[staplung]

Unfortunately, it's not just elected officials that are problematic for prediction markets. The Secretary of War, for instance is not an elected official nor are leaders of the armed forces and there is definitely a prediction market for war. Multiply this by every powerful appointee and every career bureaucrat and see what kind of picture that paints.

[lukev]

If we're not going to ban prediction markets, we could at least make it a requirement that all bets are public and associated with a real identity.

That'd go a long way towards curbing the corruption of these things, while preserving (or even greatly enhancing) their "predictive power."

[noosphr]

Sounds like a lot of second cousins are going to make amazing predictions.

[toss1]

THIS — make it transparent, not try to ban it.

And the transparency must be real-time and MUST include the full dox on beneficial owner of the contract/bet, with steep jailtime for falsification/fronting, etc.. They can even say it is for tax purposes — they win that bet, they should pay income tax (and be able to deduct the costs of their losing bets against that specific income type).

I want to know if a bunch of senators or DOD personnel bet on event X, and I want journalists and OSINT watchers to know it in realtime. That gives everyone information while naturally eliminating most of the advantage of insider trading, since nearly everyone will pile into the same trade and the odds/payoff will come closer to the reality.

[jkubicek]

Knowing who is making the bets doesn’t prevent mildly corrupt officials from driving the outcome that’s going to win them some cash.

Knowing that high-level DOD official were betting on us invading Iran does us no good if the only reason we invaded Iran was so they could win their long-odds bet. Sure, we can try and shame them, but now they're rich and we're fighting another middle-east war.

[chii]

What is the current method that exists which stops CEO/executives from short selling their own company's stock, then driving that company's value down (which is easy to accomplish)?

Why can't that same method be used to prevent or indict gov't insiders who tries to do the same?

[toss1]

That same method is the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) and is it widely regarded as simultaneously ineffective and heavy-handedly overreaching.

It is an inherently hard problem to identify insider trading when trading securities, or in this case, bets/contracts, doesn't have participant identification and transparency problems

The same solution would be best for both — everyone can trade freely with the sole caveat that all ultimately beneficial owners are fully identified and the trades are transparently published in real-time.

Braying about "free market" when in the actual market players can hide their identities and covertly manipulate it, while having an underfunded agency supposedly tracking them down after the fact, is just a farce.

A solution structured so it naturally and dynamically self-corrects is far better than an enforcement bolted-on after the fact. And yes, there would still be enforcement of requiring transparency to enforce proper identification.

[jmye]

> Knowing that high-level DOD official were betting on us invading Iran does us no good if the only reason we invaded Iran was so they could win their long-odds bet.

Of course it does, if we’re willing to do ever-so-slightly more than jerk off on TikTok about it.

[malfist]

I guess we shouldn't do this then. If it doesn't completely solve to problem.

[SteveNuts]

Seems like you’d get a secondary proxy market popping up overnight. Like domain privacy for degenerates.

[gruez]

That's why you make the regulations like AML regulations, where it's a crime to obfuscate the source of the wager too.

[gzread]

One of the worst regulations in existence, and you want more of it?

[hephaes7us]

Domain privacy isn't for degenerates.

[reverius42]

They didn't say it was?

[wwweston]

There’s no one in the world that creating an alternate “real” identity would be easier for than someone who can influence or even determine military or covert actions. It’s probably even legal for them to do so.

[Esophagus4]

I’m not sure I agree - look at the crypto crime that happens as hackers breach databases and are able to link crypto holdings with human identities to target them.

Public trades will make people targets and that will create weird incentives.

https://apnews.com/article/crypto-bitcoin-kidnapping-wrench-...

[thrance]

I doubt that would change anything, in this era of shamelessness. Being corrupt has become a virtue, and winning lots of money is cool, doesn't matter if it was from gambling on war with insider trading.

I believe prediction markets and sports betting apps are societal failures that only serve to alienate the masses and further extract wealth to the top. Let's ban them all, we're not losing anything.

[samlinnfer]

And maybe you can start by mandating age verification?

[CrossVR]

It's always a good idea to disguise your identity collection as "age verification".

[mr_00ff00]

We already do this with Congress, and there’s still insider trading

[__MatrixMan__]

Another step would be to find ways to discourage bets on outcomes that the bettors participate in.

[magpi3]

The bill also prevents senior government officials from betting on prediction markets if they are participating personally in the event on which they are betting.

https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/End-Predic...

[andai]

It's also low-ranking members of the armed forces that have a lot more information than you'd expect. If you just banned the high ranking members from prediction markets, I actually don't think very much would change. (There would just be slightly more delay.)

[hunter-gatherer]

Very few armed forces members have enough information to make actual meaningful trades. The low ranking ones do not have enough money to make meaningful trades even if they did.

[JumpCrisscross]

> if you just banned the high ranking members from prediction markets, I actually don't think very much would change

Good behavior starts at the top. It becomes a lot easier to crack down on low-level corruption if the guys at the top aren't doing it.

[ralph84]

If I was a NOAA meteorologist I'd be making bank insider trading temperature prediction markets.

[bee_rider]

Maybe this could be an alternative funding source for weather prediction, haha.

[rangestransform]

How can prediction markets be priced with continuous instead of discrete predictions?

[gzread]

They usually divide into buckets

[Esophagus4]

But wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug?

If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.

[gzread]

That's always been a just-so story invented to justify insider trading. If weather predictors always bet on a weather prediction market, why would anyone else? They'd be guaranteed to lose money.

[Esophagus4]

1) Not all expert weather predictors agree. They can bet against each other.

2) retail traders lose money and know far less than institutional investors, but do retail traders participate in the stock market? Of course they do.

[ralph84]

The meteorologist making the observation has the ability to sway the outcome. "Those automated observations were wrong, turns out the maximum temperature today was 61F not 60F." This already happens all the time. Whether insiders are doing this to win in prediction markets is up for debate.

[jghn]

> The Secretary of War

There's no such position. You may be referring to the Secretary of Defense.

[peyton]

It’s a secondary title [1].

[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2025-17508/p-3

[jghn]

POTUS also does not have the authority to rename the department, so not sure that this EO is meaningful.

[cyanydeez]

I mean, North Korea has some very deadly incentives if this whole "buy your prediction" market is brought online.

[tclancy]

They do what they can. It won’t matter. But the point at this point is to call out the grift. To make plain for at least the rest of you outside our borders that America died of grifters squeezing dollars out of some weird machine that we couldn’t or wouldn’t shut off.

This machine kills hope.

[Animats]

Congress was not even notified in advance of the wars on Iraq or Venezuela. Any leaks came from the executive branch.

[treetalker]

Don't forget relatives, useful idiots, and billionaire special envoys!

[9dev]

The latter two groups often overlap, even