
Making it less vulnerable to manipulation would entail exposing less information too. You probably wouldn't be allowed to know the current odds, which makes gambling the same as reading tea leaves.
Both sports betting and prediction markets are effectively the same as reading tea leaves anyway. You can determine the real odds in roulette or blackjack because those are closed games that have simple probabilities, but any odds given in sports betting or prediction markets are just fancy guesses
The odds in betting are the payout ratio. To hinder manipulation, the payout ratio would have to be hidden and then the platform can just always say you won less money than you did.
Perhaps, we overestimate the capabilities of capital markets
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.
We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction. We're talking about gambling as big players paying participants to throw fights, paying referees to call shots, and the players are the real world and the referees are journalists.
> We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction.
What makes you think this is not "gambling-as-addiction"?
It seems to me that these players, big or small, either have too much skin in the game or are compulsive gambling. To me the threats only make sense in that context.
I agree.
Just checking :) Didn't want to confuse two totally different equally compelling reasons to ban prediction markets
I used to be pro-betting legalization and now I see the light. It is a corrosive influence On everything it touches. I hope there's another opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle.
I feel like we need a new word for this because it is far worse than gambling when you can effectively put a hit on someone.
That's fundamentally wrong
>That's fundamentally wrong
If you have an argument, please share it. If you don't, please don't waste everyone's time.
if you can't tell the difference between a game of pure chance and predicting real world events then there is simply nothing to say
Predicting real events is significantly random which makes it like gambling, but the ability to influence events makes it unlike gambling.
Just calling it gambling emphasizes the former problem while dismissing the latter problem.
any game with a positive expected value is also not gambling, it's mining
Any system that is a zero-sum game with an effectively uncertain outcome is effectively gambling.
Investing at least positive sum in theory. Prediction markets are not.
I can tell the difference (at least I think) but I have no idea what your point is.
prediction markets are not pure gambling just as investing in stocks is not gambling.
I don't follow. What's the definition of "pure" gambling here? Do you consider for example poker to be pure? Sports betting?
Personally I consider any monetary wager where the individual isn't personally invested in corresponding productive events to constitute gambling. By that logic poker, horse races, prediction markets, futures, and even the vast majority of day trading all constitute forms of gambling.
Lotteries are pure gambling because you can't influence things, I guess that is what he meant. The examples you mentioned are then "impure gambling" since its inherently possible to influence the outcome without breaking the rules. It isn't illegal to bet on a hose that you gave extra good shoes and so on.
Betting on which card will be on top of a freshly shuffled deck is pure gambling. It is a game of pure chance.
Betting on sports is not pure chance. If I play a game of tennis against roger federer, I am sure to lose. I can predict this event with 100% certainty.
Bitcoin up or down is another non-chance event. I can easily sway the price of bitcoin by just buying some.
Recently there was a market to predict how long the US government shutdown would last. This is not gambling--you can look at historical data of shutdown durations and form a prediction based on researching each politician's views.
Sure, an idiot might gamble by just picking an option at random, but the game itself isn't gambling because it's not a game of pure chance.
Okay. So by that logic poker is gambling but not "pure" gambling. Fair enough.
So as previously stated I can tell the difference but still have no idea what point you were originally trying to make. Prediction markets are still a form of gambling however impure, no? Just as betting on a horse race is.
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."
As I understand it they operate as two separate entities -- polymarket US and polymarket INTL.
Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are morally corrupt and we having given them too much space in our society already.
That particular part isn't lawyer bullshit. They're beta testing a completely separate system that runs under US regulations. It looks like it'll be legal in a non-bullshit way.
Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.
[dead]
There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.
Then this person better bet their entire life savings on them dying, since it would reduce incentive (profit). Crazy thought experiment, gave me lots to think about
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.
Defer to an actual authority. Where is the official report on whether or not it was an interception? Even with a large explosion the fact that it landed in a wooded area implies it was intercepted. Those are targeted missiles, an acceptable result of an interception is to bring it down in an undeveloped area.
So I would think there should be some sort of authority with official capacity to state what happened, not just a random journalist that doesn't give concrete sources.
> No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
That is why modern reportings best practice is to always support both sides. /s
[dead]
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"
They can also just do that bidding war in the resolution contract
Always is. 'Reality' is a subjective accounting.
Avoiding threats is non-optional for most Israeli journalists:
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..
Then say civilians. Don't claim what you can't provide. And DO provide context (like, was it still while the massacre was ongoing [1]). But all I can do is to suggest.
> Good job cherry-picking
Me cherry-picking: Taking the literally first entries, Array[0] and Array[1].
Also, you can't claim cherry-picking as invalid against gish-gallop. Since you can't enjoy the size argument only to retract items on the list after the smallest pushback.
Otherwise I can prove God. How? Every sentence in the Bible... Oh, you found some that are wrong? "Good job cherry-picking"!
And not to mention dozens of more problems with the list (no mentioning any IDF comments, no source for titles, etc.). This is just a bad list. Simple as.
> ICC is clearly investigating
Investigating != Judgment. But good, send them more. But please send them a list starting with items that might hold the smallest of scrutinies. And don't prove it by hinting at conspiracies just because Israel has a security censor. But all I can do is to suggest.
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..
The link corroborates my claim; the State of Israel does not protect press freedom.
I am asking you to cite a better counterarguement, if you want to disprove it. Or concede that Israeli journalists are regularly threatened by their government.
I feel like being a journalist in a warzone is already exposure to a sufficient number of threats for the benefit of human society that we shouldn't simply accept them being exposed to any entirely different set of completely unnecessary threats from a pile of sociopaths running their own sick gambling dead pools.
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...
> and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran
Oh, trump made some money?
nit: The article you linked says half a billion, not a billion.
Death markets are banned in the US. Personally, I tend to think of this as a crypto problem, not a prediction market problem.
It's also fundamentally something you can't really do properly in crypto. You need a central authority to decide if "thing has happened". There's no way to properly incentivize accuracy in cases where the majority of stake benefits from an inaccuracy.
Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away. Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that increases the amount of money behind assassinations.
Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and death, but seriously, grow up.
[0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount
I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market of validated ideas and could submit a ‘bid’ before a set deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best product.
> But what if you could push?
There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.
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.
Yeah it's about trust and risk.
I'm not sure how to align the incentives on that.
For the consumer the ideal case is that the money is not released from the escrow until their product actually arrives.
But that would be overly restrictive, and limit development to companies with significant funds.
Kickstarter has a balance where, you only pledge money after deciding you trust the company.
I think we could do it so the initial fundraiser is provisional. And then everyone would know that some portion of that would fall through. Over time you would learn what the ratio is. If a million is pledged, maybe you can expect 200k to be committed in the final round.
We could even divide it further. There is some portion of users which are more open-minded and enthusiastic. They might be happy to fund a round of crappy prototypes. So in this way smaller players could gain trust and credibility.
If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?
That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.
The problem in the article is sort of boring, this is nothing new, centralized authorities who run prediction markets have been doing a terrible job at wording the predictions and then people get pissed when those poorly written words are put through a forcing function. Incompetence is boring.
Problem intrinsic to gambling is that people appropriate expected winnings instead of what they really put in, thus making the feeling of loss even greater than what it objectively is.
Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true:
Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems.
or
Case 2. sam0x17 goes through his life wielding a giant hammer called "privacy", which he swings about wildly without ever feeling the need to look very closely at any given nail. In fact, he'll even shout "privacy" in the face of a situation where privacy *is the problem*. Goons are hiding behind privacy to threaten a reporter and his family? Let's give them more privacy, that'll fix it!
HN can be very predictable sometimes, but hey, at least nobody ITT has suggested Rust yet.
You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.
[deleted]
Yes, I read your message.
> At no point do I say the oracle target should be private
Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.
Instead, your original said stuff like:
> they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity
> no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side
> where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation.
In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance:
"The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor."
Did you read... his comment? My comment? TFA?
This doesn't make any sense…
If you want to bet on a binary outcome without knowing how much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes, that's a bookie, not a prediction market.
The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and credible way.
(And that's even before we get to the fact that any kind of betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize outcomes like the death threats reported here.)
You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome
I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad
Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough
> 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 mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.
Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community.
I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there
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.
Their comment proposed something that would "be the answer here".
What does "here" mean? It's logical to expect "here" to refer to a scenario that includes cases like the one in the article. If it's some scenario that excludes cases like the one in the article, then it's not actually relevant to the discussion.
(Tangents are OK. It's just confusing if they're introduced with phrasing that makes them sound like they're not tangents.)
"here" in that comment is not referring to any specific scenario. It is referring to the problem discussed in the sentence immediately following it, that public prediction markets can shape the outcome of the events they are predicting.
>how you extrapolated that
I wasn't extrapolating - it was the literal meaning of the words. The context was that someone commented "shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called outcome-shaping markets" in direct reply to "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over…[the prediction market "Iran strikes Israel on March 10"]. I interpret that as polymarket gamblers outcome-shaped Iran striking Israel. It was at 25% odds when they struck. I don't think the commenter actually meant that literally, which is why I asked them to clarify. I'm just doing my best here.
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?
> 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'.
The decision-makers don't need change their decision whatsoever to corruptly profit from it, though, they can just place bets on the timeframe or outcome of whatever decision they originally intended to make. Why risk operational disruptions and a greater chance of getting caught when you can still profit exorbitantly from insider trading on your knowledge without incurring those unnecessary risks?
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.
Not Polymatket, but there's a humorous case of the Sutton FC goalkeeper eating a pork pie on TV, thus resolving a bet on whether he would do so.
many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw something at X basketball game" and then someone kept doing it, etc
I was confused as well: After further consideration, I realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and credibly reports on those events and their resolution criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg. national militaries.
"Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel’s military correspondent or other credible sources reports that Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money.
In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully, your worst crime is publishing a fictional news article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.
Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks", where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the Internet through another financial instrument.
> you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.
You don't even need the market to actually resolve, as soon as your rumor becomes credible the market pricing will adjust and you can just sell your shares before resolution.
I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business.
"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
That's superb. A very good literature story could be written based on that.
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.
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.
That's how pari mutuel betting works; the odds are set by the bettors betting and unknown until the book closes.
That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.
One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This only works if your intuition is better than the market's current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any particular knowledge.
Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing them don’t know or care about the odds.
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.
Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should exist on websites that are publicly accessible.
If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of the type of people who make death threats to journalists.
At the time of the threats the odds were likely very skewed, as in over 99% to one side.
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.
If a casino sets up a normal roulette wheel but pays out red at 1.5x and black at 2.5x, betting 5% of your bankroll on black over and over is "gambling" but it's not "gambling", if you get what I'm saying.
I think they mean "most people are gamblers _who_ have no idea what they're doing"
Some people are insiders though.
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.
Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.
Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is a great game, I highly recommend it to anyone in this thread.
It opens with a content warning saying that the player will likely become very angry at least once when a baby who you are financially incentivized to watch crash and burn pulls their life together, and that's okay.
I appreciate that they're explicitly covering this psychological phenomenon.
Your link points to a 2012 discussion of "Why an Airline That Travelers Love Is Failing". Not super convincing.
It's a pg comment explaining "middlebrow dismissal."
Why not look at the primary source evidence yourself?
> It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST
> This market will resolve to “Yes” if, according to the ISW map, Russia captures the intersection between Vatutina Vulytsya and Puhachova Vulytsya located in Myrnohrad by November 15, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET.
The intersection station will be considered captured if any part of the intersection is shaded red on the ISW map (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641...) by the resolution date. If the area is not shaded red by November 15, 2025, 11:59 PM ET, the market will resolve to “No”.
Followed by the sentence "A cursory search of our writings and our website shows this to be false."
Would you honestly genuinely describe this as "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"? Dishonesty
It is clear that the opinion it's pro-Russian is widespread enough they need to make advance disclaimers. You wanted "a single example backing up the claim", you got one - from the horse's mouth.
You have again failed to meet the characterization of "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank". If you are unable to find any actual evidence that fits that description then you should just admit as much
I refuse to believe you continue to miss the point explained to you several times. Being intentionally obtuse is not a great look.
All I'm asking for is a single article or published piece that you can characterize as "thoroughly pro-Russia". You routinely fail to provide this
I'm setting the bar really low here
you have angered the russian bots, be careful.
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.
Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the invasion
You're welcome to find a piece of their writing where they unequivocally support Ukraine without ifs, buts, and NATO-didits.
In their own words:
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
Also, having nuance and historical context does not mean they are "pro-Russia". We should be celebrating institutions that challenge propaganda narratives with context not hunting down anyone that doesn't fall in line with a narrative that requires you to believe history started last year
(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.
In their own words
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
Literally in the same piece:
It has been suggested that QI’s approach is insufficiently critical of Russia. A cursory search of our writings and our website shows this to be false.
I wonder why would anyone suggest that, and frequently enough they have to get out of their way to write a disclaimer?
> How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
Mate it's 2026, your gaslighting doesn't work for a few years now.
And ISW is tied to Victoria Nuland.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely correct.
They are being downvoted because Nuland is an utterly insignificant diplomat, but serves well as a dog whistle for people who subscribe to the belief that the Maidan revolution in Ukraine was really some Obama organized coup. This is a story peddled by the Russian government, which of course is where Yanukovych promptly fled after having protestors shot. At the same time Russia was busy staging troops and material for the actual coup they were planning.
Yes, insignificant enough to remark "Yats is our guy" (during an intercepted but confirmed-authentic conversation with another US diplomat that Russia subsequently leaked), only for "Yats" (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) to subsequently become the Ukrainian PM. Coincidence, I'm sure...
[deleted]
Here's what a spokesperson for Polymarket said:
"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."
Looks like a fantastic book at the outset. Thanks for the suggestion.
It's a little light on rigor. There's a lot of "X happened before Y therefore X caused Y" but I think it's a really good articulation of some of the problems it tackles.
> whether to limit the types of bets accepted
Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats concentrating around certain bet genres?
Yes in sports. NCAA is trying to specifically get player prop bets banned in part because they are more likely not just to be corrupt, but also they specifically mention player safety.
I linked this elsewhere, but I found Nate Silver's take interesting here. He specifically takes on the problem of player prop bets and says they produce abusive behavior toward players.
I think it's reasonable to research if there's some equivalent to player prop bets in other contexts, like anything that might hinge on what a reporter writes. There's the safety angle and there's also just the "more likely to be corrupted" angle. Like I said in my original comment, I'd just like them to evaluate this.
Polymarket should do the right thing. Unfortunately that means shut down entirely.
[dead]
Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48 hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent: above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.
Definitely an unpopular opinion: The whole with the internet is anonymity. Keep in mind, I support an anonymous internet, however, political interests, corporate interests, hate groups, etc. are all using it to undermine society.
Example: When Twitter ("X") suddenly started showing the locations of accounts, a lot of folks with MAGA talking points were shown to be anywhere except the U.S. Accounts with millions of followers and tons of influence have never even set foot in the U.S.
Another Example: Polymarket (not the "US" one) is anonymous. Because of this, events like the headline talks about happens. Certain government leaders worldwide could easily be seeding the bets, and playing the market, and you would never know.
Anonymity is nice, however, it is being taken advantage of for power plays. This is why we can't have nice things.
[deleted]
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 this is way worse. Traditionally violence towards journalists comes from (A) predictable entities and (B) they are curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.
In contrast:
1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.
2. The violence can arrive from all sides, simultaneously. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one way to ensure an existing report is not revised is to put the journalist out of commission.
3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, with a new bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"
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.
If you can keep the public misinformed for long enough, you can gradually sell off your position instead of losing the whole bet.
[deleted]
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.
> Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
Ban it where exactly? If you’ve got personal knowledge of where these knuckleheads reside, speak up. It’s entirely possible that it is banned where they are and they just got a VPN and did it anyway.
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.
> If you are from the US and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet of what is American.
"Everyone I disagree with is Not A Real American and should just leave the country. Who's a Real American? Well, someone who agrees with my personal political views, of course."
utterly idiotic worldview
Pursuing personal freedom is highly self-consistent; there is nothing idiotic about it. Those who seek to repress will on the other hand soon find themselves repressed.
It's also hard to have 3 independent outlets report on all the thing.s This seems like a small story that only some people in Polymarket cared about I guess? It's not like 3 different news outlets were calling authorities to confirm what really happened here. It wasn't big enough to deserve more than 1 journalist going to the source and doing all this work.
Israel doesn't have a free press, so it stays largely suppressed. If it did, surely more local news outlets would cover it. Israel strongly censors domestic war news.
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.)
Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider all feel like variations on a theme. If you start with Shockwave and absolutely love it then you are in luck because there's more where that came from. But all of his books are worth reading imho.
> as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic.
Yeah, I should really revisit Future Shock. That book might have been a little ahead of its time.
> Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.
100% agree, and I think it's almost a bigger flaw here. I'm not saying "it gets better in the second season" but I wouldn't be surprised if some people bounce off the future slang.
Interestingly enough, Brunner might be one of the only white authors I've read who describes his characters by skin tone.
Look everyone, this person believes talking Tortoises are real!
In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?
In my experience book stores either have multiple copies or zero copies.
Robertson Davies is another bellwether author I should mention.
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..
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.
For some reason this reminds me of the Byzantine Generals problem. The fact is that unless you were there we don't really know how accurate any of these statements are. The video evidence is fine but I can whip something up in veo3 in 2 minutes. So while it's not a timing issue exactly (the truth might come out eventually), like the og byzantine generals problem, it is one of incentives toward deception. The real goal here isn't the payout, it's visibility into an active war. Polymarket is gambling at it's core, but the information it surfaces is used as justification for massive financial (and military) deals. I suspect this is likely what is happening here. Whereas before you might report on something and perhaps that's it, because news is always unreliable, now you report on something that has a measurable effect on some deal pipeline. Good on you for reporting on this. Difficult problem to solve tbh.
Still no idea how a polymarket is legal with all the insider trading opportunities.
Insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft. If you insider trade on the stock market then, in a crude simplification, you steal profits from the company you have a fiduciary duty to, or some extension of that. It has nothing to do with a level playing ground, every trading company out there is trying to find information others can't and then trade on it.
What? How do you figure that? If I happen to know that my company is about to report very bad quarterly numbers, so I sell all my stock, then it tanks, I’ve just screwed whoever bought the stock, that in the most cases, will be some random people. The company does not benefit or hurt from stock prices unless they are buying back or issuing more stock.
Because that's what the law says? And the company most definitely does benefit and hurt from a fluctuating stock price, it's one of the key drivers behind financing conditions. What you describe is a simpleton view of the financial market.
That’s how the criminal penalties are framed.
I am not surprised that this happened. This is the logical conclusion of betting. Like in Muay Thai competitions, some efficient attacks are underutilized because they give the performer fewer points, which can be bad for the people betting on them. And their funding comes from the betting, so they change the sport to match what the gamblers want.
You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.
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.
To be fair gambling, like criminality, has been illegal. Similar to mobs running speakeasies.
I do not think it is so clear cut as legalize/not legalize. Current legislation often doesn't even consider this gambling - however, even if you took the viewpoint that making it illegal helps, you then have to accept the externalities that arise - crime rings will develop that offer the services, and now their users are criminals and completely vulnerable to any amount of bad/malicious practices there.
Which, historically, is a much smaller and easier problem than legalized, unregulated gambling.
We already have a model for this in the casino system.
Like sure, there’s some small black market here, but it’s relatively minuscule.
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.
Ok but if you're using it to kill people you're probably going to be pretty careful about how you got your money into the system.
You'd be very surprised. It's more likely to be a collection of internet trolls than to be organized crime
...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.
Well, that's why it's called an investigation.
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.
It's not BS though? That's what companies like Chainalysis professionally. This was covered in graphic detail as to how they caught a pedo ring in Andy Greenberg's book Tracers In The Dark.
Isn't it like claiming that breaking and entering is pointless, as you can always trace the perp through finger prints, unless they happen to wear gloves? Except in this case, most of the criminals operate from outside your jurisdiction as well.
In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in Israel.
Yes, it seems likely.
I assume the author would have noted in his blog post if the Hebrew used in making the threats came across as non-native or non-fluent.
Machine translation is really good these days, but I still think there are some "tells" for a truly vernacular and local command of a language.
Because translation is so very hard?
Yes, for colloquial speech to be plausible to a native speaker.
[deleted]
Polymarket has KYC for US users now. Can you get around it with a VPN though? I think so.
>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?
Maybe they are all in North Korea and beyond any extradition. But police broadly defined don’t even try very hard when it comes to certain crimes.
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.
Interesting tangent. This is the first I've heard the term "neoliberal" but it feels like it's being used as a perjorative term for libertarians?
"If power is concentrated anywhere..." The libertarian ideal is that it is not concentrated anywhere, because power corrupts. Maybe neoliberals want power concentrated in some entity that isn't government, and that's what you are arguing against? I guess I better do a little research on this new (to me at least) word
> 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.
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.
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.
[deleted]
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.
> 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?
> What is the law being broken?
“In most jurisdictions, death threats are a serious type of criminal offence” [1].
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?
In the US it’s a legal battle currently being fought. CISOs have been charged by the SEC and other agencies, with varied success. Some cases have been deemed over-reach, some have not. And other were a case of a CISO doing ostensibly illegal things in their capacity (in some cases paying ransom demands have been interpreted as such, especially when disguised as other things).
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.”
Fair. I should probably say “we need to actually use the corporate death penalty.”
Yes, but you are very much right: the fact that it exists but that hardly anybody knows about it is what is the problem. There are many companies that over the years should have been dissolved because of incredible crimes and yet they all keep getting away with it.
Besides that I'm all for strict personal liability for the execs and the investors of the companies they invest in. That's of course the exact opposite of the way it works right now but that actually institutionalized externalization, one of the key issues with why the world is the mess that it is.
Corporations are fine, limited liability corporations are not, I'm becoming more and more convinced that they are in fact the root of all evil because they allow the erection of financial 'diodes' that allow you to partition your stash from your liabilities and the two should always be linked. They are a very effective mechanism to allow people to screw over society and claim it's all perfectly legal.
I’ve always felt LLC’s should more narrowly limit people’s liability more or less. It’s basically a shield currently. I also think it should be reserved for sole proprietorships or otherwise very small companies, and very specific kinds of companies at that. For instance, if I am drumming up funding for a movie I should not be personally held liable if it loses money (otherwise indie film would be completely snuffed out lol)
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.
>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.
> Someone has received credible death threats
2 points - 1) “credible” is carrying a lot of water in that statement, and 2) your implication is that any activity which could eventually or conceivably involve a lunatic making a death threat is not compatible with any level of privacy.
The second is incredibly disturbing - people have made death threats over E2E encrypted chat channels, therefore we must remove any privacy built in to such a model?
I'll just dodge 1 for the moment since we're discussing an article about those threats. For the second point - I'm not saying that death threats should invalidate privacy concerns I just wanted to stress that the little people are already seeing quite a few downsides so it's important to view this issue with more nuance than a Facebook-like scenario when the privacy only comes at the cost of ad-revenue.
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.
If he's breaking the law and there is proof to that, then he will and should be arrested.
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.
I’m not sure what that wiki article has to do with a criticism of the oblique “late stage” capitalism term. Particularly when the only reference is a link to the relevant late stage capitalism article which mentions the term isn’t all that clear cut or even used with any degree of consistency, which is why I’m asking for proof that “every single” economist agrees.
If you want to just debate the validity of the specific term “late stage capitalism” then sure go ahead, but that’s not all you did in your prior comment. Capitalism comes in many forms and variations.
That being said, late stage capitalism is such a common term now that to say “it isn’t a thing“ feels more like something you feel should be the case than anything else. The fact that everyone in this conversation is able to understand the phrase without anyone needing to explain it is pretty indicative of that.
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.
> (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?
Just as a note - I feel like there's a lack of understanding of how difficult it is to get a billion dollars. It isn't something you can just trip into and I think the concentration of that much wealth really goes against something in most people's approach to the world where generosity increases as you gain more wealth. To capture that much wealth as a business owner you have to be extremely stingy with compensation to those who accompanied you along that path which is not how most people tend to operate - more often people share that wealth and make sure those around them also benefit from the work even if the structure of corporations may technically entitle the owner to 100% of the upside.
Having assets worth X dollars is not the same thing as having X dollars. It means investors are willing to trade you X dollars for the assets.
Those investors don't want to give /you/ money, they want to give the billionaire money.
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.
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.
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.
US cops don't care about solving crimes or making people safe, they only care about making a profit. And harassing random motorists on the side of the road is way easier and safer profits than trying to deal with real crime involving people with money that can afford their own lawyers to fight back.
US cops? It's Israel.
[dead]
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.
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.
I think you might be over-fixated on a very prediction-market-esque framing of this plot device... if you broaden it slightly, the idea of someone in a fictional world manipulating the news reporting of an act or set of acts, rather than caring so much about the root act itself, is as stated before, quite common.
> Pollyhop is a fictional, Google-esque search engine that according to Leann’s polling expert is being exploited by the Republican candidate Will Conway in ways that suggest Underwood can’t possibly beat him in the general election. The explanation of how Pollyhop works is convoluted at best, but the gist is that Conway and his people are manipulating search engine results so that only positive coverage of their side appears.
Or more recent examples of what essentially boils down to the plot device of "media manipulation" aka manipulating the "news reporting of the act":
- See the most recent season of Industry, which included several plot points about manipulating news coverage as a short-seller and the company being targeted fought back and forth (including specific focus on the individual journalists involved)
- See Andor, everything about how the Empire twists perception of what's happening on Ghorman, leading up the Ghorman massacre itself, and then culminating in Mon Mothma's speech in the Senate denouncing "the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil"
- See The Orville, a particular episode: https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule which includes the plot point of hacking that society's "master feed" to plant false manipulative stories to curry public favor and save a character from being punished
- See The Boys, how Vought manipulates the media to twist coverage of their "heroes" even when they commit atrocities
- See other House of Cards plotlines involving Zoe Barnes and being a direct mouthpiece for Frank Underwood
I think the only real difference if any, is that in the most common form of portrayal, maybe less attention is paid to the journalist as the point of leverage, and how they deal with threats or bribes or whatever. The fact that such manipulation occurs, is commonly accepted as a trope, without requiring too much of a deep dive. Whether a story choose to focus on the "reporter's perspective" is perhaps less common, but not uncommon IMO.
Bond's Casino Royal had a stock short sell bet with a planned attack.
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.
The source is a company that works with Polymarket and sells Polymarket data (as well as Kalshi and other gambling platforms).
The findings are consistent with academic research that these markets are well calibrated.
Could be, you should reference the academic research then.
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.
> 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.
It may be cherry-picking, but I think some commenters misunderstand this (or maybe I do).
The implication seems to be "12 hours before the resolution things are obvious anyway". But if that were the case, then I could pick some wager that is obviously true but has, for example, 70% chance, and putting my money on that. If it was true that "12 hours before the resolution it's obvious what the result is", everything would be in 0% or 100% buckets. I believe getting event with 30% confidence right exactly 30% times is impressive no matter if that's 12h or 120h before.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about prediction markets, just what I understood from the blog post.
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.
1. That is not how prediction market calibration plots work! Calibration is measured across the range of markets with different forecasted odds.
2. That is just obviously not all these markets are doing. They're aligning incentives and aggregating information in the same way other markets do.
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.
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?
What you're showing me is a [war crime], which has existed for time in humans.
[Wars] of all kinds have existed for a long time and haven't been banned.
Banning on [particular tactics in war] altogether and pushing it underground would make things far worse.
Do you see the problem with your logic?
Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.
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...
My unsupported non-conspiracy opinion:
A) They notice that it would land in the middle of nowhere and decided to not destroy it. It's better keep the interceptors for one that is going to hit an important target.
B) They partially intercepted it, perhaps only broke the motor or a fin, but the explosive head was intact. So instead of going to an important target, it crashed and exploded in the middle of nowhere.
(A) is extremely plausible. It is well-known that Iron Dome specifically avoided targeting rockets for interception when they not going to land in areas with people or infrastructure.
The main reason for this is because the interceptors are very scarce and costly.
Not a conspiracy theory, IDF official policy is to not use interceptors when the missile is confirmed by calculations to hit unpopulated areas.
(This calculation does not work for every type of missile or on every occasion)
[deleted]
I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).
The gamblers would have had a much easier time convincing a journalism LLMs that their article was "a lie".
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.
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.
Regardless of which side you are on, you are going to have enemies when it comes to the Middle East politics.
If you are a journalist, it comes with the territory, I'm sure you know.
Sooner or later a college athlete is gonna get killed for missing a shot.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
Related to your comment, see Nate Silver's take on the NBA gambling scandal.
"Player props are inherently more subject to manipulation because only one player needs to be involved in rigging the outcome. [...] Even as someone more sympathetic to gambling than most people you’re probably reading on this story, I’m not sure I’d really care if player prop bets were banned entirely. They produce abusive behavior toward players. They also often put team and individual performance into tension with one another..."
If you read some of the now-copious reporting about gamblers targeting athletes with death threats, you'll see that they have people screaming at them and threatening them violently both for performing badly and for performing well.
Truly unhinged and alarming that gambling has been legalized and marketed so quickly and so extensively, in so many forms.
Polymarket heads think they're so smart as they simultaneously reveal a total lack of awareness about feedback loops.
I don't know who needs to hear it but, you can't predict the future. You can get close, but its never a guarantee unless you have insider info, and even that can change at the last moment.
I have a theory that prediction markets will becomes hyperstition engines. This is a rather... violent example.
Athletes are also receiving death threats from gamblers.
...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".
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.
Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate a poly market bet by 2040.
Already happened.
Source?
Sounds like polymarket needs to add "will bettors kill this man" as something you can bet on.
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.
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.
It's far worse than regular gambling
People are getting death threats for writing news articles as part of their job. How is this comparable?
[deleted]
Profession athletes get threats for winning games which is part of their job. It's exactly the same.
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
Many of the comments in this discussion remind me of that Rothchild analysis in the second half of the 1800s when France had problems with a revolution.
> A friend asked Baron Rothschild what he was doing in response to Paris Commune:
> “Why,” replied the famous banker musingly, “French government bonds are selling at sixty-five. I bought five millions yesterday.”
> “What!” exclaimed the friend. “Bought bonds? Why, France is without a government, and the sewers of Paris are running red with blood!”
> “Yes, it is deplorable,” remarked the baron, “but if the sewers of Paris were not running red with blood, I could not buy bonds at this price. France will survive this terrible calamity, as she survived the Revolution, and the seven coalitions against her of all the powers of Europe. Her credit will again be the highest of any nation, and her bonds will sell again above par.”
People who oppose gambling tend to see this as a foreign capitalist selfishly making money off of the dire situation of the French people. People who do not oppose gambling see it as financial support of the French in their times of trouble when others have abandoned them.
This has nothing to do with opposing gambling. It has everything to do with, say, opposing gamblers poisoning horses to win bets.
Surely you can see the difference between dealing in a legitimate asset like a government bond, which requires a market of buyers and sellers, versus this new extraneous layer of prediction contracts, where the only defensible economic purpose is some weak information signal.
You applied the razor very well here.
There will always be a market.
It seems like the easy solution is for polymarket to just unwind the transaction and give everyone their money back, no harm no foul.
That would mean the people who did the death threats get their money back.
Yes. And then they won't want to kill the journalist anymore. Because otherwise they are going to lose all their money.
It's a bad idea to reward death threats like that. There would be more of them in the future.
Australians gamble more than anyone on Earth but the idea that people "invest" huge money, whether or not missiles explode in a country at war is crazy.
It was said Australians would bet on two flies climbing up a wall. But this is madness.
Prediction markets remind of the "Safety Training" episode[1] of the Office where Kevin and others are betting on the outcome of various situations. It was pretty funny and absurd back then. Didn't expect it to be so prescient.
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.
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
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.
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.
Well, we're discovering some really fascinating and pervasive failure cases of proto-futarchy. Please update your priors.
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
It's true but it's just revealing what Wall Street et al have been up to for the past several decades. There's this perception that they're all doing Very Important Work(tm), when in fact they're just making up silly rules and playing games with each other, aka gambling.
Wall Street is doing price discovery which benefits index investors. They're also lending (e.g. private credit) which benefits economic activity.
Robin Hood options trading is just lighting money on fire under the guise of "investing", which insidiously somehow seems more responsible than gambling on roulette.
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.)
Similar business cases can be made for futures from polymarket. For example if I start a business in the USA I may want to hedge by buying some futures Jesus will not return before 2027.
Do we typically [0] have a problem with people sabotaging industries to manipulate the futures market?
[0] Edit: Originally wrote "currently", but then I remembered the current White House, whose various crimes are being studiously ignored by the Republican congress.
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.
Run away from Polymarket
That's the issue with allowing people to bet on public events.
It's odd that we allow this to happen.
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 does this block VPNs?
That's the limit of smart-contracts: they can't know the real world, so they depend on "Oracles"/external sources who can be corrupted or coerced, and so even if the foundation is guaranteed in the code, what the code uses as a reference is not...
“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.
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.
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.
Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia!!!
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.
[dead]
[deleted]
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.
At some point betting markets are going to become a form of market where people are effectively posting bounties. You bet 1,000,000 for someone to murder a public official then someone gets in on the action and hires a hitman to do the job.
Gambling is degenerate and inclined to cause crime and criminal behavior. Ban this shit already, decriminalization of gambling is a failed experiment.
> The Economic Times, an Indian English-language business-focused news site
God help those using this newspaper as their source for betting
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?
Peak Hebrew hilarity
nightmare fuel
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?
[deleted]
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.
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?
I think people & companies get value from these markets because they are able to plan on the basis of accurate forecasts for scenarios like potential wars and election results.
I agree that these markets also create bad incentives, I just think that on net the information provided tends to be more valuable.
> 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.
I live here, I don't need Polymarket to know that there will be missiles tomorrow. In fact, that's why I'm on HN now even though it's just past midnight here. Because it's a well known law of nature that just as I drift off to sleep my phone will violently alert me with this horrid bzzhhh-bzzhhh sound that missiles are incoming. Then I'll turn on the TV, any news channel, and see the "polygon of uncertainty" overlaid on a map of the country, updating in real time, and I'll decide how fast to put my shoes on. Polymarket odds ain't got nothing on that.
More seriously - I used to think this was a good argument. But the night before the war broke out, I checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I
made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to move fast to get closer to shelter.
Yes, it's anecdata, etc etc
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?
> That there are economical incentives to make it happen just to make money?
I don't see how there is. The liquidity in a prediction market is not high enough to compensate for the expense of going to war.
The war was going to happen irregardless of the prediction market. The prediction market only let us know when it was going to happen with some hours to spare.
Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.
If there was a prediction market for whether I'll be hit by a car tomorrow, and it was lucrative enough that it would actually be worth anyone's time to deliberately hit me with a car, I'd stay home and bid on "no". Pretty sure I'd make more than enough to cover the cost of ordering pizza.
There are already perverse incentives to commit arson, like insurance. And it's entirely possible that prediction markets can make insurance even more cost-effective.
> Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.
Not your money, you can be just a random in the executive and lobby for it.
[deleted]
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).
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).."
That's when you just gotta kill yourself. Can't kill what's already dead.
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.
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.
Making people unhappy doesn't cause them to declare bankruptcy and become homeless. People may lose their reputation by reporting falsehoods in the paper (though probably not). People might read incorrect information in the newspaper. People may directly lose access to food and shelter due to gambling. The risks are no where close to equivalent.
> I don't think you understand. [...]
I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario: the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%. What does that tell you about the future?
You can try to derive information out of a stock market price, but it is not a prediction tool. The newspaper and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the context of prediction tools, because they both tell you exactly what they predict.
The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the function is completely different.
[deleted]
People can go bankrupt from sports betting, from financial investing, they go bankrupt in lots of different ways through all sorts of bad decisions. If you want to outlaw recreational betting entirely, and restrict things like Polymarket and the stock market entirely to people like "accredited investors" who are supposedly responsible enough not to go bankrupt, then maybe argue for that, but not against Polymarket specifically. And then you're going to have to argue why that doesn't restrict people's freedom -- why should only richer people be allowed to trade on information? Doesn't that disadvantage the average citizen?
> What does that tell you about the future?
Are these supposed to be trick questions or something? They tell you exactly what they tell you. I already told you -- the stock price is a prediction of NPV of future profits. Did you see that in my last comment? Do you understand that? If that isn't a concrete, actionable and valuable prediction, I don't know what is.
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.
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.
It seems strange to me that a single source would be used to resolve a bet any way. You have all this crap to make a platform "decentralized" and then it all collapses down to: "bruh, it happened, I swear." It really makes me realize how often blockchain / decentralization / "cryptography" projects are nothing more than pseudo-technical theater. Peak hype-driven development.
That would require tons of infrastructure and investment on Polymarket's side (more expense) and also reduce the number of permitted wagers (less revenue). i.e, never gonna fucking happen, it's way easier and more lucrative to have a hands-off approach, and only intervene for the occasional high-profile misfire.
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.
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.
Yes that is bad, but it isn't as bad as the expected value of a Powerball lottery ticket.
I didn't say it isn't bad, just that it isn't the worst.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
Unless you do insider trading, which can be pretty easy on prediction markets depending on your job...
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It literally has to be compromised to work. If the roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start of the spin. It has to have irregularities and asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour – and those same irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!
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.
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.
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.
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)
[deleted]
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.
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.”
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
[deleted]
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.
>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.
[dead]
I would go with rationalism being a delusion of tech bros rather than blaming a failure of rationalism on those lumpen proles inventing silly sports propositions.
Do you know someone in particular who blamed sports betting on "lumpen proles"? It kinda seems like you're making up a person to get mad at here.
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.
[deleted]
“Markets related to death are technically not supposed to be allowed at regulated prediction markets in the US.”
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_.
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.
Aren't death markets explicitly banned?
Stock markets also incentivize murder. Short a company, then kill the CEO. Boom, profit.
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.
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".
Yes - and further, even if something is "just human behavior", that doesn't mean it's never beneficial to humans to legally regulate the enablement or exploitation of that behavior.
>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.
Sounds like a urban legend.
I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.
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?
Your comparison is not even close to what is happening here.
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 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 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.
[deleted]
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.
There aren't that many things bad on this scale that I can think of.
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
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).
As a sibling says, the story is for ships, other insurance has existed for millenials.
Yes but if you're a bloke toking on your pipe in Lloyds Coffee House in 1713 you don't know that you already ordered a submarine to sink a ship you're placing a bet will sink...
Submarines in 1713?
It's yet another Goodhart's law effect:
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
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”.
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.
That existed before the internet.
The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.
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.
I do find that to be a fun thought experiment, but HN doesn't seem to agree.
How would you know it was caused by that bill? Maybe politicians should just be paid based on something we want to incentivize, like lower quartile wages.
I'm curious how you know HN doesn't seem to agree!
But I think your idea is probably a better idea than betting.
Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure
> 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.
You might have a point with institutional investors, but regular consumers on Polymarket are absolutely just gambling.
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.
It's more like the dots aren't connected but they're all the same size and color because that kind of dot is in fashion.
I don't think Polymarket bans consistent winners. You gamble against other users and Polymarket makes the same fee either way.
[flagged]
Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days
And goatse is harmless compared to the shit that's out there, especially because it only affects the dude himself. Even 3 guys 1 hammer isn't the worst yet (though pretty bad already).
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!
[dead]
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).
[dead]
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?
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and criticized state run gambling.
"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."
Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral philosopher first and an accidental economist second.
Yes! As a beginner-level, amateur armchair economist who hated philosophy class in high school, I have to admit I was surprised to learn about this when reading https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/economix by Michael Goodwin. The book overall seems to lean liberal whenever there's a political choice to be made, and yet it paints Adam Smith in a much more positive light that one would imagine, if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.
A really fun book, also!
> if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.
Leftists I've known are more likely to quote Smith than criticize him. He seems to be seen by leftists as an important figure in political economy (flawed in not reaching certain important questions, perhaps, but not much in how he addressed those questions he did consider.) Even his argument that the class whose understanding of their own interests is best aligned with the common interests is the landed aristocracy (the bourgeoisie having interests opposed to the common interest, while the working class shares—by its sheer size, defines—the common interests but lacks an understanding of what their real interests are in the domain of interest) [0] is seen as describing exactly a problem than the Left (see, e.g., Marx and discussions of class consciousness) sees as central to solve, rather than being a regressive idealized preference.
The Left criticizes a lot of the arguments people who appeal to a mythologized caricature of Smith use his name to defend, sure, but that's a different thing than criticizing Smith.
[0] Which is about as far as you can be from leaning liberal where there is a political choice to be made, though given the complete displacement of the landed aristocracy as an economically-meaningful distinct class it is largely irrelevant in practical terms in the 21st century.
Some in the Left, including Marx - perhaps most of the well-read Left - do this. Then there is an entire category of people who throw his name around in the mud and call “Adam Smith liberal” anything they view as immoral or excessive.
It's funny as a economist people thinking that the free market is some kind of god, that the invisible hand is infallible. He never argued markets work without institutions. He believed governments must enforce justice, prevent monopolies, and provide public goods for markets to function properly.
There are far better examples they could use.
[flagged]
[flagged]
I might have done - you claim questionable reasons for Thiel's actions without evidence. For one thing he didn't start it.
His ownership percentage is similar to Elon's stake in Tesla, you can quibble over details (Series B vs A). His associates are teaming over Polymarket and now Palantir is in charge of policing the market.. sort of a fox guarding the hen house situation?
I'll downvote that WITH commenting, also HN rules encourage against ranting about downvotes, fyi.
I don't think there's any issue with asking when no explanation is provided and it's unclear to you. Whereas complaining about it is just tedious and doesn't add anything of value.
wonder no further!
I do take Adam Smith out of context, that is the precise point -- the invisible hand of self-interest is the salient idea that has endured and shaped modern Hypercapitalism. It doesn't matter if he is rolling in his grave at audio frequencies due to my and, more importantly, society's alleged misappropriation of his work and misunderstanding of his many moral considerations. He was effectively soundbited centuries ago and we are still struggling to manage the implications. Saying he was a good guy makes it more difficult to fix the problem.
Maybe you have a valid point here, but by intentionally taking him out of context, it perpetuates the misunderstanding. We'd be better off actually understanding Smith, reading Smith, and grappling with limitations of the invisible hand. Otherwise it is just an exercise in nihilism and blowing everything up.
It's not about whether he is a good guy or not, it is about what we can learn from his writings.
I know he is always associated with the 'invisible hand of the market' idea, but a lot of his writings were about the PROBLEMS that arise because of this invisible hand. He had a lot of good insights into what we have to be careful of when the free market does what it does. We should actually take some of those lessons to shape policy to protect us from the invisible hand.
Noam Chomsky explains (I won't say 'apologizes for') Adam Smith frequently, but I think it is more important to allow modern, living thinkers space and consideration to reflect upon what is happening in our time, rather than relying excessively on canonical figures who didn't have our contemporary context available in their writings. Sadly there is plenty of timelessness, problems recognized in 1776 that still remain unsolved, but too many use the weight and respect for Adam Smith disingenuously to advocate for insane market policies.
Much like Marx, who had a lot of very insightful observations.
Whether what was done in his name is or isn't directly attributable to his writings is somewhat academic. That has taken on a life of its own, and overshadowed all his other ideas.
It has also certainly made talking about class in America very difficult.
Very good comparison. I do have more respect for Marx, the modern concept of life/work balance owes much to his concept of estranged labor ("Life itself appears only as a means to life"), as I haven't had to live in a society afflicted by his excesses and misappropriations, unlike the case of Adam Smith.
Adam Smith mentions something similar as well. He talks about how the worker's attachment to the work is different when he's working in a super specialised part of a production process rather than making the whole product like an artisan.
[flagged]
Where exactly would he go to escape it?
Earth: Love it or leave it.
The main non free market societies are communist like North Korea, or tribal people say in the Amazon who don't have markets. Neither have very high standards of living.
A better compromise might be scandinavian countries but Adam Smith would probably have approved of those.
North Sentinel Island.
Assuming he can get past immigration.
[flagged]
>Trump Says He Will Have the ‘Honor’ of ‘Taking Cuba’
>President Trump’s words came amid a nationwide blackout and as a top Cuban official said his country would move to open the economy to foreign investors.
Turns out you can't escape the free market societies because those societies can't tolerate others.
It's strange - if we're so confident that our ideology is superior then wouldn't we welcome a small neighbor on our doorstep trying something different as a sort of experiment expected to reaffirm our views? Celebrate them the way you might a silly child, occasionally support them, all while pointing to them as an example of why we don't do what they're doing.
Unless of course we fear they might succeed.
We interfered with Cuba when they acquired nuclear missiles aimed at the US.
Cube prevents its citizens from leaving.
That was an awful long time ago and doesn't reflect the current situation.
> Cube prevents its citizens from leaving.
What's your point? If they suddenly changed that policy do you believe we would immediately walk back the sanctions and the oil blockade? That isn't how it looks to me.
The only way I can think to interpret current US policy is either one of petty insecurity or else an attempt at coercive commercial exploitation.
Free market countries build walls to keep people out, socialist countries build walls to keep their citizens from fleeing.
[deleted]
Now we're discussing "audio frequencies"? My gosh, you really are off the deep end, aren't you.
If you want to effect change, then state your critique precisely, or not at all. Your looney top-level comment has derailed what should be a discussion of how to reign in Polymarket, because you've overstated your case, messed up your references to authority, and apparently you've slandered Aleister f*cking Crowley, too, such that his defenders are arguing about him here, instead of about how to reign in Polymarket.
When you make your side appear detached from all sense and reason, you are functionally no better than controlled opposition.
We could gamble on when Polymarket's operators die.
How about something that they would see more as a genuine threat?
Bet on whether they get into a car accident, and then see what happens if all of a sudden that number starts spiking towards 100%.
Or whether the company will fail or have a bad IPO.
If I propose odds based on survival tables for other companies of that age (I think for six years, the annual risk is 9 %), which side of the bet would you like to take?
The, uh, earnestness of your reply makes me suspect you missed the subtext.
We're not interested in expected value or winning the bet. If anything, it's the opposite: The "goal" is to lose the bet due to a situation caused by the pattern of betting, with something beyond any actuarial tables because it's not an independent event.
If I can presume to speak for up-thread commenters, we've agreed the system is inherently exploitable and harmful, and we're either (A) imagining the schadenfreude of using that same evil to harm the people who promote it, or at least (B) imagining them forced to fear the monster they're unleashing on others, so that they take steps to limit it.
Yes, obviously it is about the fear. If everybody takes a 100000:1 bet for a buck then that reserves the next 30 years or so. It's a lottery of sorts, someone will earn quite a bit.
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?
The over. Rich people live longer.
Yes. I add that google says: "controlling for substance abuse reduces the gap by about 60% for men and 36% for women". I couldn't get it to quantify the effect of obesity.
There are other imponderable factors at work. For example, does not-wealthy cause substance abuse or does substance abuse cause not-wealthy?
We are all the sum of our choices.
Even when there's a polymarket bet on their heads?
This comment is art
For some reason people tend to forget the most important part of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", I guess it because the words "Love is the law, love under will" doesn't sound satanic enough. If you take the time to actually read some of his material you'll be surprised how much he (the 'satanist' Crowley) talks about God and angels (as positive forces).
They won't understand friend.
Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets misrepresented.
It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalism instead of invoking his name.
> He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences
Smith wrote about the political economy. He absolutely considered the balance between public and market interests. Most people talking about The Wealth of Nations have never read it.
A hint is in the name, it's called the wealth of nations not the wealth of the sovereign individual.
You’ll not find “the invisible hand” in wealth of nations as a major concept. It was a throw away phrase that wasn’t a central part of his writing.
So many Smith apologists. I don't believe he should be demonized, and perhaps I am guilty of this by mentioning his name and 'satanic' in the same sentence, but he decidedly should not be lionized either. So many are drunk with history and shirk the work to evolve and transcend it. It doesn't matter if Adam Smith had morality and consideration, those are not ideals his writing ultimately bred, what matters are the free market ideals he clearly encouraged long ago, are now wildly out of control.
He described a natural process, he didn't invent it.
The invisible hand in markets is a natural property with an effect that's dependent on the environment the market operates within. He may be the first person to describe the process in writing (that we know of), but human beings have been experiencing the effects of this since we first attempted to trade with one another.
He didn't encourage free market ideals, though! He warned us about them!
He encouraged relatively free international trade rather than mercantilism, and and a lot of people have turned that into being an advocate for "capitalism" against a preceding system, never paying attention to the fact that mercantilism was an international trade policy response by nations with emergent capitalist economies trying to figure out how best to operate within that system, not an alternative (much less predecessor) economic system.
AFAICT this is (like a lot of the modern mythology of capitalism) started as a response (in the sense of an attempt to build a similar-but-opposed structure, not a response in conversation like a rebuttal) 19th Century anti-capitalist critics (and, in particular, Marx), part of which was setting Smith up as the preceding and opposing figure; a kind of capitalist Christ so that Marx could be the anti-Christ.
Have you actually read The Wealth of Nations?
It doesn't matter whether you've misrepresented him? It doesn't matter whether the ideas you cite to him are ones that he actually held?
Are there any cases where truth matters to you? I hope that this is just a rare exception, but I struggle to see how it's a principled one in any way.
Anyhow, I guess I can't stop you. "Do what thou wilt", indeed.
> It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences.
The "invisible hand" was something of a minor metaphor that other people glommed on to later, and its clear that they, and not his actual work, are where your idea of Smith comes from if you can say "He didn't consider its shadow/consequences" with a straight face.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is almost entirely about the consequences of the (then-still-somewhat-emergent) capitalist economy system and its interactions with the political space. A very large part of it was warning about its dangers, and advising of how to manage and mitigate them.
> He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences
This is just completely false. Wealth of Nations spends a HUGE portion of the text to talk about the negative consequences of the 'invisible hand'. Why would you say he never considered its consequences? What about his famous quote from Wealth of Nations:
> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting on the outcome of the war, but in practice they are.
Hard disagree. In most countries, you can not anonymously trade stocks, for starters, where you can anonymously bet on Polymarket.
> Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.
But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.
This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.
Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
> But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.
I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.
In many companies this is not allowed.
Pretty sure that discussion was had in the 20s. What emerged was a securities regulation system with rules and prohibitions built on the mission of productive companies and positive-sum games.
Polymarket also bets on sports games and wars which makes it a categorically different market from a regulatory perspective.
> I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments.
This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.
[dead]
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.
And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):
> “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”
But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous, opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.
This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.
> rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley
Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even if commonly underplayed by mainstream academia).
Technology, science and the occult have always had an interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know, inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a student of Crowley).
It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the work of Western esotericism on the history of the West would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of the Middle East.
I’m only dismissing it in relation to the field of economics. I would trivially dismiss Sufism in the same context.
This discussion is ridiculous. We’re literally talking about the occult here.
> 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.
>If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate.
I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.
It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.
The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.
The approach of allowing a limited amount of some "vice" (or otherwise disfavored activity), highly regulated, combined with stiff penalties for illegal use is a pretty common approach to greatly reduce anti-social activity.
Yes... harm reduction approaches can be effective. The point is that they also need a "very annoying" frictional element to prevent harm reduction from creating worse outcomes than prohibition.
The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had previously effectively achieved this goal by making any gambling habit include regular travel, which itself prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly activity.
"Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe consumption site, where you have to go through harm reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely have things like blood work done to check for potential disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.
The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the process, whereas addicts would go through the process trivially.
> If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal
Except it's not the same gambling in both cases, they have qualitative differences beyond simply where they're happening. My unhinged neighbor who'd threaten a journalist probably doesn't have an invite to the Underground Gambling Den.
Even if he did, when a court case happens there's no presumption of normalcy. He can't say: "Pshaw, everybody legally gambles on all sorts of things there, the fact that I bet big on the journalist not having his fingers broken is just coincidence."
The immediate illegality of the gambling is also a check on corruption, since it's already disqualifying for Judge Stickyfingers McBriberson to be on the platform, let alone "betting" on the outcome of cases he presides over.
[deleted]
Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious—but how does legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue? Bookie licensing?
Why on earth would you think it's untaxed? A legalized gambling business trivially creates taxable income.
Ah, right. These legalized bookies should be paying income tax to the jurisidictions they operate in (albeit probably happening as reliably as winning bettors are on their winnings).
Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."
You are, quite succintly, a liberal in your beliefs here. This is not liberal in the CNN/Fox News sense, in case this comes off offensive.
I'm a "capitalist" in the sense that I think markets that allow people to exchange private capital create the better outcomes for society for society than other types of economic systems.
I'm also a "liberal."
Ha! I see, well, I'm clearly in the wrong here then.
May all your capital provide the most good it can! Godspeed.
Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.
Clearing up the incorrect connections you made is helpful.
Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore mistakes.
You're connection between an economic system with some kind of an amoral political view is a non sequitur. You could trivially operate gambling institutions in a socialist system. The gambling existing has nothing to do with the economic system itself. It has to do with the political climate.
Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad for society
People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird populations and many people are infected with pathogens carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0 harm activities.
Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a total copout. You know what else creates negative externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt, besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just fine!
Do you have a religion that works on systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic failure
We have a system. Free speech, public debate and democratic elections.
Inventing Assassination Markets in 2026, not bad.
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!
> I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match...
I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit?
I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily change a game result. With so much money on the line, it doesn't seem like a good mix.
Athletes (both college and professional) frequently receive threats from sports betters. Since the betting apps let you make specific wagers such as whether a specific player will make more than 6 three pointers in a game the harassment can become quite targeted.
Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce things many people might benefit from (how well that works is another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely positive to them. Imagine if your next door neighbor dropped a cash-filled envelope that you found - lucky you? And if that was your neighbor's rent money? Like a lot of scams, the 'value' is only accrued by fleecing rubes, and it also creates a new class of super-bookies, which also not positive.
You're asking the wrong question, in a free society (supposedly) people are allowed to do whatever they want by default. They're not perimtted to do things, they're forbidden from doing specific things.
Is gambling a neg-negative? why do you care? how is that relevant? Things shouldn't be forbidden because of net impact, specific harm needs to be outlined and addressed. Most of the time, there are more specific problematic behaviors that should be legislated against, not gambling.
In your example, that person spending their rent money could maybe addressed by the law? Or if someone spends their family's savings on a bet, that specific behavior can be addressed. If you think about it, this lazy approach doesn't address root causes. Maybe that guy's rent money, or family's savings, he could have blown it on a fancy car, no law against that.
Conversely, what if someone bet all their money on a stock option? People kill themselves over this, but it isn't illegal. you see how the entire approach is crooked and lazy? categorizing "gambling" addresses the reactionary emotions of the crowd, it doesn't address root causes, it doesn't evaluate nuanced situations.
It isn't betting or speculating that is the problem.
That's a strong libertarian position I think few would agree with. A similar case would be fentanyl - what harm does it do to me if people are dying on the sidewalk from overdoses? Well, the cumulative impact of that on society is considered negative enough that we've outlawed its recreational use. That argument of course doesn't apply equally to my neighbor taking shrooms, which doesn't have any impact, go ahead. The question is if you see gambling as closer to fent than to shrooms - I would suggest that it has a significant blast radius[1].
No, I must disagree. With Fentanyl you can prohibit the substance just fine because it causes phsyical harm to its user, although even then I personally think so long as the seller educates its users well enough, it should be allowed.
If what you're bothered by is fact that people are dying on the streets, that's pretty grime, maybe make that illegal so they can find a less visually unappealing way of dying?
Consider this: How many people commit suicide? How people do __NOT__ commit suicide because fentanyl bought them something to chase after for a little while longer? How about we worry about all the people that die because they can't get enough medical care? Why is society quick to neglect that, and yet so eager to take away liberties for drug abuse? Or homeless too, I suspect you wouldn't want homeless people sleeping in tents on the street either, because that bothers you visually?
Your neighbors on shrooms are just as dependent on drugs as someone on fentanyl, so clearly you don't care about the dependency factor. If you care about mortality, then address the top causes of mortality.
Even with fentanly, people overdose specifically because it is illegal. In a sane society, people would be able to get fentanly administered to them in free facilities/clinics that give them correct dosage after doing a quick check on their blood chemistry. That would be cheaper than pumping junkies full of narcan every day, dealing with body clean up, all the crime that comes with the criminality of it all, and other costs to society. Same as with home with homelessness you could just give people free housing and that would be a lot cheaper, and it will solve the visual displeasure you have as well.
But the cruelty and hypocrisy is the point of it all isn't it?
Bankers and investors at major cities are cocaine junkies, that's a well known fact. In some states, being a weed junkie is highly normalized. being addicted to cigarettes and alcohol (which both have a well established mortality rate, and high cost to society!) is normalized, even celebrated at times. A junkie with needles on him by the street bothers you, but the same junkie with a bottle of beer and a blunt might not.
As I argued earlier, with gambling you're focusing on the wrong thing, gambling is the how, not the what. Every argument you make about "gambling" can be made about day trading stocks, or betting on options. People take risks they shouldn't think with money in a way that affects others, that interaction should be legislated, and some costs (not criminal) should be imposed by society on people that do that, targeting both the platform/house and the participants. The solutions are highly nuanced though, they're not as lazy as "just ban gambling", and they have costs associated with them that people don't want the government to subsidize, but in the long run are cheaper.
Should I be able to spend my life's savings on a corvette or an RV, without the seller asking how that would impact those around me, or how I would survive if additional costs arise later on? If I end up homeless, or my family becomes destitute because of that decision, the "blast radius" to society is the same as if I did spent that money at a casino. If your concern truly is "blast radius" then that could be addressed directly, root caused solved at the root.
I'm not a libertarian for the record, I'm simply trying to analyze the problems at hand and find the best solutions.
The social benefit is that it gives a controlled outlet for the need to gamble when managed by the government.
One major utility of prediction markets is to get good estimates of probabilities of future events.
That's an interesting idea, though of course while we've done that with crop or livestock futures, we seem to have coped pretty well without betting on absolutely everything until now.
We usually cope well before inventions improve things.
I don't know if prediction markets will be an important improvement, but it might be, so we should let them run.
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.
I suppose the extreme take would be that it becomes a de facto bounty hunting platform
Calling Adam Smith a libertine is beyond insane
Yeah I wonder if they meant libertarian.
I don't know you, but I do know that you haven't studied Adam Smith.
edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.
> Adam Smith's libertine
What on earth does this even mean?!
[deleted]
The problem is that you are identifying a symptom of an ongoing societal moral decline with an economic system. Spend some time on Dostoevsky or Kant. When morality is solely based on our current nationalism/hedonism hybrid in the West you end up at these extreme morally dubious exploits whether in a free or autocratic society. I don't claim to know what can help society become more ethical. What do you propose will improve society's ethical foundations? It's often the case that staunch critics of a system or another don't usually have much to offer in terms of ethics, they pontificate in favor or counter a given system without exploring whether society's ethics dwell on shaky foundations, they spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, the merits of this or that implementations when in reality all societies whose ethical foundations crater, do not recover their ethics through policy reform alone.
There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different.
To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.
Did you actually mean libertine or libertarian? I'm extremely confused.
"ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"),
Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about?
Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things.
Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side.
Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well.
Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that.
These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise.
There's no 'isms' here.
They're just villains, same as it ever was.
They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.
This is a serious news story that should be concerning to all sides, including people who are generally pro-markets. Thus, I wish that we had produced a top comment that was critical of Polymarket without being deranged. (Libertine? Adam Smith for totally unfettered markets? Satanic?)
If the prediction markets cannot produce a satisfactory solution to this problem, then their license to operate should be seriously cut back by regulators. Bets on a vast set of propositions that involve journalistic judgement should be banned, if they can't be blackmail-proofed. The social utility of these markets as info aggregators is marginal at best, and it is dwarfed by the harm of threats to reporters.
It is in Polymarket's court to figure out how to resolve this amicably. Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police. If your KYC has neglected to gather that info, then freeze all money on that side of the market until each bettor has identified themselves. Or some other means of fixing it, I don't know. Figure it out.
If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs. And if it comes down to it, I'm pretty sure that Shayne spends most of his time in the US, and we have extradition with Israel.
My apologist response would be that Polymarket isn’t the root cause—it’s more of a mirror. It simply makes the incentives and speculation already present in late-stage capitalism more transparent and accessible for anyone to participate in.
You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already heavily monetized—think Page Six, Access Hollywood, livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor Swift’s personal life.
Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made available to the wider public?
I don't think it is a mirror, quite the opposite. I think most Americans (and probably europeans?) think a lot of this is in fact very bad, and should be stopped.
The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the voters want.
Adam Smith's libertine didn't allow the concept of rent-seeking entities. It sure as well wouldn't allow polymarket gamblers
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
"The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock"
"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
"[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it"
"every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends... to raise the real rent of land."
- Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a highly relevant reddit thread(0)]
Adam Smith has wrote extensively about how much he disliked Landlords. It's a great tragedy that most people consider him with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that.
So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article talked about)
(Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith, the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on their platforms/algorithms too)
A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too. My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when he was so against the practices of rent-seeking.
(0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of mind." : https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...
I can understand how you would call inside traders rent seekers. I don't understand the connection for some guy betting a hundred bucks. What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?
(Also landlords only gain all the surplus when the entire system is super biased. It's not inherent to the concept of landlording. What's the alternative to having landlords anyway?)
I feel like my point more than anything (in the scope of this discussion) is that, relevant to the discussion (Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story)
> What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?
The median is kinda skewed to be honest. The median you and I think is very few percentage points in my opinion.
Let me say "typical" then?
Second most malicious quintile?
I'm avoiding "average" because one bad actor will spoil the average. But if you exclude the worst ten percent, what's wrong with everyone else?
The people in the article are in that worst bunch. But you critiqued basically everyone on the site.
Also did you finish your first sentence?
There are definitely some (very few) people who can maybe use the platform in a "decent manner" but I feel like its 1 out of 20 type situation but sure theoretically I have nothing against those people actually.
> But you critiqued basically everyone on the site
My apologies in the sense, that I mean to critique the 19/20 people. I did think when writing the first comment that maybe I should've highlighted it more but I already partially did it by writing "degenerate" etc. words
So I definitely agree with you on that aspect. Not everyone especially not the people you are talking about now are parasitic in that sense but key point being the people mentioned in the article being the worst bunch as you mention.
> Also did you finish your first sentence?
Yea, I re-read it, it feels incomplete but in essence, I sort of agree.
TLDR: I can agree with ya in the sense that there are definitely some people on the platform who can use it in a decent manner but the people mentioned in the article aren't the ones. Also even with that being said, I feel like the platforms can push the people with decent manners to indecency.
Okay, so we basically agree on the principles but have very different estimates for what percent of people on the site are acting decently.
Good enough, maybe somebody is working on a study of that.
Yes famous libertine Adam Smith, up there with Marquis de Sade and Ami Perrin
Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore, regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you!
Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural" extreme?
I don't think "regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans" is the logical conclusion of "prediction markets incentivize antisocial behavior".
> … libertine …
Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.
> libertine
I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.
Dollars to donuts that "libertine" was just as deliberate as the "satanic" that followed it.
I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, but if it was deliberate it’s worse; it descends beyond mere polemics and is just casting baseless and unfounded aspersions.
I quite enjoyed it. Smith has long been commandeered by libertine laissez-faire cultists who have severed the “invisible hand” from his body of work to worship as a relic.
[deleted]
[flagged]
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.
Can you name anything about this news story that couldn't have happened in a non-Israeli context? Or does the Israel angle just draw you in like a moth to a flame, until it's the only word in the whole article you can really read?
And to GP's point: Can you point to one paragraph in your original post that does not cry out that you need to log off? I sure can't.
Imagine it’s the Vietnam war, and there’s an American reporter reporting on missiles/bombs hitting South Vietnam.
The Viet Cong disputes the reporting and furthermore publishes death threats against the American journalist.
Of course, this is a logical response from your enemy combatant, who isn’t going to be in the habit of agreeing with you. The American journalist should expect it.
Furthermore, American armed forces obviously shouldn’t be attacking North Vietnam in the first place. Anyone who is even halfway educated already knows that it’s an unjustified war. This proxy war is taking place among global superpowers and the primary victims are the local people.
I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about this: Israel/USA started the current war in Iran. This is established fact and I don’t even think the US government disputes it.
The only difference with today’s war is that Israel is within missile range of Iran, which is why I said if I was an Israeli citizen I’d be rip roaring mad at my government for being incompetent. Netanyahu isn’t seen as a bumbling fool like Trump but he actually is. Remember that before he was elected he was seen as an extreme candidate. He is escalating war in his region which directly threatens his own people, and it has been largely unnecessary with nothing to gain. I seem to recall the genocide in Gaza being a military campaign that his own generals advised against.
A journalist on the side of the aggressor is whining about getting death threats and reporting it to his local beat cops like it’s a lost puppy. Welcome to the war your country started. Wars tend to involve death threats.
I don’t know what you mean by “log off,” you mean bury my head in the sand and stop following current events? Or turn off my brain and accept the point of view coming from AIPAC, a lobbying organization that spends tens of millions of dollars supporting political candidates in my state.
These are major news stories that I would know about just by tuning in to any news network. I assure you I’m not chronically online. This is my only social media account. No Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
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
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.
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:
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.
even better headline golf!
> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
> Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.
You're saying that after having read the article.
A priori, you'd get different impressions between a regular journalist death threats and someone engaging to re-write an article leading to death threats.
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?
For starters, no mention of re-write option. The HN headline makes me assume pre-emptive death threats instead of escalation over dialogue to re-write.
"I will kill you if you do not do X" is still a threat to kill you. All the more so when X is a thing the person will obviously not do. Rewriting the story would destroy whatever credibility they have as a journalist, and probably is literally not even possible assuming they work for any kind of reasonable organization (hey boss, I need you to update that story I wrote so a different set of gamblers win). Also, even if they did update it, they'd probably start receiving death threats from the gamblers on the other side of the bet they just screwed over.
Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option", as if that diminishes the fact that it's a death threat in any way whatsoever.
>Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option"
It's crazy for me to use the first person's own words? That's crazy?
Journalists get threats all the time. You just made my point on why it's more nuanced that this author engaged and was offered a chance to re-write.
> You just made my point on why it's more nuanced that this author engaged…
As the article clearly explains, the author replied ("engaged") without knowing why his interlocutors were interested in the minor details of the story.
His initial interlocutor ("Aviv") seemed to be engaging in good faith: "Alternatively, if you have information that it was indeed a full missile that was not intercepted, I would be glad to be corrected."
The author was naturally interested in getting the story right, and wanted to understand what his interlocutors might know about it, how they might be misunderstanding it, or why it might be so important to them.
> … and was offered a chance to re-write.
Do you truly believe that an "offer" to rewrite a story in a way that the author believes to be inaccurate—accompanied by death threats—is an important "nuance" that must be conveyed in the headline of a posting about this?
That's wild.
You're not making sense.
It's the author's own language.
Why did the author use if not important?
> It's the author's own language.
> Why did the author use if not important?
The headline cannot possibly convey every detail that's in the story.
The headlines chosen by the author of the TOI story, and by the author of his HN post, both adequately summarize the story.
After reading it in full, I found absolutely nothing misleading about either headline.
You asked if the mention of "rewrite" was important.
I said the author chose to put that language in their own title, otherwise they wouldn't have deemed it important.
Your position doesn't make any sense.
"Offered a chance to re-write." How is it even possibly to downplay something to this degree? I suppose "I'm going to kill you if you don't wire me everything in your bank account" is not a death threat, because hey, they're offering you a chance to give them all of your money. When someone on the street holds you at knifepoint, they're just offering you a chance to give them your wallet and phone!
You're going to have to be more clear.
I have no idea what your point is.
When someone makes an "offer" to a journalist to rewrite something in a way that the journalist believes to be untrue in exchange for dropping death threats against the journalist… that isn't a "nuance."
Certainly not an exculpatory one.
Do you get that point?
That is my point and that it should be in the headline.
You're confusing yourself.
To me, how the death threat is phrased is not very important. What would you drop from the title to include that?
See suggestions above by me and others.
[flagged]
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
> the whole prediction market thesis assumes information flows freely into prices — breaks down when participants start trying to influence the information itself
How naive can you possibly be...
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?
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.
I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.
The effect of this is that those markets should dry up as the information quality is so poor. So bad that even insiders are taking risk by betting on an outcome.
Unlike the regular markets though, which are dominated by smart money, these markets are dominated by degen gamblers and idiots, so I guess they just shrug it off.
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.
What censorship does Israel do?
Israel does military censorship, same as any other country, you can't communicate information that would harm the defense of the country or aid its enemies. Israel is in a hostile and armed neighborhood with frequent hot conflicts, both regular military and irregular forces, so the issue is fairly everpresent compared to other Western style democracies such as in Europe where their neighbors are peaceful.
I guess for a start they won't let me view this article with a VPN on.
Check the article linked in that comment.
you forgot to put /s at the end of your comment, yes?
As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.
My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
At least with sports betting it's limited in scope. Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or players are altering their play to make or break bets but ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited. And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly impossible to enforce.
Was I a sucker for believing that Kalshi was going to [e.g.] help farmers hedge against drought years or is the problem just morally bankrupt selection of events?
If they said that and you believed it kinda. There are already markets and insurance schemes to allow farmers to do that though through crop insurance, it's a very old and even government subsidized to keep the prices down in many countries. Farmers in need of that can already insure their crops to make $XXX amount of money to make sure they break even on the crop for the year for example there's no real need to bet on the amount of rain to reach that same goal.
We already have an extremely complicated system of farm insurance and commodity futures for that.
Yep Kalshi is at best only shrinking the scale of things a farmer could bet on instead of getting proper old style crop insurance (either yield or revenue). It's just cloaking a weather slot machine in "we're helping farmers" language. Agri-washing their betting market if you will.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this.
There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/40.11
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9183-26
Yeah, regulations are only as strong as the consequences given those who break them.
If people can threaten journalists for money and get away with it, they will. If people who threaten journalists over money are sent to prison, then after a brief transition period it will mostly stop.
It's braindead easy to anonymously threaten people on the internet. It's getting easier to steal identities or create new ones out of whole cloth and cypto wallets means you can't functionally know where the money comes from. I'm not sure attempting to punish people you can't realistically identify can be considered an effective strategy.
Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
> Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
We don't seem to have much luck getting it to happen. The larger the corporate entity the more unlikely they'll see any meaningful punishment.
Seems like bets on missile strikes would violate that...
This is the sanest reply on the thread.
During WW2 when Britain captured all incoming german spies and ran a fake german spy network, they could redirect the german V1 or V2 bombs, by misreporting what they did or didn't hit.
Allowing bets on acts of violence allows the perpetrators to assess their success rate...
They do. It's moot, though, because Polymarket isn't subject to US law.
There has been an ongoing controversy over the fact that Kalshi (which is subject to US law) chose to comply with the law over the market on Khomeini "leaving office", when the bettors assumed that it wouldn't.
What happens if someone bets on a terrorist attack in an unlikely place and then puts the bomb himself? This can turn ugly very easily.
Well that is a high enough level even the bet would probably be enforced. But the point is valid, this is a slippery slope and there's a reason these bets are illegal.
> As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.
The Good Work channel on YouTube did a really good video on this topic recently- https://youtu.be/mOptJl8Xkx0?si=4jyNnXweXp7V9VkM
In a nutshell, these platforms operate by classifying their bets as 'futures contracts' with 'meaningful real world economic consequences' rather than traditional gambling, allowing them to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than stricter state gambling laws.
It's going to take strong push from lawmakers to close the loophole, and even stronger push from the platforms to stop anything meaningful being done.
> there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating each others' humanity.
I honestly don't know what your point is. The best I can come up with is:
"The whole point of sports (in my opinion) is X good thing therefore betting on sports is more acceptable"
Making bets on good things doesn't make the betting better. Just because Polymarket would allow you to bet money that the infant homicide rate goes down next year, doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow betting on.
His point is pretty simple. Sports don't inherently involve life or death, the whole point is that it's a competition that "respects each other's humanity", eg not a competition to the death.
The same can't be said for war (bombings), which Polymarket allows betting on.
Seems like a fundamental difference to me.
Sports just delay the death or move it to injury instead, and people bet on the injuries just the same.
> Seems like a fundamental difference to me.
one is more culturally taboo than the other, but they are fundamentally the same activity
... if I post a multi-paragraph long reply on the incentives created by betting on less infant homicide, am I going to find out that you understand perfectly well what the incentives are, and that was the entire point of your comment?
The actions people have taken in accordance with sports betting incentives is everything up to and including murder. The moral ideal the parent commenter associates with sports doesn't make that okay.
If you have a point to make about how the age of the person being murdered means it's a categorical difference rather than a difference of degree I'll read it.
Just checking that you knew betting on good outcomes was how you incentivized bad ones.
Eg, to be rid of a turbulent priest, you'd place a bet that Thomas Becket will live to see the year 1171, which is a "good" outcome to bet on happening.
Glad we're both clear on which one of us missed the other's point...
[dead]
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
I wouldn't say one in the last decade is "tons of people"
> I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences...
Functionally, you are correct.
But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.
Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.
It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/little-tech-startup...
Which is of course a blatant abuse of our legal system, since they are doing nothing different than a casino's roulette or blackjack tables.
"Red futures pay out at 2:1!"
"Get your future here on whether the dealer's cards are higher than your own!"
Well the real insight here is that most "investing" is gambling.
Yeah, but unfortunately its probably going to keep going until people actually die before they will be stopped.
Banning it sends it underground into the hands of organised crime, which will still have access to modern technology.
There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.
As someone who at first embraced the idea of prediction markets and is now ambivalent, sending them underground vastly reduces their harm. First, because discoverability is an issue. Second, there will be much less liquidity. Third, any gains will have to be laundered or hidden, making it even more difficult.
Maybe prediction markets are net positives, or maybe regulating them will make them so, but banning them does resolve most of their negative effects.
> First, because discoverability is an issue.
I can't believe how many betting ads I see or hear every time I consume US media. It's worse then all the ads about drugs they want you to request from your doctor.
Underground is where it belongs. The less visible it is to the general public, the fewer people will be drawn into it. And it being taken over by organized crime is just another way of saying that law enforcement will be able to make arrests and throw them in prison, which they can't effectively do if it's being run legally.
This is only true if people's want for it exceeds their want to not break the law.
For illegal drugs, people who want them want them a lot, so them being illegal isn't a strong deterrent; although, legalization has still absolutely increased the number of users (i.e. legality was acting as an effective deterrent for some.)
For illegal gambling, sure _some_ people won't be deterred by legality, but most people aren't hardcore gambling addicts; they're just engaging as a form of "harmless fun." They're not looking to go to jail to toss $20 on a sports game.
It was only a few years ago that sports betting was significantly more heavily regulated and limited, and stuff like Polymarket didn't exist (just non-monetary forecasting sites like Metaculus.) Even if there was more demand for "underground gambling" before these changes, the net negative to society was still significantly less.
There were other prediction markets like Intrade which was founded in 1999. I had coworkers who made a significant amount of money doing prediction market arbitrage for the 2012 election.
Intrade confuses me. It was illegal to use Intrade as a US citizen; in fact, some people I personally know who were into that scene had to maintain foreign bank accounts.
What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
> What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.
Giving it to you straight: GOP SCOTUS court packing via denying Obama’s nomination led to 6-3 supermajority, and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue. Sports gambling startups ate sports right up, then, innovators like YC funded companies that said “that, but for everything” and collided with a shameless pay-to-play administration, not the general “politicians take donations from companies” kind, the “name don jr as your strategic advisor” kind. (Kalshi) Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this) is de facto law of the land.
> and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue.
What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.
(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)
> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.
You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?
Fair point that PASPA was the exception, not the rule, and that the anti-commandeering / "states rights" argument isn't some novel theory. It does happen to be deployed often in cases where businesses don't want to be regulated. (and, the elephant in the room, more famously....never mind, let's not go there)
I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.
But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.
We can ban online betting and betting advertising though. If you want to bet on ponies go to a racetrack. No apps, no phones.
Not sure about other countries but in Australia at least, betting was only allowed at race courses on race days. That has obviously changed though.
This was the case in Italy too until a few decades ago, except for some specific locations with a casino license, and a national kind of sport lottery.
Since sport betting became legal the issues with gambling addiction have skyrocketed but the state is addicted to the trickle of provents from it and can't cut it back.
There was an attempt to limit sport bets advertising, and that was widely sidestepped (you advertise for bet.news instead of bet.com, with the former linking to the latter)
Maybe we dedicate specific buildings to gambling, so it's legal, regulated, and localized. Call it a "casino".
We should definitely ban advertising it.
Yeah, sports betting is also bad. I guess polymarket casts a wider net, and the fact that everything is fair game means you cannot avoid hearing about it
Ban it on which grounds?
I have never in my life placed a sport bet, nor a polymarket bet. It strikes me as one of the dumbest things to do with your money and time.
But a lot of people seem to genuinely enjoy it. Gambling is part of human heritage. Regulate? Sure! Ban? I don't understand why
> Ban? I don't understand why
Many things that people enjoy are banned because it causes harm to other individuals or to society as a whole.
Not a difficult concept to understand.
That's why I was asking for a rationale. The devil is in the details. Otherwise motorcycling will be next, alcohol, excessive gaming, etc. etc.
Motorcycling does not cause immediate harm to society or to the individual, and is a regulated activity anyway.
Alcohol and tobacco are regulated too. Perhaps less than it should, in no small part for cultural reasons. I say this as someone that enjoys the occasional whiskey and smoking a pipe.
I am unaware of evidence of gaming causing harm to society. Maybe it exists. I can't comment on it.
I generally share the same perspective but the article provides a good rationale for doing otherwise.
I do not think so. We can hold these people accountable otherwise, there are laws for that already.
I think there is a fundamental difference between betting on a sports event and on a war.
What would that difference be?
Well, one involves two teams of consenting players involved in a game.
The other involves the brutal deaths and suffering of exponentially more innocent people than those who want to be involved.
No, that's the fundamental difference between a sports event and a war. Which is obvious and not what was asked.
The question was, what if any is the fundamental difference between betting on a sports event vs a war?
Add “profiting from and encouraging the exacerbation of” to the start of my explanations.
Then your attempted explanation is wrong.
Plenty of people have been murdered over sports betting. It's more than your reductive "oh it's just consenting players".
[dead]
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
The existence of something in no way encourages someone to commit a crime. That is victim blaming (if the concept of 'sport' can be a victim in this case). Sport and people who enjoy sport and people who enjoy gambling on sport don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to materially gain from it. If you banned sports those people would just move on to some other criminal enterprise to get rich with minimal effort.
In what's happening in the story the fact that people are gambling on a war is certainly quite grim, but it's not really a problem. People do distasteful things all the time. The problem is that they're issuing death threats to someone. That's not really anything to do with gambling.
The existence of incentives can encourage crime. Why would anyone throw a game if there wasn't an upside? Nobody does anything for "free", and by creating a market you are providing liquidity leading to more "labor". A market for whether or not someone will die within x date sets up a financial incentive to kill that person. That is encouragement.
Saying that people who enjoy sport/ gambling "don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to gain materially from it" is a false dichotomy. It's nature. Ask yourself, would you throw a game in your sport of choice in a hobby league for 100 million dollars or whatever? Why not, no one gets harmed, it is a lot of money, it's not even a proper league. This applies to all levels of real world consequences, some people have a larger apetite for risk.
Ah, the old "let's not have gun control, criminals can always find a gun" again. Except that when there are fewer guns around it is manifestly harder for more criminals to find.
In a very strict sense, you are right. But people influence other people, and people who wouldn't act this aggressively otherwise find themselves inspired to after taking a bet.
Ah, the old "let's not have gun control, criminals can always find a gun" again. Except that when there are fewer guns around it is manifestly harder for more criminals to find.
That's not my argument though. Gambling is not the equivalent of a gun in this situation. Gambling is the catalyst, sure, but the crime is making death threats. Removing all the reasons why people might make death threats in order to stop the death threats is going to be tricky.
If you want an analogy it's like the argument is 'Let's not have banks because they only encourage bank robbers!', and I'm here arguing that really we just need to make bank robbery a crime.
But the argument for not having cash so that it does not encourage robberies is a real argument and it does indeed work.
ATMs have long had devices that stain cash if you try to steal from them. Bank cashiers used to have "we don't have the keys to the vault" signs. Vaults that open at fixed times beyond the control of the cashiers are a thing.
Regulation and enforcement are important but removing opportunity and motive are also important.
Things are not black and white, clear cut, absolutes.
The problem can indeed be "the asshat contingent", but at the same time, it's not blaming the victim to say that certain situations open up opportunities.
A lot of our laws are in place to prevent people from taking advantage of such opportunities. That's why some laws seem bizarrely harsh, where you can earn more jail time than physically assaulting someone, for a financial crime. Or computer hacking.
The logic is "this is an easy way to break the law", and "we'll have to make the penalty worse to compensate". That's not blaming the victim. In fact, it's an attempt to protect the victim.
This sensible approach is akin to what you'd do if you entered certain 'sketchy' sections of many cities, at 2am. You certainly wouldn't walk around carrying a big box of 100 iphones, and people would say you were nuts to go into that area at 2am and do so.
Yes, the asshats who assaulted you, beat you unconscious, and stole your $100k worth of iphones were wrong. But, you'd certainly be considered a little dim for doing so I'd think. Why?
Because you're ignoring reality for a catch phrase.
Reality is just that.
If it becomes commonplace for existing prediction markets to get undermined by this kind of manipulation, won't that just be an opportunity for people to create better prediction markets that are less vulnerable to manipulation?
And doesn't that just mean more resources and energy is going into solving the problem of determining the truth of past events (and, as a result given that these are prediction markets, the likelihood of future ones?)
And isn't that a good thing?
If those prediction markets are patronised by people who want to manipulate it, what drives customers to the new ones?
Making it less vulnerable to manipulation would entail exposing less information too. You probably wouldn't be allowed to know the current odds, which makes gambling the same as reading tea leaves.
Both sports betting and prediction markets are effectively the same as reading tea leaves anyway. You can determine the real odds in roulette or blackjack because those are closed games that have simple probabilities, but any odds given in sports betting or prediction markets are just fancy guesses
The odds in betting are the payout ratio. To hinder manipulation, the payout ratio would have to be hidden and then the platform can just always say you won less money than you did.
Perhaps, we overestimate the capabilities of capital markets
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.
We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction. We're talking about gambling as big players paying participants to throw fights, paying referees to call shots, and the players are the real world and the referees are journalists.
> We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction.
What makes you think this is not "gambling-as-addiction"?
It seems to me that these players, big or small, either have too much skin in the game or are compulsive gambling. To me the threats only make sense in that context.
I agree.
Just checking :) Didn't want to confuse two totally different equally compelling reasons to ban prediction markets
I used to be pro-betting legalization and now I see the light. It is a corrosive influence On everything it touches. I hope there's another opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle.
I feel like we need a new word for this because it is far worse than gambling when you can effectively put a hit on someone.
That's fundamentally wrong
>That's fundamentally wrong
If you have an argument, please share it. If you don't, please don't waste everyone's time.
if you can't tell the difference between a game of pure chance and predicting real world events then there is simply nothing to say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
Predicting real events is significantly random which makes it like gambling, but the ability to influence events makes it unlike gambling.
Just calling it gambling emphasizes the former problem while dismissing the latter problem.
any game with a positive expected value is also not gambling, it's mining
Any system that is a zero-sum game with an effectively uncertain outcome is effectively gambling.
Investing at least positive sum in theory. Prediction markets are not.
I can tell the difference (at least I think) but I have no idea what your point is.
prediction markets are not pure gambling just as investing in stocks is not gambling.
I don't follow. What's the definition of "pure" gambling here? Do you consider for example poker to be pure? Sports betting?
Personally I consider any monetary wager where the individual isn't personally invested in corresponding productive events to constitute gambling. By that logic poker, horse races, prediction markets, futures, and even the vast majority of day trading all constitute forms of gambling.
Lotteries are pure gambling because you can't influence things, I guess that is what he meant. The examples you mentioned are then "impure gambling" since its inherently possible to influence the outcome without breaking the rules. It isn't illegal to bet on a hose that you gave extra good shoes and so on.
Betting on which card will be on top of a freshly shuffled deck is pure gambling. It is a game of pure chance.
Betting on sports is not pure chance. If I play a game of tennis against roger federer, I am sure to lose. I can predict this event with 100% certainty.
https://polymarket.com/event/btc-updown-5m-1773764400
Bitcoin up or down is another non-chance event. I can easily sway the price of bitcoin by just buying some.
Recently there was a market to predict how long the US government shutdown would last. This is not gambling--you can look at historical data of shutdown durations and form a prediction based on researching each politician's views.
Sure, an idiot might gamble by just picking an option at random, but the game itself isn't gambling because it's not a game of pure chance.
Okay. So by that logic poker is gambling but not "pure" gambling. Fair enough.
So as previously stated I can tell the difference but still have no idea what point you were originally trying to make. Prediction markets are still a form of gambling however impure, no? Just as betting on a horse race is.
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.
Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are morally corrupt and we having given them too much space in our society already.
That particular part isn't lawyer bullshit. They're beta testing a completely separate system that runs under US regulations. It looks like it'll be legal in a non-bullshit way.
Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.
[dead]
There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.
Then this person better bet their entire life savings on them dying, since it would reduce incentive (profit). Crazy thought experiment, gave me lots to think about
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.
Defer to an actual authority. Where is the official report on whether or not it was an interception? Even with a large explosion the fact that it landed in a wooded area implies it was intercepted. Those are targeted missiles, an acceptable result of an interception is to bring it down in an undeveloped area.
So I would think there should be some sort of authority with official capacity to state what happened, not just a random journalist that doesn't give concrete sources.
> No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
That is why modern reportings best practice is to always support both sides. /s
[dead]
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"
They can also just do that bidding war in the resolution contract
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...
How does one say that a media worker is fair game, but a journalist is not? Both are classified as civilians under international law [1]. There are several airstrikes as the method of execution of these journalists as well. Good job cherry-picking the "favourable" examples. Also, I don't know what you're on about, but ICC is clearyly investigating Israeli war crimes of targeted journalist executions [3]. [1]: https://cpj.org/2023/10/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-... [2]: https://cpj.org/data-methodology/ [3]: https://ifex.org/iccs-israel-palestine-investigation-will-in...
> Both are classified as civilians
Then say civilians. Don't claim what you can't provide. And DO provide context (like, was it still while the massacre was ongoing [1]). But all I can do is to suggest.
> Good job cherry-picking
Me cherry-picking: Taking the literally first entries, Array[0] and Array[1].
Also, you can't claim cherry-picking as invalid against gish-gallop. Since you can't enjoy the size argument only to retract items on the list after the smallest pushback.
Otherwise I can prove God. How? Every sentence in the Bible... Oh, you found some that are wrong? "Good job cherry-picking"!
And not to mention dozens of more problems with the list (no mentioning any IDF comments, no source for titles, etc.). This is just a bad list. Simple as.
> ICC is clearly investigating
Investigating != Judgment. But good, send them more. But please send them a list starting with items that might hold the smallest of scrutinies. And don't prove it by hinting at conspiracies just because Israel has a security censor. But all I can do is to suggest.
[1]: https://13tv.co.il/item/news/abroad/dynw9-903794689/
[flagged]
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..
The link corroborates my claim; the State of Israel does not protect press freedom.
I am asking you to cite a better counterarguement, if you want to disprove it. Or concede that Israeli journalists are regularly threatened by their government.
I feel like being a journalist in a warzone is already exposure to a sufficient number of threats for the benefit of human society that we shouldn't simply accept them being exposed to any entirely different set of completely unnecessary threats from a pile of sociopaths running their own sick gambling dead pools.
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...
> and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran
Oh, trump made some money?
nit: The article you linked says half a billion, not a billion.
Death markets are banned in the US. Personally, I tend to think of this as a crypto problem, not a prediction market problem.
It's also fundamentally something you can't really do properly in crypto. You need a central authority to decide if "thing has happened". There's no way to properly incentivize accuracy in cases where the majority of stake benefits from an inaccuracy.
You are describing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away. Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that increases the amount of money behind assassinations.
Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and death, but seriously, grow up.
[0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount
I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market of validated ideas and could submit a ‘bid’ before a set deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best product.
> But what if you could push?
There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.
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.
Yeah it's about trust and risk.
I'm not sure how to align the incentives on that.
For the consumer the ideal case is that the money is not released from the escrow until their product actually arrives.
But that would be overly restrictive, and limit development to companies with significant funds.
Kickstarter has a balance where, you only pledge money after deciding you trust the company.
I think we could do it so the initial fundraiser is provisional. And then everyone would know that some portion of that would fall through. Over time you would learn what the ratio is. If a million is pledged, maybe you can expect 200k to be committed in the final round.
We could even divide it further. There is some portion of users which are more open-minded and enthusiastic. They might be happy to fund a round of crappy prototypes. So in this way smaller players could gain trust and credibility.
If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?
That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.
The problem in the article is sort of boring, this is nothing new, centralized authorities who run prediction markets have been doing a terrible job at wording the predictions and then people get pissed when those poorly written words are put through a forcing function. Incompetence is boring.
Problem intrinsic to gambling is that people appropriate expected winnings instead of what they really put in, thus making the feeling of loss even greater than what it objectively is.
Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true:
Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems.
or
Case 2. sam0x17 goes through his life wielding a giant hammer called "privacy", which he swings about wildly without ever feeling the need to look very closely at any given nail. In fact, he'll even shout "privacy" in the face of a situation where privacy *is the problem*. Goons are hiding behind privacy to threaten a reporter and his family? Let's give them more privacy, that'll fix it!
HN can be very predictable sometimes, but hey, at least nobody ITT has suggested Rust yet.
You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.
Yes, I read your message.
> At no point do I say the oracle target should be private
Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.
Instead, your original said stuff like:
> they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity
> no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side
> where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation.
In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance:
"The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor."
Did you read... his comment? My comment? TFA?
This doesn't make any sense…
If you want to bet on a binary outcome without knowing how much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes, that's a bookie, not a prediction market.
The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and credible way.
(And that's even before we get to the fact that any kind of betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize outcomes like the death threats reported here.)
You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome
I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad
Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough
> 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 mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.
Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community.
I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there
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.
Their comment proposed something that would "be the answer here".
What does "here" mean? It's logical to expect "here" to refer to a scenario that includes cases like the one in the article. If it's some scenario that excludes cases like the one in the article, then it's not actually relevant to the discussion.
(Tangents are OK. It's just confusing if they're introduced with phrasing that makes them sound like they're not tangents.)
"here" in that comment is not referring to any specific scenario. It is referring to the problem discussed in the sentence immediately following it, that public prediction markets can shape the outcome of the events they are predicting.
>how you extrapolated that
I wasn't extrapolating - it was the literal meaning of the words. The context was that someone commented "shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called outcome-shaping markets" in direct reply to "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over…[the prediction market "Iran strikes Israel on March 10"]. I interpret that as polymarket gamblers outcome-shaped Iran striking Israel. It was at 25% odds when they struck. I don't think the commenter actually meant that literally, which is why I asked them to clarify. I'm just doing my best here.
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'.
The decision-makers don't need change their decision whatsoever to corruptly profit from it, though, they can just place bets on the timeframe or outcome of whatever decision they originally intended to make. Why risk operational disruptions and a greater chance of getting caught when you can still profit exorbitantly from insider trading on your knowledge without incurring those unnecessary risks?
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
Not Polymatket, but there's a humorous case of the Sutton FC goalkeeper eating a pork pie on TV, thus resolving a bet on whether he would do so.
many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw something at X basketball game" and then someone kept doing it, etc
I was confused as well: After further consideration, I realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and credibly reports on those events and their resolution criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg. national militaries.
"Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel’s military correspondent or other credible sources reports that Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money.
In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully, your worst crime is publishing a fictional news article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.
Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks", where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the Internet through another financial instrument.
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rul...
> you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.
You don't even need the market to actually resolve, as soon as your rumor becomes credible the market pricing will adjust and you can just sell your shares before resolution.
I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business.
"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
That's superb. A very good literature story could be written based on that.
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...
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.
That's how pari mutuel betting works; the odds are set by the bettors betting and unknown until the book closes.
That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.
One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This only works if your intuition is better than the market's current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any particular knowledge.
Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing them don’t know or care about the odds.
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.
Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should exist on websites that are publicly accessible.
If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of the type of people who make death threats to journalists.
At the time of the threats the odds were likely very skewed, as in over 99% to one side.
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value>
> Most people on Polymarket are gamblers
Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.
If a casino sets up a normal roulette wheel but pays out red at 1.5x and black at 2.5x, betting 5% of your bankroll on black over and over is "gambling" but it's not "gambling", if you get what I'm saying.
I think they mean "most people are gamblers _who_ have no idea what they're doing"
Some people are insiders though.
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.
Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is a great game, I highly recommend it to anyone in this thread.
It opens with a content warning saying that the player will likely become very angry at least once when a baby who you are financially incentivized to watch crash and burn pulls their life together, and that's okay.
I appreciate that they're explicitly covering this psychological phenomenon.
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 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
Your link points to a 2012 discussion of "Why an Airline That Travelers Love Is Failing". Not super convincing.
It's a pg comment explaining "middlebrow dismissal."
Why not look at the primary source evidence yourself?
> It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST
https://understandingwar.org/newsroom/statement-on-isw-mappi...
https://polymarket.com/event/arch-will-russia-capture-myrnoh...
> Settled as: Proposal: Yes
> This market will resolve to “Yes” if, according to the ISW map, Russia captures the intersection between Vatutina Vulytsya and Puhachova Vulytsya located in Myrnohrad by November 15, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET.
The intersection station will be considered captured if any part of the intersection is shaded red on the ISW map (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641...) by the resolution date. If the area is not shaded red by November 15, 2025, 11:59 PM ET, the market will resolve to “No”.
https://oracle.uma.xyz/settled?project=Polymarket&transactio...
Please give me a single example backing up the claim that Quincy Institute is "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"
On their page "Quincy Institute’s Position on Russia-Ukraine" they say at the very beginning:
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
It has been suggested that QI’s approach is insufficiently critical of Russia.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
Followed by the sentence "A cursory search of our writings and our website shows this to be false."
Would you honestly genuinely describe this as "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"? Dishonesty
It is clear that the opinion it's pro-Russian is widespread enough they need to make advance disclaimers. You wanted "a single example backing up the claim", you got one - from the horse's mouth.
You have again failed to meet the characterization of "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank". If you are unable to find any actual evidence that fits that description then you should just admit as much
I refuse to believe you continue to miss the point explained to you several times. Being intentionally obtuse is not a great look.
All I'm asking for is a single article or published piece that you can characterize as "thoroughly pro-Russia". You routinely fail to provide this
I'm setting the bar really low here
you have angered the russian bots, be careful.
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.
Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the invasion
You're welcome to find a piece of their writing where they unequivocally support Ukraine without ifs, buts, and NATO-didits.
In their own words:
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
Also, having nuance and historical context does not mean they are "pro-Russia". We should be celebrating institutions that challenge propaganda narratives with context not hunting down anyone that doesn't fall in line with a narrative that requires you to believe history started last year
(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.
In their own words
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
Literally in the same piece:
It has been suggested that QI’s approach is insufficiently critical of Russia. A cursory search of our writings and our website shows this to be false.
I wonder why would anyone suggest that, and frequently enough they have to get out of their way to write a disclaimer?
> How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
Mate it's 2026, your gaslighting doesn't work for a few years now.
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/
They are being downvoted because Nuland is an utterly insignificant diplomat, but serves well as a dog whistle for people who subscribe to the belief that the Maidan revolution in Ukraine was really some Obama organized coup. This is a story peddled by the Russian government, which of course is where Yanukovych promptly fled after having protestors shot. At the same time Russia was busy staging troops and material for the actual coup they were planning.
Yes, insignificant enough to remark "Yats is our guy" (during an intercepted but confirmed-authentic conversation with another US diplomat that Russia subsequently leaked), only for "Yats" (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) to subsequently become the Ukrainian PM. Coincidence, I'm sure...
Here's what a spokesperson for Polymarket said:
"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/polymarket-bett...
(I'd prefer if it said they were evaluating whether to limit the types of bets accepted to make the possibility of harassing journalists less likely.)
"this violates our TOS" is a classic Accountability Sink. "Polymarket has a rule against harassment, so we obviously did all we could!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
Looks like a fantastic book at the outset. Thanks for the suggestion.
It's a little light on rigor. There's a lot of "X happened before Y therefore X caused Y" but I think it's a really good articulation of some of the problems it tackles.
> whether to limit the types of bets accepted
Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats concentrating around certain bet genres?
Yes in sports. NCAA is trying to specifically get player prop bets banned in part because they are more likely not just to be corrupt, but also they specifically mention player safety.
https://www.ncaa.org/news/2026/1/15/media-center-ncaa-urges-...
I linked this elsewhere, but I found Nate Silver's take interesting here. He specifically takes on the problem of player prop bets and says they produce abusive behavior toward players.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...
I think it's reasonable to research if there's some equivalent to player prop bets in other contexts, like anything that might hinge on what a reporter writes. There's the safety angle and there's also just the "more likely to be corrupted" angle. Like I said in my original comment, I'd just like them to evaluate this.
Polymarket should do the right thing. Unfortunately that means shut down entirely.
[dead]
Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48 hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent: above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.
Definitely an unpopular opinion: The whole with the internet is anonymity. Keep in mind, I support an anonymous internet, however, political interests, corporate interests, hate groups, etc. are all using it to undermine society.
Example: When Twitter ("X") suddenly started showing the locations of accounts, a lot of folks with MAGA talking points were shown to be anywhere except the U.S. Accounts with millions of followers and tons of influence have never even set foot in the U.S.
Another Example: Polymarket (not the "US" one) is anonymous. Because of this, events like the headline talks about happens. Certain government leaders worldwide could easily be seeding the bets, and playing the market, and you would never know.
Anonymity is nice, however, it is being taken advantage of for power plays. This is why we can't have nice things.
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 this is way worse. Traditionally violence towards journalists comes from (A) predictable entities and (B) they are curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.
In contrast:
1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.
2. The violence can arrive from all sides, simultaneously. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one way to ensure an existing report is not revised is to put the journalist out of commission.
3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, with a new bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"
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.
> Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
Ban it where exactly? If you’ve got personal knowledge of where these knuckleheads reside, speak up. It’s entirely possible that it is banned where they are and they just got a VPN and did it anyway.
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.
> If you are from the US and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet of what is American.
"Everyone I disagree with is Not A Real American and should just leave the country. Who's a Real American? Well, someone who agrees with my personal political views, of course."
utterly idiotic worldview
Pursuing personal freedom is highly self-consistent; there is nothing idiotic about it. Those who seek to repress will on the other hand soon find themselves repressed.
It's also hard to have 3 independent outlets report on all the thing.s This seems like a small story that only some people in Polymarket cared about I guess? It's not like 3 different news outlets were calling authorities to confirm what really happened here. It wasn't big enough to deserve more than 1 journalist going to the source and doing all this work.
Israel doesn't have a free press, so it stays largely suppressed. If it did, surely more local news outlets would cover it. Israel strongly censors domestic war news.
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.)
Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider all feel like variations on a theme. If you start with Shockwave and absolutely love it then you are in luck because there's more where that came from. But all of his books are worth reading imho.
> as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic.
Yeah, I should really revisit Future Shock. That book might have been a little ahead of its time.
> Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.
100% agree, and I think it's almost a bigger flaw here. I'm not saying "it gets better in the second season" but I wouldn't be surprised if some people bounce off the future slang.
Interestingly enough, Brunner might be one of the only white authors I've read who describes his characters by skin tone.
Look everyone, this person believes talking Tortoises are real!
In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?
In my experience book stores either have multiple copies or zero copies.
Robertson Davies is another bellwether author I should mention.
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..
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.
For some reason this reminds me of the Byzantine Generals problem. The fact is that unless you were there we don't really know how accurate any of these statements are. The video evidence is fine but I can whip something up in veo3 in 2 minutes. So while it's not a timing issue exactly (the truth might come out eventually), like the og byzantine generals problem, it is one of incentives toward deception. The real goal here isn't the payout, it's visibility into an active war. Polymarket is gambling at it's core, but the information it surfaces is used as justification for massive financial (and military) deals. I suspect this is likely what is happening here. Whereas before you might report on something and perhaps that's it, because news is always unreliable, now you report on something that has a measurable effect on some deal pipeline. Good on you for reporting on this. Difficult problem to solve tbh.
Still no idea how a polymarket is legal with all the insider trading opportunities.
Insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft. If you insider trade on the stock market then, in a crude simplification, you steal profits from the company you have a fiduciary duty to, or some extension of that. It has nothing to do with a level playing ground, every trading company out there is trying to find information others can't and then trade on it.
What? How do you figure that? If I happen to know that my company is about to report very bad quarterly numbers, so I sell all my stock, then it tanks, I’ve just screwed whoever bought the stock, that in the most cases, will be some random people. The company does not benefit or hurt from stock prices unless they are buying back or issuing more stock.
Because that's what the law says? And the company most definitely does benefit and hurt from a fluctuating stock price, it's one of the key drivers behind financing conditions. What you describe is a simpleton view of the financial market.
That’s how the criminal penalties are framed.
I am not surprised that this happened. This is the logical conclusion of betting. Like in Muay Thai competitions, some efficient attacks are underutilized because they give the performer fewer points, which can be bad for the people betting on them. And their funding comes from the betting, so they change the sport to match what the gamblers want.
You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.
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.
To be fair gambling, like criminality, has been illegal. Similar to mobs running speakeasies.
I do not think it is so clear cut as legalize/not legalize. Current legislation often doesn't even consider this gambling - however, even if you took the viewpoint that making it illegal helps, you then have to accept the externalities that arise - crime rings will develop that offer the services, and now their users are criminals and completely vulnerable to any amount of bad/malicious practices there.
Which, historically, is a much smaller and easier problem than legalized, unregulated gambling.
We already have a model for this in the casino system.
Like sure, there’s some small black market here, but it’s relatively minuscule.
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.
Ok but if you're using it to kill people you're probably going to be pretty careful about how you got your money into the system.
You'd be very surprised. It's more likely to be a collection of internet trolls than to be organized crime
...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.
Well, that's why it's called an investigation.
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.
It's not BS though? That's what companies like Chainalysis professionally. This was covered in graphic detail as to how they caught a pedo ring in Andy Greenberg's book Tracers In The Dark.
Isn't it like claiming that breaking and entering is pointless, as you can always trace the perp through finger prints, unless they happen to wear gloves? Except in this case, most of the criminals operate from outside your jurisdiction as well.
In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in Israel.
Yes, it seems likely.
I assume the author would have noted in his blog post if the Hebrew used in making the threats came across as non-native or non-fluent.
Machine translation is really good these days, but I still think there are some "tells" for a truly vernacular and local command of a language.
Because translation is so very hard?
Yes, for colloquial speech to be plausible to a native speaker.
Polymarket has KYC for US users now. Can you get around it with a VPN though? I think so.
>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?
Maybe they are all in North Korea and beyond any extradition. But police broadly defined don’t even try very hard when it comes to certain crimes.
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.
Interesting tangent. This is the first I've heard the term "neoliberal" but it feels like it's being used as a perjorative term for libertarians?
"If power is concentrated anywhere..." The libertarian ideal is that it is not concentrated anywhere, because power corrupts. Maybe neoliberals want power concentrated in some entity that isn't government, and that's what you are arguing against? I guess I better do a little research on this new (to me at least) word
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> What is the law being broken?
“In most jurisdictions, death threats are a serious type of criminal offence” [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_threat#Legality
>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?
In the US it’s a legal battle currently being fought. CISOs have been charged by the SEC and other agencies, with varied success. Some cases have been deemed over-reach, some have not. And other were a case of a CISO doing ostensibly illegal things in their capacity (in some cases paying ransom demands have been interpreted as such, especially when disguised as other things).
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.”
It exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution
Fair. I should probably say “we need to actually use the corporate death penalty.”
Yes, but you are very much right: the fact that it exists but that hardly anybody knows about it is what is the problem. There are many companies that over the years should have been dissolved because of incredible crimes and yet they all keep getting away with it.
Besides that I'm all for strict personal liability for the execs and the investors of the companies they invest in. That's of course the exact opposite of the way it works right now but that actually institutionalized externalization, one of the key issues with why the world is the mess that it is.
Corporations are fine, limited liability corporations are not, I'm becoming more and more convinced that they are in fact the root of all evil because they allow the erection of financial 'diodes' that allow you to partition your stash from your liabilities and the two should always be linked. They are a very effective mechanism to allow people to screw over society and claim it's all perfectly legal.
I’ve always felt LLC’s should more narrowly limit people’s liability more or less. It’s basically a shield currently. I also think it should be reserved for sole proprietorships or otherwise very small companies, and very specific kinds of companies at that. For instance, if I am drumming up funding for a movie I should not be personally held liable if it loses money (otherwise indie film would be completely snuffed out lol)
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.
>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.
> Someone has received credible death threats
2 points - 1) “credible” is carrying a lot of water in that statement, and 2) your implication is that any activity which could eventually or conceivably involve a lunatic making a death threat is not compatible with any level of privacy.
The second is incredibly disturbing - people have made death threats over E2E encrypted chat channels, therefore we must remove any privacy built in to such a model?
I'll just dodge 1 for the moment since we're discussing an article about those threats. For the second point - I'm not saying that death threats should invalidate privacy concerns I just wanted to stress that the little people are already seeing quite a few downsides so it's important to view this issue with more nuance than a Facebook-like scenario when the privacy only comes at the cost of ad-revenue.
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.
If he's breaking the law and there is proof to that, then he will and should be arrested.
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’m not sure what that wiki article has to do with a criticism of the oblique “late stage” capitalism term. Particularly when the only reference is a link to the relevant late stage capitalism article which mentions the term isn’t all that clear cut or even used with any degree of consistency, which is why I’m asking for proof that “every single” economist agrees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
You said
> Capitalism is just capitalism.
If you want to just debate the validity of the specific term “late stage capitalism” then sure go ahead, but that’s not all you did in your prior comment. Capitalism comes in many forms and variations.
That being said, late stage capitalism is such a common term now that to say “it isn’t a thing“ feels more like something you feel should be the case than anything else. The fact that everyone in this conversation is able to understand the phrase without anyone needing to explain it is pretty indicative of that.
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.
> (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?
Just as a note - I feel like there's a lack of understanding of how difficult it is to get a billion dollars. It isn't something you can just trip into and I think the concentration of that much wealth really goes against something in most people's approach to the world where generosity increases as you gain more wealth. To capture that much wealth as a business owner you have to be extremely stingy with compensation to those who accompanied you along that path which is not how most people tend to operate - more often people share that wealth and make sure those around them also benefit from the work even if the structure of corporations may technically entitle the owner to 100% of the upside.
Having assets worth X dollars is not the same thing as having X dollars. It means investors are willing to trade you X dollars for the assets.
Those investors don't want to give /you/ money, they want to give the billionaire money.
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.
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.
US cops don't care about solving crimes or making people safe, they only care about making a profit. And harassing random motorists on the side of the road is way easier and safer profits than trying to deal with real crime involving people with money that can afford their own lawyers to fight back.
US cops? It's Israel.
[dead]
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.
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.
I think you might be over-fixated on a very prediction-market-esque framing of this plot device... if you broaden it slightly, the idea of someone in a fictional world manipulating the news reporting of an act or set of acts, rather than caring so much about the root act itself, is as stated before, quite common.
For example, this from House of Cards: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/arts/television/house-of-...
> Pollyhop is a fictional, Google-esque search engine that according to Leann’s polling expert is being exploited by the Republican candidate Will Conway in ways that suggest Underwood can’t possibly beat him in the general election. The explanation of how Pollyhop works is convoluted at best, but the gist is that Conway and his people are manipulating search engine results so that only positive coverage of their side appears.
Or more recent examples of what essentially boils down to the plot device of "media manipulation" aka manipulating the "news reporting of the act":
- See the most recent season of Industry, which included several plot points about manipulating news coverage as a short-seller and the company being targeted fought back and forth (including specific focus on the individual journalists involved)
- See Andor, everything about how the Empire twists perception of what's happening on Ghorman, leading up the Ghorman massacre itself, and then culminating in Mon Mothma's speech in the Senate denouncing "the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil"
- See The Orville, a particular episode: https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule which includes the plot point of hacking that society's "master feed" to plant false manipulative stories to curry public favor and save a character from being punished
- See The Boys, how Vought manipulates the media to twist coverage of their "heroes" even when they commit atrocities
- See other House of Cards plotlines involving Zoe Barnes and being a direct mouthpiece for Frank Underwood
I think the only real difference if any, is that in the most common form of portrayal, maybe less attention is paid to the journalist as the point of leverage, and how they deal with threats or bribes or whatever. The fact that such manipulation occurs, is commonly accepted as a trope, without requiring too much of a deep dive. Whether a story choose to focus on the "reporter's perspective" is perhaps less common, but not uncommon IMO.
Bond's Casino Royal had a stock short sell bet with a planned attack.
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).
The findings are consistent with academic research that these markets are well calibrated.
Could be, you should reference the academic research then.
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.
> 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.
It may be cherry-picking, but I think some commenters misunderstand this (or maybe I do).
The implication seems to be "12 hours before the resolution things are obvious anyway". But if that were the case, then I could pick some wager that is obviously true but has, for example, 70% chance, and putting my money on that. If it was true that "12 hours before the resolution it's obvious what the result is", everything would be in 0% or 100% buckets. I believe getting event with 30% confidence right exactly 30% times is impressive no matter if that's 12h or 120h before.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about prediction markets, just what I understood from the blog post.
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.
1. That is not how prediction market calibration plots work! Calibration is measured across the range of markets with different forecasted odds.
https://calibration.city/introduction
https://manifold.markets/calibration
2. That is just obviously not all these markets are doing. They're aligning incentives and aggregating information in the same way other markets do.
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?
Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.
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...
My unsupported non-conspiracy opinion:
A) They notice that it would land in the middle of nowhere and decided to not destroy it. It's better keep the interceptors for one that is going to hit an important target.
B) They partially intercepted it, perhaps only broke the motor or a fin, but the explosive head was intact. So instead of going to an important target, it crashed and exploded in the middle of nowhere.
(A) is extremely plausible. It is well-known that Iron Dome specifically avoided targeting rockets for interception when they not going to land in areas with people or infrastructure.
The main reason for this is because the interceptors are very scarce and costly.
Not a conspiracy theory, IDF official policy is to not use interceptors when the missile is confirmed by calculations to hit unpopulated areas. (This calculation does not work for every type of missile or on every occasion)
I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).
The gamblers would have had a much easier time convincing a journalism LLMs that their article was "a lie".
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.
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.
Regardless of which side you are on, you are going to have enemies when it comes to the Middle East politics.
If you are a journalist, it comes with the territory, I'm sure you know.
Sooner or later a college athlete is gonna get killed for missing a shot.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
Related to your comment, see Nate Silver's take on the NBA gambling scandal.
"Player props are inherently more subject to manipulation because only one player needs to be involved in rigging the outcome. [...] Even as someone more sympathetic to gambling than most people you’re probably reading on this story, I’m not sure I’d really care if player prop bets were banned entirely. They produce abusive behavior toward players. They also often put team and individual performance into tension with one another..."
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...
Yes. Or for making a shot.
If you read some of the now-copious reporting about gamblers targeting athletes with death threats, you'll see that they have people screaming at them and threatening them violently both for performing badly and for performing well.
Truly unhinged and alarming that gambling has been legalized and marketed so quickly and so extensively, in so many forms.
Polymarket heads think they're so smart as they simultaneously reveal a total lack of awareness about feedback loops.
I don't know who needs to hear it but, you can't predict the future. You can get close, but its never a guarantee unless you have insider info, and even that can change at the last moment.
I have a theory that prediction markets will becomes hyperstition engines. This is a rather... violent example.
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.
This reminds me of the 9/11-era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market
...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".
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.
Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate a poly market bet by 2040.
Already happened.
Source?
Sounds like polymarket needs to add "will bettors kill this man" as something you can bet on.
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.
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.
It's far worse than regular gambling
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 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
Many of the comments in this discussion remind me of that Rothchild analysis in the second half of the 1800s when France had problems with a revolution.
> A friend asked Baron Rothschild what he was doing in response to Paris Commune:
> “Why,” replied the famous banker musingly, “French government bonds are selling at sixty-five. I bought five millions yesterday.”
> “What!” exclaimed the friend. “Bought bonds? Why, France is without a government, and the sewers of Paris are running red with blood!”
> “Yes, it is deplorable,” remarked the baron, “but if the sewers of Paris were not running red with blood, I could not buy bonds at this price. France will survive this terrible calamity, as she survived the Revolution, and the seven coalitions against her of all the powers of Europe. Her credit will again be the highest of any nation, and her bonds will sell again above par.”
People who oppose gambling tend to see this as a foreign capitalist selfishly making money off of the dire situation of the French people. People who do not oppose gambling see it as financial support of the French in their times of trouble when others have abandoned them.
This has nothing to do with opposing gambling. It has everything to do with, say, opposing gamblers poisoning horses to win bets.
Surely you can see the difference between dealing in a legitimate asset like a government bond, which requires a market of buyers and sellers, versus this new extraneous layer of prediction contracts, where the only defensible economic purpose is some weak information signal.
You applied the razor very well here.
There will always be a market.
It seems like the easy solution is for polymarket to just unwind the transaction and give everyone their money back, no harm no foul.
That would mean the people who did the death threats get their money back.
Yes. And then they won't want to kill the journalist anymore. Because otherwise they are going to lose all their money.
It's a bad idea to reward death threats like that. There would be more of them in the future.
Australians gamble more than anyone on Earth but the idea that people "invest" huge money, whether or not missiles explode in a country at war is crazy.
It was said Australians would bet on two flies climbing up a wall. But this is madness.
Prediction markets remind of the "Safety Training" episode[1] of the Office where Kevin and others are betting on the outcome of various situations. It was pretty funny and absurd back then. Didn't expect it to be so prescient.
[1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Safety_Training
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.
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.
Well, we're discovering some really fascinating and pervasive failure cases of proto-futarchy. Please update your priors.
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
It's true but it's just revealing what Wall Street et al have been up to for the past several decades. There's this perception that they're all doing Very Important Work(tm), when in fact they're just making up silly rules and playing games with each other, aka gambling.
Wall Street is doing price discovery which benefits index investors. They're also lending (e.g. private credit) which benefits economic activity.
Robin Hood options trading is just lighting money on fire under the guise of "investing", which insidiously somehow seems more responsible than gambling on roulette.
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.)
Similar business cases can be made for futures from polymarket. For example if I start a business in the USA I may want to hedge by buying some futures Jesus will not return before 2027.
Do we typically [0] have a problem with people sabotaging industries to manipulate the futures market?
[0] Edit: Originally wrote "currently", but then I remembered the current White House, whose various crimes are being studiously ignored by the Republican congress.
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.
Run away from Polymarket
That's the issue with allowing people to bet on public events.
It's odd that we allow this to happen.
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 does this block VPNs?
That's the limit of smart-contracts: they can't know the real world, so they depend on "Oracles"/external sources who can be corrupted or coerced, and so even if the foundation is guaranteed in the code, what the code uses as a reference is not...
“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
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.
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.
Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia!!!
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.
[dead]
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.
At some point betting markets are going to become a form of market where people are effectively posting bounties. You bet 1,000,000 for someone to murder a public official then someone gets in on the action and hires a hitman to do the job.
Gambling is degenerate and inclined to cause crime and criminal behavior. Ban this shit already, decriminalization of gambling is a failed experiment.
> The Economic Times, an Indian English-language business-focused news site
God help those using this newspaper as their source for betting
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?
Peak Hebrew hilarity
nightmare fuel
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?
I think people & companies get value from these markets because they are able to plan on the basis of accurate forecasts for scenarios like potential wars and election results.
I agree that these markets also create bad incentives, I just think that on net the information provided tends to be more valuable.
> 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.
I live here, I don't need Polymarket to know that there will be missiles tomorrow. In fact, that's why I'm on HN now even though it's just past midnight here. Because it's a well known law of nature that just as I drift off to sleep my phone will violently alert me with this horrid bzzhhh-bzzhhh sound that missiles are incoming. Then I'll turn on the TV, any news channel, and see the "polygon of uncertainty" overlaid on a map of the country, updating in real time, and I'll decide how fast to put my shoes on. Polymarket odds ain't got nothing on that.
More seriously - I used to think this was a good argument. But the night before the war broke out, I checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to move fast to get closer to shelter.
Yes, it's anecdata, etc etc
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?
> That there are economical incentives to make it happen just to make money?
I don't see how there is. The liquidity in a prediction market is not high enough to compensate for the expense of going to war.
The war was going to happen irregardless of the prediction market. The prediction market only let us know when it was going to happen with some hours to spare.
Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.
If there was a prediction market for whether I'll be hit by a car tomorrow, and it was lucrative enough that it would actually be worth anyone's time to deliberately hit me with a car, I'd stay home and bid on "no". Pretty sure I'd make more than enough to cover the cost of ordering pizza.
There are already perverse incentives to commit arson, like insurance. And it's entirely possible that prediction markets can make insurance even more cost-effective.
> Ballistic missiles are pretty expensive. You'd have to bid a lot of money for it to be worthwhile to shoot them at a country just to make money on Polymarket.
Not your money, you can be just a random in the executive and lobby for it.
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).
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).."
That's when you just gotta kill yourself. Can't kill what's already dead.
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.
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.
Making people unhappy doesn't cause them to declare bankruptcy and become homeless. People may lose their reputation by reporting falsehoods in the paper (though probably not). People might read incorrect information in the newspaper. People may directly lose access to food and shelter due to gambling. The risks are no where close to equivalent.
> I don't think you understand. [...]
I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario: the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%. What does that tell you about the future?
You can try to derive information out of a stock market price, but it is not a prediction tool. The newspaper and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the context of prediction tools, because they both tell you exactly what they predict.
The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the function is completely different.
People can go bankrupt from sports betting, from financial investing, they go bankrupt in lots of different ways through all sorts of bad decisions. If you want to outlaw recreational betting entirely, and restrict things like Polymarket and the stock market entirely to people like "accredited investors" who are supposedly responsible enough not to go bankrupt, then maybe argue for that, but not against Polymarket specifically. And then you're going to have to argue why that doesn't restrict people's freedom -- why should only richer people be allowed to trade on information? Doesn't that disadvantage the average citizen?
> What does that tell you about the future?
Are these supposed to be trick questions or something? They tell you exactly what they tell you. I already told you -- the stock price is a prediction of NPV of future profits. Did you see that in my last comment? Do you understand that? If that isn't a concrete, actionable and valuable prediction, I don't know what is.
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.
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.
It seems strange to me that a single source would be used to resolve a bet any way. You have all this crap to make a platform "decentralized" and then it all collapses down to: "bruh, it happened, I swear." It really makes me realize how often blockchain / decentralization / "cryptography" projects are nothing more than pseudo-technical theater. Peak hype-driven development.
That would require tons of infrastructure and investment on Polymarket's side (more expense) and also reduce the number of permitted wagers (less revenue). i.e, never gonna fucking happen, it's way easier and more lucrative to have a hands-off approach, and only intervene for the occasional high-profile misfire.
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.
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.
Yes that is bad, but it isn't as bad as the expected value of a Powerball lottery ticket.
I didn't say it isn't bad, just that it isn't the worst.
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
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
Unless you do insider trading, which can be pretty easy on prediction markets depending on your job...
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
It literally has to be compromised to work. If the roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start of the spin. It has to have irregularities and asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour – and those same irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
[dead]
I would go with rationalism being a delusion of tech bros rather than blaming a failure of rationalism on those lumpen proles inventing silly sports propositions.
Do you know someone in particular who blamed sports betting on "lumpen proles"? It kinda seems like you're making up a person to get mad at here.
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.
Aren't death markets explicitly banned?
Stock markets also incentivize murder. Short a company, then kill the CEO. Boom, profit.
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".
Yes - and further, even if something is "just human behavior", that doesn't mean it's never beneficial to humans to legally regulate the enablement or exploitation of that behavior.
>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.
Sounds like a urban legend.
I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.
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?
Your comparison is not even close to what is happening here.
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.
There aren't that many things bad on this scale that I can think of.
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
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
As a sibling says, the story is for ships, other insurance has existed for millenials.
Yes but if you're a bloke toking on your pipe in Lloyds Coffee House in 1713 you don't know that you already ordered a submarine to sink a ship you're placing a bet will sink...
Submarines in 1713?
It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
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”.
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.
That existed before the internet.
The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.
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.
I do find that to be a fun thought experiment, but HN doesn't seem to agree.
How would you know it was caused by that bill? Maybe politicians should just be paid based on something we want to incentivize, like lower quartile wages.
I'm curious how you know HN doesn't seem to agree!
But I think your idea is probably a better idea than betting.
Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure
> 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.
You might have a point with institutional investors, but regular consumers on Polymarket are absolutely just gambling.
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.
It's more like the dots aren't connected but they're all the same size and color because that kind of dot is in fashion.
I don't think Polymarket bans consistent winners. You gamble against other users and Polymarket makes the same fee either way.
[flagged]
Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days
And goatse is harmless compared to the shit that's out there, especially because it only affects the dude himself. Even 3 guys 1 hammer isn't the worst yet (though pretty bad already).
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!
[dead]
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).
[dead]
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?
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and criticized state run gambling.
"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."
Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral philosopher first and an accidental economist second.
Yes! As a beginner-level, amateur armchair economist who hated philosophy class in high school, I have to admit I was surprised to learn about this when reading https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/economix by Michael Goodwin. The book overall seems to lean liberal whenever there's a political choice to be made, and yet it paints Adam Smith in a much more positive light that one would imagine, if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.
A really fun book, also!
> if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.
Leftists I've known are more likely to quote Smith than criticize him. He seems to be seen by leftists as an important figure in political economy (flawed in not reaching certain important questions, perhaps, but not much in how he addressed those questions he did consider.) Even his argument that the class whose understanding of their own interests is best aligned with the common interests is the landed aristocracy (the bourgeoisie having interests opposed to the common interest, while the working class shares—by its sheer size, defines—the common interests but lacks an understanding of what their real interests are in the domain of interest) [0] is seen as describing exactly a problem than the Left (see, e.g., Marx and discussions of class consciousness) sees as central to solve, rather than being a regressive idealized preference.
The Left criticizes a lot of the arguments people who appeal to a mythologized caricature of Smith use his name to defend, sure, but that's a different thing than criticizing Smith.
[0] Which is about as far as you can be from leaning liberal where there is a political choice to be made, though given the complete displacement of the landed aristocracy as an economically-meaningful distinct class it is largely irrelevant in practical terms in the 21st century.
Some in the Left, including Marx - perhaps most of the well-read Left - do this. Then there is an entire category of people who throw his name around in the mud and call “Adam Smith liberal” anything they view as immoral or excessive.
There's a great podcast about Adam Smith here, debunking some of those oversimplifications: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-...
It's funny as a economist people thinking that the free market is some kind of god, that the invisible hand is infallible. He never argued markets work without institutions. He believed governments must enforce justice, prevent monopolies, and provide public goods for markets to function properly.
There are far better examples they could use.
[flagged]
[flagged]
I might have done - you claim questionable reasons for Thiel's actions without evidence. For one thing he didn't start it.
His ownership percentage is similar to Elon's stake in Tesla, you can quibble over details (Series B vs A). His associates are teaming over Polymarket and now Palantir is in charge of policing the market.. sort of a fox guarding the hen house situation?
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/why-trump-backi...
I'll downvote that WITH commenting, also HN rules encourage against ranting about downvotes, fyi.
I don't think there's any issue with asking when no explanation is provided and it's unclear to you. Whereas complaining about it is just tedious and doesn't add anything of value.
wonder no further!
I do take Adam Smith out of context, that is the precise point -- the invisible hand of self-interest is the salient idea that has endured and shaped modern Hypercapitalism. It doesn't matter if he is rolling in his grave at audio frequencies due to my and, more importantly, society's alleged misappropriation of his work and misunderstanding of his many moral considerations. He was effectively soundbited centuries ago and we are still struggling to manage the implications. Saying he was a good guy makes it more difficult to fix the problem.
Maybe you have a valid point here, but by intentionally taking him out of context, it perpetuates the misunderstanding. We'd be better off actually understanding Smith, reading Smith, and grappling with limitations of the invisible hand. Otherwise it is just an exercise in nihilism and blowing everything up.
It's not about whether he is a good guy or not, it is about what we can learn from his writings.
I know he is always associated with the 'invisible hand of the market' idea, but a lot of his writings were about the PROBLEMS that arise because of this invisible hand. He had a lot of good insights into what we have to be careful of when the free market does what it does. We should actually take some of those lessons to shape policy to protect us from the invisible hand.
Noam Chomsky explains (I won't say 'apologizes for') Adam Smith frequently, but I think it is more important to allow modern, living thinkers space and consideration to reflect upon what is happening in our time, rather than relying excessively on canonical figures who didn't have our contemporary context available in their writings. Sadly there is plenty of timelessness, problems recognized in 1776 that still remain unsolved, but too many use the weight and respect for Adam Smith disingenuously to advocate for insane market policies.
Much like Marx, who had a lot of very insightful observations.
Whether what was done in his name is or isn't directly attributable to his writings is somewhat academic. That has taken on a life of its own, and overshadowed all his other ideas.
It has also certainly made talking about class in America very difficult.
Very good comparison. I do have more respect for Marx, the modern concept of life/work balance owes much to his concept of estranged labor ("Life itself appears only as a means to life"), as I haven't had to live in a society afflicted by his excesses and misappropriations, unlike the case of Adam Smith.
Adam Smith mentions something similar as well. He talks about how the worker's attachment to the work is different when he's working in a super specialised part of a production process rather than making the whole product like an artisan.
[flagged]
Where exactly would he go to escape it?
Earth: Love it or leave it.
The main non free market societies are communist like North Korea, or tribal people say in the Amazon who don't have markets. Neither have very high standards of living.
A better compromise might be scandinavian countries but Adam Smith would probably have approved of those.
North Sentinel Island.
Assuming he can get past immigration.
[flagged]
>Trump Says He Will Have the ‘Honor’ of ‘Taking Cuba’
>President Trump’s words came amid a nationwide blackout and as a top Cuban official said his country would move to open the economy to foreign investors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/world/americas/cuba-us-fo...
Turns out you can't escape the free market societies because those societies can't tolerate others.
It's strange - if we're so confident that our ideology is superior then wouldn't we welcome a small neighbor on our doorstep trying something different as a sort of experiment expected to reaffirm our views? Celebrate them the way you might a silly child, occasionally support them, all while pointing to them as an example of why we don't do what they're doing.
Unless of course we fear they might succeed.
We interfered with Cuba when they acquired nuclear missiles aimed at the US.
Cube prevents its citizens from leaving.
That was an awful long time ago and doesn't reflect the current situation.
> Cube prevents its citizens from leaving.
What's your point? If they suddenly changed that policy do you believe we would immediately walk back the sanctions and the oil blockade? That isn't how it looks to me.
The only way I can think to interpret current US policy is either one of petty insecurity or else an attempt at coercive commercial exploitation.
Free market countries build walls to keep people out, socialist countries build walls to keep their citizens from fleeing.
Now we're discussing "audio frequencies"? My gosh, you really are off the deep end, aren't you.
If you want to effect change, then state your critique precisely, or not at all. Your looney top-level comment has derailed what should be a discussion of how to reign in Polymarket, because you've overstated your case, messed up your references to authority, and apparently you've slandered Aleister f*cking Crowley, too, such that his defenders are arguing about him here, instead of about how to reign in Polymarket.
When you make your side appear detached from all sense and reason, you are functionally no better than controlled opposition.
We could gamble on when Polymarket's operators die.
How about something that they would see more as a genuine threat?
Bet on whether they get into a car accident, and then see what happens if all of a sudden that number starts spiking towards 100%.
Or whether the company will fail or have a bad IPO.
If I propose odds based on survival tables for other companies of that age (I think for six years, the annual risk is 9 %), which side of the bet would you like to take?
The, uh, earnestness of your reply makes me suspect you missed the subtext.
We're not interested in expected value or winning the bet. If anything, it's the opposite: The "goal" is to lose the bet due to a situation caused by the pattern of betting, with something beyond any actuarial tables because it's not an independent event.
If I can presume to speak for up-thread commenters, we've agreed the system is inherently exploitable and harmful, and we're either (A) imagining the schadenfreude of using that same evil to harm the people who promote it, or at least (B) imagining them forced to fear the monster they're unleashing on others, so that they take steps to limit it.
Yes, obviously it is about the fear. If everybody takes a 100000:1 bet for a buck then that reserves the next 30 years or so. It's a lottery of sorts, someone will earn quite a bit.
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?
The over. Rich people live longer.
Yes. I add that google says: "controlling for substance abuse reduces the gap by about 60% for men and 36% for women". I couldn't get it to quantify the effect of obesity.
There are other imponderable factors at work. For example, does not-wealthy cause substance abuse or does substance abuse cause not-wealthy?
We are all the sum of our choices.
Even when there's a polymarket bet on their heads?
This comment is art
For some reason people tend to forget the most important part of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", I guess it because the words "Love is the law, love under will" doesn't sound satanic enough. If you take the time to actually read some of his material you'll be surprised how much he (the 'satanist' Crowley) talks about God and angels (as positive forces).
They won't understand friend.
Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets misrepresented.
It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalism instead of invoking his name.
> He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences
Smith wrote about the political economy. He absolutely considered the balance between public and market interests. Most people talking about The Wealth of Nations have never read it.
A hint is in the name, it's called the wealth of nations not the wealth of the sovereign individual.
You’ll not find “the invisible hand” in wealth of nations as a major concept. It was a throw away phrase that wasn’t a central part of his writing.
So many Smith apologists. I don't believe he should be demonized, and perhaps I am guilty of this by mentioning his name and 'satanic' in the same sentence, but he decidedly should not be lionized either. So many are drunk with history and shirk the work to evolve and transcend it. It doesn't matter if Adam Smith had morality and consideration, those are not ideals his writing ultimately bred, what matters are the free market ideals he clearly encouraged long ago, are now wildly out of control.
He described a natural process, he didn't invent it.
The invisible hand in markets is a natural property with an effect that's dependent on the environment the market operates within. He may be the first person to describe the process in writing (that we know of), but human beings have been experiencing the effects of this since we first attempted to trade with one another.
He didn't encourage free market ideals, though! He warned us about them!
He encouraged relatively free international trade rather than mercantilism, and and a lot of people have turned that into being an advocate for "capitalism" against a preceding system, never paying attention to the fact that mercantilism was an international trade policy response by nations with emergent capitalist economies trying to figure out how best to operate within that system, not an alternative (much less predecessor) economic system.
AFAICT this is (like a lot of the modern mythology of capitalism) started as a response (in the sense of an attempt to build a similar-but-opposed structure, not a response in conversation like a rebuttal) 19th Century anti-capitalist critics (and, in particular, Marx), part of which was setting Smith up as the preceding and opposing figure; a kind of capitalist Christ so that Marx could be the anti-Christ.
Have you actually read The Wealth of Nations?
It doesn't matter whether you've misrepresented him? It doesn't matter whether the ideas you cite to him are ones that he actually held?
Are there any cases where truth matters to you? I hope that this is just a rare exception, but I struggle to see how it's a principled one in any way.
Anyhow, I guess I can't stop you. "Do what thou wilt", indeed.
> It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences.
The "invisible hand" was something of a minor metaphor that other people glommed on to later, and its clear that they, and not his actual work, are where your idea of Smith comes from if you can say "He didn't consider its shadow/consequences" with a straight face.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is almost entirely about the consequences of the (then-still-somewhat-emergent) capitalist economy system and its interactions with the political space. A very large part of it was warning about its dangers, and advising of how to manage and mitigate them.
> He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences
This is just completely false. Wealth of Nations spends a HUGE portion of the text to talk about the negative consequences of the 'invisible hand'. Why would you say he never considered its consequences? What about his famous quote from Wealth of Nations:
> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting on the outcome of the war, but in practice they are.
Hard disagree. In most countries, you can not anonymously trade stocks, for starters, where you can anonymously bet on Polymarket.
> Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.
But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.
This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.
Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
> But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.
I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.
In many companies this is not allowed.
Pretty sure that discussion was had in the 20s. What emerged was a securities regulation system with rules and prohibitions built on the mission of productive companies and positive-sum games.
Polymarket also bets on sports games and wars which makes it a categorically different market from a regulatory perspective.
> I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments.
This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.
[dead]
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.
And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):
> “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”
But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous, opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.
This entire discussion is ridiculous. We shouldn't be conflating the serious economic and philosophical work of someone like Adam Smith with the rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley. It's absurd.
> rantings of someone like Aleister Crowley
Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even if commonly underplayed by mainstream academia).
Technology, science and the occult have always had an interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know, inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a student of Crowley).
It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the work of Western esotericism on the history of the West would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of the Middle East.
I’m only dismissing it in relation to the field of economics. I would trivially dismiss Sufism in the same context.
This discussion is ridiculous. We’re literally talking about the occult here.
> 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.
>If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate.
I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.
It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.
The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.
The approach of allowing a limited amount of some "vice" (or otherwise disfavored activity), highly regulated, combined with stiff penalties for illegal use is a pretty common approach to greatly reduce anti-social activity.
Yes... harm reduction approaches can be effective. The point is that they also need a "very annoying" frictional element to prevent harm reduction from creating worse outcomes than prohibition.
The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had previously effectively achieved this goal by making any gambling habit include regular travel, which itself prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly activity.
"Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe consumption site, where you have to go through harm reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely have things like blood work done to check for potential disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.
The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the process, whereas addicts would go through the process trivially.
> If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal
Except it's not the same gambling in both cases, they have qualitative differences beyond simply where they're happening. My unhinged neighbor who'd threaten a journalist probably doesn't have an invite to the Underground Gambling Den.
Even if he did, when a court case happens there's no presumption of normalcy. He can't say: "Pshaw, everybody legally gambles on all sorts of things there, the fact that I bet big on the journalist not having his fingers broken is just coincidence."
The immediate illegality of the gambling is also a check on corruption, since it's already disqualifying for Judge Stickyfingers McBriberson to be on the platform, let alone "betting" on the outcome of cases he presides over.
Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious—but how does legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue? Bookie licensing?
Why on earth would you think it's untaxed? A legalized gambling business trivially creates taxable income.
Ah, right. These legalized bookies should be paying income tax to the jurisidictions they operate in (albeit probably happening as reliably as winning bettors are on their winnings).
Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."
You are, quite succintly, a liberal in your beliefs here. This is not liberal in the CNN/Fox News sense, in case this comes off offensive.
I'm a "capitalist" in the sense that I think markets that allow people to exchange private capital create the better outcomes for society for society than other types of economic systems.
I'm also a "liberal."
Ha! I see, well, I'm clearly in the wrong here then.
May all your capital provide the most good it can! Godspeed.
Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.
Clearing up the incorrect connections you made is helpful.
Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore mistakes.
You're connection between an economic system with some kind of an amoral political view is a non sequitur. You could trivially operate gambling institutions in a socialist system. The gambling existing has nothing to do with the economic system itself. It has to do with the political climate.
Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad for society
People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird populations and many people are infected with pathogens carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0 harm activities.
Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a total copout. You know what else creates negative externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt, besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just fine!
Do you have a religion that works on systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic failure
We have a system. Free speech, public debate and democratic elections.
Inventing Assassination Markets in 2026, not bad.
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!
> I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match...
I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit?
I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily change a game result. With so much money on the line, it doesn't seem like a good mix.
Athletes (both college and professional) frequently receive threats from sports betters. Since the betting apps let you make specific wagers such as whether a specific player will make more than 6 three pointers in a game the harassment can become quite targeted.
Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce things many people might benefit from (how well that works is another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely positive to them. Imagine if your next door neighbor dropped a cash-filled envelope that you found - lucky you? And if that was your neighbor's rent money? Like a lot of scams, the 'value' is only accrued by fleecing rubes, and it also creates a new class of super-bookies, which also not positive.
You're asking the wrong question, in a free society (supposedly) people are allowed to do whatever they want by default. They're not perimtted to do things, they're forbidden from doing specific things.
Is gambling a neg-negative? why do you care? how is that relevant? Things shouldn't be forbidden because of net impact, specific harm needs to be outlined and addressed. Most of the time, there are more specific problematic behaviors that should be legislated against, not gambling.
In your example, that person spending their rent money could maybe addressed by the law? Or if someone spends their family's savings on a bet, that specific behavior can be addressed. If you think about it, this lazy approach doesn't address root causes. Maybe that guy's rent money, or family's savings, he could have blown it on a fancy car, no law against that.
Conversely, what if someone bet all their money on a stock option? People kill themselves over this, but it isn't illegal. you see how the entire approach is crooked and lazy? categorizing "gambling" addresses the reactionary emotions of the crowd, it doesn't address root causes, it doesn't evaluate nuanced situations.
It isn't betting or speculating that is the problem.
That's a strong libertarian position I think few would agree with. A similar case would be fentanyl - what harm does it do to me if people are dying on the sidewalk from overdoses? Well, the cumulative impact of that on society is considered negative enough that we've outlawed its recreational use. That argument of course doesn't apply equally to my neighbor taking shrooms, which doesn't have any impact, go ahead. The question is if you see gambling as closer to fent than to shrooms - I would suggest that it has a significant blast radius[1].
1: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/by-the-numbers/sports-betting...
No, I must disagree. With Fentanyl you can prohibit the substance just fine because it causes phsyical harm to its user, although even then I personally think so long as the seller educates its users well enough, it should be allowed.
If what you're bothered by is fact that people are dying on the streets, that's pretty grime, maybe make that illegal so they can find a less visually unappealing way of dying?
Consider this: How many people commit suicide? How people do __NOT__ commit suicide because fentanyl bought them something to chase after for a little while longer? How about we worry about all the people that die because they can't get enough medical care? Why is society quick to neglect that, and yet so eager to take away liberties for drug abuse? Or homeless too, I suspect you wouldn't want homeless people sleeping in tents on the street either, because that bothers you visually?
Your neighbors on shrooms are just as dependent on drugs as someone on fentanyl, so clearly you don't care about the dependency factor. If you care about mortality, then address the top causes of mortality.
Even with fentanly, people overdose specifically because it is illegal. In a sane society, people would be able to get fentanly administered to them in free facilities/clinics that give them correct dosage after doing a quick check on their blood chemistry. That would be cheaper than pumping junkies full of narcan every day, dealing with body clean up, all the crime that comes with the criminality of it all, and other costs to society. Same as with home with homelessness you could just give people free housing and that would be a lot cheaper, and it will solve the visual displeasure you have as well.
But the cruelty and hypocrisy is the point of it all isn't it?
Bankers and investors at major cities are cocaine junkies, that's a well known fact. In some states, being a weed junkie is highly normalized. being addicted to cigarettes and alcohol (which both have a well established mortality rate, and high cost to society!) is normalized, even celebrated at times. A junkie with needles on him by the street bothers you, but the same junkie with a bottle of beer and a blunt might not.
As I argued earlier, with gambling you're focusing on the wrong thing, gambling is the how, not the what. Every argument you make about "gambling" can be made about day trading stocks, or betting on options. People take risks they shouldn't think with money in a way that affects others, that interaction should be legislated, and some costs (not criminal) should be imposed by society on people that do that, targeting both the platform/house and the participants. The solutions are highly nuanced though, they're not as lazy as "just ban gambling", and they have costs associated with them that people don't want the government to subsidize, but in the long run are cheaper.
Should I be able to spend my life's savings on a corvette or an RV, without the seller asking how that would impact those around me, or how I would survive if additional costs arise later on? If I end up homeless, or my family becomes destitute because of that decision, the "blast radius" to society is the same as if I did spent that money at a casino. If your concern truly is "blast radius" then that could be addressed directly, root caused solved at the root.
I'm not a libertarian for the record, I'm simply trying to analyze the problems at hand and find the best solutions.
The social benefit is that it gives a controlled outlet for the need to gamble when managed by the government.
One major utility of prediction markets is to get good estimates of probabilities of future events.
That's an interesting idea, though of course while we've done that with crop or livestock futures, we seem to have coped pretty well without betting on absolutely everything until now.
We usually cope well before inventions improve things.
I don't know if prediction markets will be an important improvement, but it might be, so we should let them run.
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.
I suppose the extreme take would be that it becomes a de facto bounty hunting platform
Calling Adam Smith a libertine is beyond insane
Yeah I wonder if they meant libertarian.
I don't know you, but I do know that you haven't studied Adam Smith.
edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.
> Adam Smith's libertine
What on earth does this even mean?!
The problem is that you are identifying a symptom of an ongoing societal moral decline with an economic system. Spend some time on Dostoevsky or Kant. When morality is solely based on our current nationalism/hedonism hybrid in the West you end up at these extreme morally dubious exploits whether in a free or autocratic society. I don't claim to know what can help society become more ethical. What do you propose will improve society's ethical foundations? It's often the case that staunch critics of a system or another don't usually have much to offer in terms of ethics, they pontificate in favor or counter a given system without exploring whether society's ethics dwell on shaky foundations, they spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, the merits of this or that implementations when in reality all societies whose ethical foundations crater, do not recover their ethics through policy reform alone.
There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different.
To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.
Did you actually mean libertine or libertarian? I'm extremely confused.
"ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"),
Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about?
Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things.
Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side.
Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well.
Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that.
These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise.
There's no 'isms' here.
They're just villains, same as it ever was.
They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.
This is a serious news story that should be concerning to all sides, including people who are generally pro-markets. Thus, I wish that we had produced a top comment that was critical of Polymarket without being deranged. (Libertine? Adam Smith for totally unfettered markets? Satanic?)
If the prediction markets cannot produce a satisfactory solution to this problem, then their license to operate should be seriously cut back by regulators. Bets on a vast set of propositions that involve journalistic judgement should be banned, if they can't be blackmail-proofed. The social utility of these markets as info aggregators is marginal at best, and it is dwarfed by the harm of threats to reporters.
It is in Polymarket's court to figure out how to resolve this amicably. Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police. If your KYC has neglected to gather that info, then freeze all money on that side of the market until each bettor has identified themselves. Or some other means of fixing it, I don't know. Figure it out.
If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs. And if it comes down to it, I'm pretty sure that Shayne spends most of his time in the US, and we have extradition with Israel.
My apologist response would be that Polymarket isn’t the root cause—it’s more of a mirror. It simply makes the incentives and speculation already present in late-stage capitalism more transparent and accessible for anyone to participate in.
You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already heavily monetized—think Page Six, Access Hollywood, livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor Swift’s personal life.
Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made available to the wider public?
I don't think it is a mirror, quite the opposite. I think most Americans (and probably europeans?) think a lot of this is in fact very bad, and should be stopped.
The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the voters want.
Adam Smith's libertine didn't allow the concept of rent-seeking entities. It sure as well wouldn't allow polymarket gamblers
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
"The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock"
"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
"[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it"
"every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends... to raise the real rent of land."
- Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a highly relevant reddit thread(0)]
Adam Smith has wrote extensively about how much he disliked Landlords. It's a great tragedy that most people consider him with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that.
So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article talked about)
(Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith, the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on their platforms/algorithms too)
A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too. My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when he was so against the practices of rent-seeking.
(0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of mind." : https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...
I can understand how you would call inside traders rent seekers. I don't understand the connection for some guy betting a hundred bucks. What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?
(Also landlords only gain all the surplus when the entire system is super biased. It's not inherent to the concept of landlording. What's the alternative to having landlords anyway?)
I feel like my point more than anything (in the scope of this discussion) is that, relevant to the discussion (Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story)
> What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?
The median is kinda skewed to be honest. The median you and I think is very few percentage points in my opinion.
Let me say "typical" then?
Second most malicious quintile?
I'm avoiding "average" because one bad actor will spoil the average. But if you exclude the worst ten percent, what's wrong with everyone else?
The people in the article are in that worst bunch. But you critiqued basically everyone on the site.
Also did you finish your first sentence?
There are definitely some (very few) people who can maybe use the platform in a "decent manner" but I feel like its 1 out of 20 type situation but sure theoretically I have nothing against those people actually.
> But you critiqued basically everyone on the site
My apologies in the sense, that I mean to critique the 19/20 people. I did think when writing the first comment that maybe I should've highlighted it more but I already partially did it by writing "degenerate" etc. words
So I definitely agree with you on that aspect. Not everyone especially not the people you are talking about now are parasitic in that sense but key point being the people mentioned in the article being the worst bunch as you mention.
> Also did you finish your first sentence?
Yea, I re-read it, it feels incomplete but in essence, I sort of agree.
TLDR: I can agree with ya in the sense that there are definitely some people on the platform who can use it in a decent manner but the people mentioned in the article aren't the ones. Also even with that being said, I feel like the platforms can push the people with decent manners to indecency.
Okay, so we basically agree on the principles but have very different estimates for what percent of people on the site are acting decently.
Good enough, maybe somebody is working on a study of that.
Yes famous libertine Adam Smith, up there with Marquis de Sade and Ami Perrin
Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore, regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you!
Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural" extreme?
I don't think "regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans" is the logical conclusion of "prediction markets incentivize antisocial behavior".
> … libertine …
Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.
> libertine
I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.
Dollars to donuts that "libertine" was just as deliberate as the "satanic" that followed it.
I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, but if it was deliberate it’s worse; it descends beyond mere polemics and is just casting baseless and unfounded aspersions.
I quite enjoyed it. Smith has long been commandeered by libertine laissez-faire cultists who have severed the “invisible hand” from his body of work to worship as a relic.
[flagged]
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.
Can you name anything about this news story that couldn't have happened in a non-Israeli context? Or does the Israel angle just draw you in like a moth to a flame, until it's the only word in the whole article you can really read?
And to GP's point: Can you point to one paragraph in your original post that does not cry out that you need to log off? I sure can't.
Imagine it’s the Vietnam war, and there’s an American reporter reporting on missiles/bombs hitting South Vietnam.
The Viet Cong disputes the reporting and furthermore publishes death threats against the American journalist.
Of course, this is a logical response from your enemy combatant, who isn’t going to be in the habit of agreeing with you. The American journalist should expect it.
Furthermore, American armed forces obviously shouldn’t be attacking North Vietnam in the first place. Anyone who is even halfway educated already knows that it’s an unjustified war. This proxy war is taking place among global superpowers and the primary victims are the local people.
I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about this: Israel/USA started the current war in Iran. This is established fact and I don’t even think the US government disputes it.
The only difference with today’s war is that Israel is within missile range of Iran, which is why I said if I was an Israeli citizen I’d be rip roaring mad at my government for being incompetent. Netanyahu isn’t seen as a bumbling fool like Trump but he actually is. Remember that before he was elected he was seen as an extreme candidate. He is escalating war in his region which directly threatens his own people, and it has been largely unnecessary with nothing to gain. I seem to recall the genocide in Gaza being a military campaign that his own generals advised against.
A journalist on the side of the aggressor is whining about getting death threats and reporting it to his local beat cops like it’s a lost puppy. Welcome to the war your country started. Wars tend to involve death threats.
I don’t know what you mean by “log off,” you mean bury my head in the sand and stop following current events? Or turn off my brain and accept the point of view coming from AIPAC, a lobbying organization that spends tens of millions of dollars supporting political candidates in my state.
These are major news stories that I would know about just by tuning in to any news network. I assure you I’m not chronically online. This is my only social media account. No Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
[flagged]
[flagged]
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!
> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
> Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.
You're saying that after having read the article.
A priori, you'd get different impressions between a regular journalist death threats and someone engaging to re-write an article leading to death threats.
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?
For starters, no mention of re-write option. The HN headline makes me assume pre-emptive death threats instead of escalation over dialogue to re-write.
"I will kill you if you do not do X" is still a threat to kill you. All the more so when X is a thing the person will obviously not do. Rewriting the story would destroy whatever credibility they have as a journalist, and probably is literally not even possible assuming they work for any kind of reasonable organization (hey boss, I need you to update that story I wrote so a different set of gamblers win). Also, even if they did update it, they'd probably start receiving death threats from the gamblers on the other side of the bet they just screwed over.
Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option", as if that diminishes the fact that it's a death threat in any way whatsoever.
>Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option"
It's crazy for me to use the first person's own words? That's crazy?
Journalists get threats all the time. You just made my point on why it's more nuanced that this author engaged and was offered a chance to re-write.
> You just made my point on why it's more nuanced that this author engaged…
As the article clearly explains, the author replied ("engaged") without knowing why his interlocutors were interested in the minor details of the story.
His initial interlocutor ("Aviv") seemed to be engaging in good faith: "Alternatively, if you have information that it was indeed a full missile that was not intercepted, I would be glad to be corrected."
The author was naturally interested in getting the story right, and wanted to understand what his interlocutors might know about it, how they might be misunderstanding it, or why it might be so important to them.
> … and was offered a chance to re-write.
Do you truly believe that an "offer" to rewrite a story in a way that the author believes to be inaccurate—accompanied by death threats—is an important "nuance" that must be conveyed in the headline of a posting about this?
That's wild.
You're not making sense.
It's the author's own language.
Why did the author use if not important?
> It's the author's own language.
> Why did the author use if not important?
The headline cannot possibly convey every detail that's in the story.
The headlines chosen by the author of the TOI story, and by the author of his HN post, both adequately summarize the story.
After reading it in full, I found absolutely nothing misleading about either headline.
You asked if the mention of "rewrite" was important.
I said the author chose to put that language in their own title, otherwise they wouldn't have deemed it important.
Your position doesn't make any sense.
"Offered a chance to re-write." How is it even possibly to downplay something to this degree? I suppose "I'm going to kill you if you don't wire me everything in your bank account" is not a death threat, because hey, they're offering you a chance to give them all of your money. When someone on the street holds you at knifepoint, they're just offering you a chance to give them your wallet and phone!
You're going to have to be more clear.
I have no idea what your point is.
When someone makes an "offer" to a journalist to rewrite something in a way that the journalist believes to be untrue in exchange for dropping death threats against the journalist… that isn't a "nuance."
Certainly not an exculpatory one.
Do you get that point?
That is my point and that it should be in the headline.
You're confusing yourself.
To me, how the death threat is phrased is not very important. What would you drop from the title to include that?
See suggestions above by me and others.
[flagged]
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
> the whole prediction market thesis assumes information flows freely into prices — breaks down when participants start trying to influence the information itself
How naive can you possibly be...
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?
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.
I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.
The effect of this is that those markets should dry up as the information quality is so poor. So bad that even insiders are taking risk by betting on an outcome.
Unlike the regular markets though, which are dominated by smart money, these markets are dominated by degen gamblers and idiots, so I guess they just shrug it off.
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.
What censorship does Israel do?
Israel does military censorship, same as any other country, you can't communicate information that would harm the defense of the country or aid its enemies. Israel is in a hostile and armed neighborhood with frequent hot conflicts, both regular military and irregular forces, so the issue is fairly everpresent compared to other Western style democracies such as in Europe where their neighbors are peaceful.
I guess for a start they won't let me view this article with a VPN on.
Check the article linked in that comment.
you forgot to put /s at the end of your comment, yes?