[bs7280]

I mentioned this on a different post - the biggest problem with prediction markets is not the gambling or dumb people losing money. Its the fact that it gives very powerful people a vehicle to make lobsided bets on outcomes they control.

A small example of this would be NFL / NBA Refs fixing playoff games with a bad call or two. This actually happened 20 years ago, an NBA ref went to prison over being bribed just $2000 per game.

The much worse example is the fact that you can make 100-1 odds on whether the US airstrikes Iran today... or How many times Pam Bondi says the word "China" in a press conference.

[Buttons840]

It's a national security issue too.

Somebody poor grunt who chose to earn a living by laboring (which has proven to be much less effective than being born with money) will be putting fuel in the bombers and thinking "I could just make an anonymous bet..."

It's a national security issue.

We saw this with the Venezuela attack. A flurry of trading and someone made $400,000 for placing a bet mere hours before the "surprise" attack. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-400000-payout-after-ma...

[mhb]

Wouldn't the counterargument to this be that if the poor grunt is willing to betray his country for money in the prediction market, he would also be willing to take money from enemy x to do the same thing?

With the prediction market, there is a financial incentive for people on the opposite side of the bet being motivated to uncover the malfeasance.

[milanhbs]

A good general rule is to make it hard for people to do bad things, and to not create incentives to do so. This seems to do the opposite.

[throwaway85825]

If you're a grunt trying to contact Russia or china you're much more likely to end up talking to an FBI agent posing as a foreigner. Prediction markets make it easy and anonymous.

[pinkmuffinere]

Are they really anonymous? I’m not meaning to disagree, that just surprises me. I would have thought they need to follow KYC requirements.

[throwaway85825]

There are crypto prediction markets that cater to the anonymous.

[anigbrowl]

I think doing war crimes is the real betrayal of the country. But we have a president who think his personal morality is superior to international law, ratified treaties (despite the supremacy clause) and so on. This is overtly and explicitly unconstitutional.

[Buttons840]

> he would also be willing to take money from enemy x to do the same thing?

The prediction market is the mechanism by which this happens.

[mlinhares]

Nobody is going to uncover anything on bets when they're done an hour before the event happens. This isn't the stock market and trying to connect it to what happens on the stock market makes no sense.

[NickC25]

With the venezuela attack, the real trade wasn't on Polymarket or Kalshi.

The trade was going long the 3x Oil&Gas ETFs the trading day beforehand. There was huge buying for absolutely zero perceived reason...then boom we just straight up kidnapped Maduro.

[dist-epoch]

It's not necessarily illegal use of secret information.

There exists "alternate data", some companies monitor all kinds of stuff, satellite pictures, etc, some of these companies surely saw the inevitable asset positioning just before such a big attack (150 planes).

Just like the Ukraine invasion was first visible on Google Maps as traffic jams !!! at the border at midnight

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/google-...

[HNisCIS]

Counting cars in Best Buy parking lots on black friday used to almost be a meme in the GIS community until ai models became reliable enough.

You can also do entertaining things like determine if a factory/data-center is running at full capacity by looking at the fans in the cooling stacks. Satellites take the red, green, and blue channels separately at different times so you can see if a fan is spinning through the apparent chromatic aberration of the blades, same deal with anything else that spins or moves. If you know the satellite you're buying imagery from, its TLE and a little information about the sensor you can work out all sorts of fun details.

[asdff]

You could see USAF and navy air power operating in venezuela on ads-b. I was shocked seeing F15s. You'd think there'd be no way the military would have ads-b activated while performing military operations.

[jrjeksjd8d]

When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, what choice do you have? There are civilian aircraft up in the sky. Having a fighter jet run into one and kill a bunch of civilians is a bad PR situation.

[hrimfaxi]

When you're doing extra-legal military operations in a country that isn't at war, do you really care about PR?

[asdff]

Didn't they already clear the airspace?

[robcohen]

How would this happen? Jets are significantly more maneuverable than anything else in the sky. The military could, you know, pilot the plane so it does not hit anything.

[eru]

That's neat. Though I'd say it was the first public sign. The US had been telling anyone willing to listen for weeks beforehand that an invasion was coming.

[HNisCIS]

Disbelief and normalcy are a hell of a drug. Unless someone fully expects something terrible to happen and they are deliberately trying to find out when it'll happen, most people will happily ignore all of the signs until it's too late.

Just look at the lead up to the Ukraine invasion, the US intelligence services were practically screaming from the rooftops that it was happening. Russians were obviously stacking up on two borders. Meanwhile, reporters were on the street asking people how they felt about the oncoming invasion and they all said some variation of "they've been threatening that forever, it's all talk, it won't happen".

[rdtsc]

> Meanwhile, reporters were on the street asking people how they felt about the oncoming invasion and they all said some variation of "they've been threatening that forever, it's all talk, it won't happen".

The Ukrainian government took the approach of not starting a full on panic. They thought maybe there was still some chance of stopping it. And not knowing 100% the day and time meant stopping the economy, people fleeing and such. It could even play into the hands of the enemy as they could react and postpone as well.

Some have criticized the government for that tactic science. Some might say they should have listened to the US intelligence instead, but that presumes people should trust the US intelligence more than their own government.

[eru]

Well, one problem is that the US intelligence services might have a credibility problem with the general public.

[chrisss395]

This - the electronic warfare assets moved to this region months before were a huge sign of what was going to happen.

[ironbound]

Pizza orders are also an indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_pizza_theory

[dv_dt]

The irony that operational national security would be greatly improved if only they maintained a well staffed and resourced government kitchen for the Pentagon, but won't for many silly reasons. Oh no, lots of people would have to sit on idle standby many times, or gov't employees would get free meals.

[kibwen]

The Pentagon has a ton of restaurants inside. There's literally an official mall-style map of all of them right here, I count almost 30: https://www.whs.mil/Services-and-Information/DoDCC/

The pizza index is specifically about late-night pizza orders, when presumably most of those restaurants are closed (though some do appear to be open 24/7).

[dv_dt]

If the pizza-indicator is still observable, then there is insufficient internal capacity (or perhaps it would be more correct to say insufficient at the right times) to mask the signal

[bandrami]

There are several restaurants there. The Domino's thing is back from the first Gulf War and wasn't even really true then

[silisili]

I believe that orders probably do go up. I don't believe the sites/accounts using Google's 'how busy' have any relevance at all. As I understand it, these just use GPS/location data of phones.

It only takes one person to pick up 40 pizzas, after all. Perhaps they could look at time estimates for a new order as a better indicator, if such an API exists prior to ordering.

[nostromo]

That person is reportedly in jail and facing serious time.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-jails-venezuela-leaker-...

Anyone with a security clearance making bets like this is not a smart person.

[teknopaul]

Stats on politicians trading habits, indicates insider trading like this is standard practice in the USofA.

No beleives MAGA nuts are trading experts.

[tsimionescu]

Politicians don't have anything to lose from this. There is (shockingly!) nothing illegal about politicians making trades based on decisions that they know they are about to take that have a significant and easily predictable impact on the market.

By contrast, making public bets based on classified information that you are not authorized to publicize is a simple and relatively direct breach of laws regarding the handling of classified documents and state secrets.

[graemep]

A number of Trump's cabinet advisors have strong backgrounds in finance. At least two former hedge fund managers and one VC that I know of in prominent positions and I do not know much about American politics.

[edmundsauto]

Is this confirmed by a trustworthy source? This article only reports on what president Trump stated. Given the source and the lack of any details, this isn’t verifiable which I think is a minimum requirement.

[eru]

No worse than existing financial markets, and we already deal with those.

[TheDong]

The big difference here is that if you buy short-dated out-of-the-money options and make it big, the SEC comes knocking on your door and reads your text messages to find out what you knew and when.

It's both easy to track down stock traders due to KYC, and easy to prosecute due to laws.

Polymarket and friends make it both much harder to find the trader, and also it's less clear if there's a legal theory that lets you prosecute someone dealing in these new markets.

Sure, congress and the president can insider trade a bit here and there, but the everyday joe is rightfully afraid to.

[eru]

It seems like the difference is all due to historical accidents in the US and laws that should arguably be changed. Nothing to do with prediction markets by itself.

[TZubiri]

I'd just like to make the distinction between:

1- Making a bet with privileged information. 2- Creating the event and making the bet.

2 would be a war crime, 1 would be a probabilistic leak.

Trump claimed they didn't want to pass through congress because they leak, and there were no leaks about the event. But if any personnel made a polymarket bet, that would constitute a leak. It wasn't acted upon, but if personnel continues to leak information in this manner, it is possible that an adversary will eventually listen to this signal, and that it was just ignored because it is too fresh.

This analysis would also make it clear why it would be immoral to participate in such markets as a civilian. Because if it is your country you might be compensating an insider for information, benefitting the enemy. And if you are not, you might be harming the enemy, but you would be an unlawful belligerent.

[jacobedawson]

Of course the next step beyond that is "leaking" false information as a decoy by placing large bets on certain events. If that happens enough times it seems like it should wash away the value for agencies hoping to act on "privileged" information.

[TZubiri]

Sure, it's an information warfare, but at its core, you can mask a signal, but you will never be able to eliminate the signal, just dilute it, and at a cost.

[ncr100]

This is fascinating.

[tptacek]

This gets into a philosophical point about what a prediction market actually is. If it's a device for anonymously aggregating fragmented group information into a coherent accurate prediction, the lopsided bets are a feature; the only point of the market is the price signal, and the lopsided bets true up the price.

But most of us understand that prediction markets aren't that, no matter what Robin Hansen said when he was helping invent the modern incarnation of things like Polymarket and Kalshi. They're gambling venues, and we have "Nevada Gaming Commission"-style concerns about fairness. To me, the next logical step is to say that they should be heavily regulated, but in the era of DraftKings, that seems off the table.

[SleepySteve_sk]

I think of them as "Accountability" markets. Someone who can influence the outcome is encouraged to make a public bet on their success, and define what the success criteria is. The bet is then a means to hold them publicly accountable for doing what they said they would do. The market then becomes a voting machine for the public to decide if they think the person will succeed or not.

[banannaise]

> The market then becomes a voting machine for the public to decide if they think the person will succeed or not.

Which would be great, if the mechanism and prize for "voting" were something other than people's basic means of survival.

Gambling addiction isn't bad because there's something wrong with predicting outcomes, it's bad because it causes people to lose all of their money.

"Kalshi, but with a maximum order size of $1" would be great. Kalshi, with a maximum order size of oh crap I can't pay my rent this month, is very bad!

[eru]

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Arguments_for_...

[shagie]

> How many times Pam Bondi says the word "China" in a press conference.

A classic example is the color of the Queen's hat at Royal Ascot.

https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2008/06/20/Bets-placed-on-queen...

https://news.williamhill.com/horse-racing/queens-hat-betting...

And the relevant one from 2005 - https://www.foxnews.com/story/hat-trick-upsets-british-booki...

> But alarms were raised Thursday morning, hours before the royal appearance, when a run of bets for brown started coming in, displacing light blue as the favorite.

> "Nobody was backing brown at all and suddenly everyone wanted in on it," Paddy Power (search), owner of the eponymous chain of betting shops that inaugurated the hat bet 10 years ago, told The Times.

> Power's odds on brown went from 12-1, to 2-1, to even and finally to 8-11 before he yanked the bet at 11:30 a.m., 2½ hours before the Queen was due to show.

> "Someone must have been in the know. We laid 50 pounds at 20-1 and 200 pounds at 10-1 and some smaller bets," David Hood, spokesman for rival betting chain William Hill (search), told the Daily Telegraph.

> ...

> When Elizabeth II finally made her appearance, she was indeed wearing a brown hat with cream trim.

> "Somebody has made a tidy sum," sniffed Hood.

> Both he and Power, who estimated his firm lost about 10,000 pounds, or $18,000, suspected palace insiders.

[jvanderbot]

That's the actual point. Everyone else is there to make money gambling, but the whole premise is to incentivize people with secret information to share it anonymously with the public, and take a reward for doing it.

All without traceability or secret drops or whatever.

POSIWID

[robocat]

> POSIWID

Everyone can make up a silly purpose.

Against POSIWID: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

[jvanderbot]

Oh, I suppose one could interpret it as literally as possible, and arrive at that essay's conclusion.

I have always considered the following to be basically synonymous:

* In the absence of info, consider the intended output of the system to be what it is measured to be

* The output of the system is best determined using observation vs reasoning

Most of the examples there are moreso about two systems colliding. Yes, the purpose of the military is to disable the enemy and by god they are disabling a lot of each other so much so that they don't seem to be doing much else.

Except the bus system, in which the purpose is indeed to turn fuel into exhaust, because the busses move whether they are full or not. The purpose of busses is to drive around, and it so happens people like to use them. If the purpose of busses was to shuttle people around, it could be done several other better ways.

If the purpose is to gamble, it can be done many other ways. This system seems purpose-designed (or purpose-emergent) to coax out secret information in the form of large bets.

[robocat]

That is the "Single Cause" Fallacy or Causal Reductionism. That is the tendency to oversimplify a complex system by highlighting one "root cause".

Selecting a single measurement is the same as selecting a purpose.

Either way, we see people can choose a nonsense root cause, to argue something specious by defining a nonsense POSIWID.

There's also a crossover with the human tendency to try and attribute causes to the bosses of a system. Sometimes systems are emergent and are not designed/run by any specific person. Especially when hallucinating benefits to specific people e.g. "follow the money". I'd like to define this as "agentic reification of emergent systems" however unfortunately modern times are creating noise around each of those words.

In general I find it interesting to see how people argue about systems. From what I see, very few people understand the systems they comment upon - instead most people rely on political memes and shallow analysis instead of any deeper rational thinking. I've been decomposing my own thinking about mortgages for a while and I'm still terribly ignorant about that system!

Aside: and thank you: I found out about the Glowies meme while writing this comment, meme seeded by Terry Davis https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TerryADavis

[ncr100]

(The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does)

[kibwen]

The market can only resolve based on public information, so it could only incentivize revealing information that is already destined to be imminently revealed. Furthermore, it doesn't incentivize sharing that information with enough lead time to actually take action based on that information; the opposite is actually true, insiders are incentivized to wait until just before the event to make their trade, meaning that the public gets no actionable information in practice. And that's assuming that you can distinguish an insider from someone lying for the sake of market manipulation.

[dogmayor]

Untrue. Insiders are incentivized to trade when they can buy at the lowest price. That could be at any point up to the event.

[eru]

> [...] insiders are incentivized to wait until just before the event to make their trade, [...]

What are you basing that one? And how is this supposed to work?

If you are an insider the incentive is to trade as soon as possible, lest some other insider beats you to the punch, or some conventional leak (or investigative journalist) spoils your party.

This is easiest to see, when there are multiple unconnected insiders: the first to trade wins. But even if you merely suspect another insider might exist, you have an incentive to trade first.

> And that's assuming that you can distinguish an insider from someone lying for the sake of market manipulation.

That's exactly the same as any other noise trader in financial markets, yes. Nothing specific about insider information.

[eru]

> All without traceability or secret drops or whatever.

Well, that's not an argument against prediction markets.

They could have exactly the same amount of traceability as regular financial markets, and still work well as prediction markets.

[cyberax]

Without additional signals, you can just as well use it to manipulate markets.

E.g. there's a 1-to-1000 bet for $1m today on Trump falling down the staircase. So markets read this and go crazy, buying up the stock. The next day, nothing happens and the markets go down. But somebody could have made billions betting on that.

[eru]

> But somebody could have made billions betting on that.

Just because there's a small bid for 1-to-1000 on market, doesn't mean you can buy billions worth of contracts at that price.

[JumpCrisscross]

> it gives very powerful people a vehicle to make lobsided bets on outcomes they control

I'm sceptical that prediction markets uniquely enable this. Like, if you want to bet on U.S. airstrikes in the short term, you could always buy oil options (or short exposed companies). If you're in for the long term, you're buying something that benefits from cheaper gas, e.g. an additives company.

[dragonwriter]

All of these things are much more subject to the problem that effects policy generally: the law of unintended consequences. Betting on the policy, rather than an intended/expected longer-term outcome that is easily derailed by intervening events outside of your direct control is much more direct (plus, if you are corrupt enough to bet on policy you control, that policy is probably already seeking a longer-term aim that serves your existing financial interests, so the ability to bet on the policy itself makes the corruption more attractive by providing a more immediate and certain payoff on top of the longer-term, less certain one.)

[jlawson]

Prediction markets don't uniquely enable it, but they make it far more effective and easy.

Insider trading is illegal. And for trades that aren't technically insider trading, often having some information ahead of time isn't as useful as it seems. Markets are known to react unpredictably to news; sometimes they move the opposite way from what you'd think, especially over the mid-long term, and there are many other influences on the price.

With a prediction market though, if you know what'll happen in the world, you know exactly what you'll win in the market.

[eru]

> Insider trading is illegal.

Only in some markets and in some jurisdictions and some of the time.

Eg until fairly recently 'insider trading' in commodities wasn't anything you were punished for in the US.

[bs7280]

You are not wrong, and I should clarify I also have a big problem with the current state of legal insider trading of elected officials, but this polymarket problem is much more extreme. You can get a guaranteed 100-1 payout by blowing up some random people on the other side of the planet. Way worse than making even 2-5x on a leveraged futures bet with insider info. In that example, the victim is usually just other rich people.

[JumpCrisscross]

If we want to go turtles all the way down, we could create a market to predict trading by decision makers and thus incentivize leaks from the betting markets.

[eru]

Well, insider trading should be legalised in general. It would be better for the general public.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Arguments_for_...

[graemep]

It would deter those who are not insiders from investing as returns would shift from them to insiders.

As the biggest social benefit securities markets provide is to enable raising capital this is a huge drawback and makes things worse for the general public.

[eru]

> It would deter those who are not insiders from investing as returns would shift from them to insiders.

Retail investors should be index funds anyway.

Until fairly recently there was no 'insider trading' you could get in trouble for in commodities in the US. That hasn't stopped non-insiders from trading in commodities.

Also, even if insider trading is legal, that doesn't mean your company needs to allow it: you can still punish your own employees for it, and eg claw back bonuses and sue for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

The main thing the (American) laws against insider trading does what private contracts can't do is to make the golf buddy liable, too.

In any case, American insider trading regulation is already laxer than French insider trading law. And it doesn't look like French companies have an easier time raising capital.

[graemep]

> Retail investors should be index funds anyway.

That does does not solve the problem as insider traders will still be shifting profit to themselves. You still need non-insiders (not necessarily retail investors) to make the market work - even for insider trading to work you need a non-insider to trade with.

> Until fairly recently there was no 'insider trading' you could get in trouble for in commodities in the US. That hasn't stopped non-insiders from trading in commodities.

Can you show that it had no impact on how non-insiders traded? How recently was recently?

> Also, even if insider trading is legal, that doesn't mean your company needs to allow it: you can still punish your own employees for it, and eg claw back bonuses and sue for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

A lot less of a deterrent, and a lot of people with access to inside information have a lot more to gain than to lose.

> In any case, American insider trading regulation is already laxer than French insider trading law. And it doesn't look like French companies have an easier time raising capital.

Both do have insider trading laws so both are probably good enough, and there are a lot of other variables.

[tim333]

So if you buy stock in company A, have it go to zero because the business went bust, find the CEO already knew it was bust when he was selling the stock to you, you'd be fine with that?

[monero-xmr]

You can also just... not place bets on completely bizarre prediction markets like "how many times this person says this word". The market can sort it out, etc.

[bs7280]

You have completely missed my point. I don't give 2 shits about people losing money gambling. I give a shit about the Whitehouse doing insane things just so they can use the insider information to personally make money. Did you know on Oct 10th someone made $200M on a BTC short position made 30 minutes before Trumps announcement of 100% tariffs on China?

[monero-xmr]

People make short positions all the time in crypto, and long, and levered long and short, because of hedging. Same in equities market

[TeMPOraL]

Plenty of more fun dynamics. For example, in some cases it becomes a way for voting for decisions one otherwise wouldn't control. If a person in position to make a decision doesn't really care about any choice in particular, seeing the prediction market lean one way would incentivize them to choose the opposite, making a short sale immediately before.

It also makes sense for the people voting: by betting against the outcome they want, they end up either a) paying for getting things their way, or b) getting consolation payoff if the decision makers pick the undesired choice.

[joelthelion]

A lot of these issues mostly disappear if you use play money.

It turns out that play money prediction markets are just as good as the real money ones.

[adrianwaj]

Perhaps a bet should convert into play money if the stakes get too high and the temptation for "induced manipulation" is deemed too strong. The issue is how high is too high?

Imagine a jury or judge start betting on their own cases? $500 might not sway them, but $200,000 bets coming in from villain/victims' relatives might and they thereafter decide to enter the market and also influence (or force) a legal outcome. So it can be used as a stealth form of bribery if external parties seek to make it profitable for insiders to effectuate an outcome. So at what point should the bet switch over to play money?

And what happens if all that play money can one day be redeemed into a new coin?

So with the rise of prediction markets one can predict a subsequent rise in surveillance. Can you even flag a bet on PolyMarket?

"Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by March 31?" https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...

There's almost $7m in volume there. But what if multiple Israel-aligned groups coughed up say $250m and bet "no" then that's like a bounty, right, for someone in Iran to effectuate a yes on the ground? Khamenei himself could step down too after involving himself in the bet and then use the proceeds to ensure his ongoing protection. I don't know. PolyMarket or PolyPay?

[dlubarov]

Yeah - in principle betting markets are also bribery markets. Instead of betting based on expectations, one can bet the opposite of the outcome they desire.

It's interesting how those markets avoid any language like "death," I assume to not give the obvious appearance of an assassination market, though death seems covered by "is prevented from fulfilling his duties".

[sysguest]

+1

if you're not the person-in-complete-power, your bet is really likely to be 'rigged' against you

I'd rather play dice or buy lotteries

[roflyear]

well, at least for really odd ones - like the china example - the liquidity is (probably) going to be really low. you need people buying both sides to make money.

But for big events/talked about stuff/etc ofc this is not true.

[bs7280]

Again - Its not the money I care about, its what people are willing to do to make it.

[eru]

If there's not much money to be made (because of illiquidity and adverse selection keeping market participants out), then there's not much incentive for people to do weird things.

[tj-teej]

Isn't this the intent of a prediction markets?

IIRC the original prediction markets existed to try and get as close as possible to finding the true answer to open questions. Someone willing to bet a lot of money on an outcome (because they have an edge/are very sure of an outcome) is the point, they're putting their money where their mouth is...

[caconym_]

> the biggest problem with prediction markets is not the gambling or dumb people losing money. Its the fact that it gives very powerful people a vehicle to make lobsided bets on outcomes they control

This is quickly becoming the point of them, at least insofar as they are enjoying an extremely favorable regulatory environment courtesy of the Trump crew.

[qznc]

Why isn’t political gambling in the UK a problem then?

[shagie]

It is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_general_el...

> During the 2024 general election campaign, allegations were made that illicit bets were placed by political party members and police officers, some of whom may have had insider knowledge of the date of the general election before Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister at the time, publicly announced when it would be held.

> ...

> In April 2025, the Gambling Commission charged 15 people with offences under Section 42 of the Gambling Act 2005, including Russell George, Tony Lee, Nick Mason, Laura Saunders, and Craig Williams. Trials are not expected to begin until September 2027 or January 2028.

[eru]

People being charged doesn't mean there's a problem of any significant magnitude for society.

[eru]

How is that any worse than existing financial markets?

You can already short sell a company and then cause trouble for them, eg with an anonymous phone call of a bomb threat or whatever.

Typically, the authorities will catch you, because they check suspiciously lucky traders. They can do the same with prediction markets.

> A small example of this would be NFL / NBA Refs fixing playoff games with a bad call or two. This actually happened 20 years ago, an NBA ref went to prison over being bribed just $2000 per game.

The outcome of a sports game isn't exactly important in the grand scheme of things. And no one is forced to bet on sports to hedge their harvest against the weather or something like that. It's all entertainment.

> The much worse example is the fact that you can make 100-1 odds on whether the US airstrikes Iran today... or How many times Pam Bondi says the word "China" in a press conference.

So? Don't participate in these particular bets then?

[wyager]

> Its the fact that it gives very powerful people a vehicle to make lobsided bets on outcomes they control.

OK, and? The market is just paying them to make information about their decisions public.

[socialcommenter]

Parent comment has a strong implication that the bets will impact their decisions, and invariably for the worse.

If "Politician XYZ takes the day off and sits on the couch" were paying 100-1 odds, it wouldn't be such a big drama (although, again, the existence of the bet would still impact their behaviour)

[bs7280]

Correct. I've always had a hard time getting my point phrased in a way that gets people to understand my point, but I'm baffled that people don't see an issue with creating something that says "Hey if you blow up these random people in Iran today you can make $50 million dollars and no one can punish you" and thinking its not a big fucking deal.

This also isn't a theoretical issue that may happen - it dissapoints me that very few people know this but - on October 10th when BTC fell from $122k to $104k because of a trump announcement, someone created a short position 30 minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports and profited $200M USD.

[bs7280]

I replied to 1 comment below yours - but I want to ask, how do you think this incentivizes people to make info about decisions public? That would lower the return on their bets.

[TZubiri]

I think the war ones are the only real concern.

In the context of legislating prediction markets or not, sports is not a concern at all.

Whether it's a net positive or negative for important shit like war and corruption, we'll see, but if it helps in the important stuff, but damages sports, sorry bud.

[bs7280]

First - I can not comprehend how you could possibly have a charitable interpretation on the war point and how it might have a net positive. I'm not trying to be condescending or anything, I would like to hear a single positive for being able to make BTC bets on killing people.

Second - even if you are not one of the millions of Americans that give a shit about sports, there is still a massive fraud implications just by the existence of crypto prediction markets. All it takes is one bad call to changed the outcome of game. The Superbowl last year had over $1 billion wagered on it.

[baobabKoodaa]

If I live in a country that is under threat of being attacked by U.S. it is nice to have a website where I can look to get a reasonable probability that the attack happens

[Atreiden]

That figure will also be hugely unreliable, because as we've seen, there is tremendous incentive for insiders to leverage their information immediately before it's relevant.

If the odds sit at 97% NO for weeks or months, then 3 hours before the invasion an insider makes their play, you would have to be constantly monitoring this market, interpret that spike correctly as an insider trade, and be able to, in that very short amount of time, take actions that change the outcome for you, personally.

Doesn't seem like much of an upside to me.

[bs7280]

The existence of the odds making for a way increases the odds a war happens to begin with.

[TZubiri]

This is going to be a very nuanced point, so if you already have your mind made up on "Pro this" or "anti that" you are going to miss it. To me this is clearly a bleeding edge legal and technological phenomenon so if you hold a solid position either way, we are not in the same page at all. Prediction markets are going to be an issue in general in congress for the next years to come, and in specific cases in the courts for the next decades, it's silly to think that we, a random individual commenting on an internet forum, have the right answer at this nascent time, I recommend if you are coming into this with a premade opinion on the subject, to have a suspension of disbelief and enter into the discussion on the grounds that there's not a right answer at this time.

On to the nuanced response:

>"First - I can not comprehend how you could possibly have a charitable interpretation on the war point and how it might have a net positive."

>"I would like to hear a single positive for being able to make BTC bets on killing people."

This has been marked by yourself as a single point, but there's two distinct asks here, which I believe you are conflating. The latter of which is easy to answer, the first one is clearly to be decided and no one knows at this time (and could go either way).

First you ask how it might be a "net positive", that is that its positives outweigh the negatives. Then you ask to hear a single positive. Forgive me for overspelling the obvious here if the contradiction is already clear, but I must dwell on this as it seems to be precisely what's causing you to "not comprehend".

It is trivial to show a single positive, it can be done so in two manners, first showing that a single positive is possible, and then a bit harder would be to argue that said positive is definitely a positive and not a negative, in isolation. On the first type, to merely show that an individual positive is possible, I could do so in three different manners, one which is on good faith and relevant to the actual events/discussion, e.g: "on assasination events, victims can get information on their safety and act accordingly.", the issue is that this might distract you into discussing the specifics of what I just said instead of following the greater argument. A second way would be to show an individual positive that is technically so, but obviously would not be used to argue anything else, which avoids the reader from being defensive, e.g: "It's fun for people to gamble". It's worth noting that this is a single positive in isolation. Thirdly, I can argue anything really, and it is at least a candidate, mere refutation the fact is irrelevant as we are for this point only considering that there could be positives: e.g: "It might solve AGI/string physics", even in the exercise of finding a silly positive effect, we nevertheless find that it's technically possible that prediction markets might fund scientific research.

On the second type, to show that such positive effect is actually positive, I don't think there's much grounds to deny here that there exist individual positive effects. So I won't try to waste much effort, here, I think a stronger argument would be to argue that the net effect is negative, which again is distinct from being able to point out a single positive.

Regarding the net effect of markets on war or assasination attempts, I do not hold an answer, do you? Do you know for a fact whether it's a net positive or a net negative? Somewhere in the US courts, legislation and lawyers there seems to be a different answer. The journalists and a large amount of readers seem to be of course against it, but they don't hold much more power or say in the matter than the bare minimum any citizen gets by democratic vote, and to that extent, the power they hold is just over the capability to affect legislation for companies that have a global audience, and are just headquartered in your country as a base of operations, and would immediately move to another jurisdiction, or give way to a competitor in another jurisdiction if the conditions were to turn too unfavourable.

Personally, I don't make bets on wars, or assasination attempts because of the possibility that they may cause negative effects, it is sufficient and I consider the burden of proof to be inverted, but by no means do I hold the belief that it is a net negative. And I still reserve the right morally and legally to participate in these markets if for some bad turn of luck I were to be caught in the middle of a war, in the same manner that I might reserve the right to own and bear arms.

[tim333]

Assassination in political battles could theoretically be an issue. In the recent Trump vs Harris one, approx $3bn was bet and an assassination attempt was made although not for betting purposes one presumes.

You could probably hire a gunman for much less than $3bn. I don't know if the crypto markets are anonymous enough to get away with it though.

[PlatoIsADisease]

I've been telling people it only takes 2 or 3 people to throw a football game. The person who hires the ref(optional), the ref, and the person who places the bet.

And I was told I was crazy.

Hahahahahahahahahaha. Nope I was right.

[eru]

Huh? It's pretty obvious that you can influence the outcome of a sports event, if you can influence the ref or if you can get a player on one side to pretend to be less competent than she normally is.

[PlatoIsADisease]

10 years ago we'd be called conspiracy theorists.

[4ggr0]

Sports Betting Scandals have been a thing for probably almost as long as sports exist, i don't get why you think that this was a thoughtcrime 10 years ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_betting#Famous_betting_...

wouldn't surprise me to find out that even cavemen were manipulating outcomes of stone-throwing contests to earn some more meat.

[eru]

I think the disagreement was over whether it was likely that people threw matches like this, not whether it was possible.