Bet appears on Polymarket? You have the ability to direct people and resources to enact the under? Congrats you're rich!
If you have the ability, you are already rich.
The current stock market insane binge has changed that a bit.
Fool and his money are quickly separated…
And to be fair options trading used to be pretty limited in users too, until apps like robinhood tried to democratize it.
It's not democratic if you can't destroy it, and believe me a majority of people want to destroy it.
Although polymarket would do the best at "attraction" towards the average uninformed consumer because the bets and how to place them are far more understandable than the various option trading strategies.
Coinbase
Robinhood
DraftKings
FanDuel
Polymarket here is one example among the companies causing the problem. Legislation that addresses the problem should affect all the listed companies and more, not just Polymarket.
Sorry, that was what I meant to imply with the second half of my comment. Still, in my country there have been debates about whether publishing polls shouldn't be forbidden n weeks or days before the election (currently publishing polls and campaigning is only forbidden on election day).
You got to give even a 1000$ or something in this bet, you are gonna be so vocal about support, manipulation of data to convince unconvinced voters to join you or other details
The unconvinced voters are simply gonna bet on the voting side after sometime. For context, a third of the population in US iirc doesn't vote so what's gonna happen is that a difference of few %'s Lead could turn into something massive
And that few % can easily be rigged by an irrational actor. You are thinking 1 person = 1 vote (yes/no) but I may be wrong but how these work is in the aggregate and so a rich person can cause much more disruption within the voting system "legally" as well.
The point here is the legal part where what can end/what would end up happening is that elites around the world with irrational money can basically get political bases & favours established around the world for their purposes
Suppose an election is at 49 A / 51 B but now a rich guy contacted A and said to invest x$ to now make the odds 51 A / 49 B and then this news gets to twitter or any platform and now people get false news and some undecided voters might go bet on 51 itself too so now it might be 53/47 and in real voting election 51 A/49B
Some Elections are really close so I am pretty sure something like this is bound to happen sooner than later
Ive seen people point out White House press conferences do weird shit, like cut the conference 10 seconds before some polymarket prop bet of "how long will this press conference be".
Much more heinously, a few months ago right before one of Trumps asinine tariff announcements, someone took out a $300M BTC short position that was almost certainly from a WH insider.
I honestly don't care if someone loses all their money gambling, but the problem I have is how so many institutions are able to be undermined at a fundamental level do the existence of polymarket.
there is the stock market for those things, where insider trading is nigh invisible to public.
Polymarket all of a sudden makes it much easier to make money betting on an outcome people control. Looking at polymarket, I see bets paying 100-1 based on the number of tweets Elon makes on a given day. I see another at 100-1 on wether the US airstrikes Iran today with $66m riding on it. All of a sudden theres an incentive of a life changing amount of money for goons in the whitehouse to strike Iran for shits and giggles.
Did you know that in 2007 some NBA Refs were caught rigging games for just $2000 a game? Now Refs don't even need to be payed off when you can make a position anonymously with bitcoin.
but many have the knowledge of which company or industry is about to experience legislation, which they can pass to any of their associates worldwide, who can then buy or short the affected entities and share the profit with the insider. Polymarket is just the idiocracy version of that.
Polymarket is worse as it gives a mechanism for proactively changing the outcome of events to a much more extreme degree, simply because someone can make money on it.
A benign version of this would be NFL employees betting $1million on the color of gatorade in the Superbowl.
An insane version of this would be Trump issuing a single airstrike on Iran after having a friend or family member place a $10M bet on polymarket that pays out $1B. It completely erodes the obligation our government officials have to not act in their self interests.
...and is illegal.
It's not illegal to throw a basketball game.
Personally I find it sickening to see ads that say you can get rich betting on the weather. I haven't seen ads for polymarket but Kalshi's ads are absolutely predatory.
I used to think it's just yet another way to people with more money than sense to get their kicks.
But then I saw the true reason why the platform is terrifying - it gives people who have nontrivial amounts riding on the line a very powerful incentive to influence said events.
I have seen expertly crafted and highly convincing narratives - that I know to be false from firsthand experience - spring up inside (and presumably outside) the platform spring up on an issue. There was the thing where the ISW (a reputable military think tank) reported an Ukrainian city was captured (when in fact it wasn't) in order to win a bet.
Imagine if next time someone leaks some military intel in order to hedge a bet. Money, especially lots of it, is a very powerful motivator.
There's also no way to check and control who has insider info or has influence on the outcome (as betting against them is essentially suicide)
NFTs have zero value but people seem to derive non-monetary value from them. Naked option trading is a form of gambling (as well as risk management) and, as a result, it is regulated.
Polymarket is a "financial investment" for regulatory purposes but is gambling, there is no legitimate risk management reason. As a result, there is massive scope for harm because it is gambling without any of the gambling regulations that exist in the US.
People on this site appear to be unaware that gambling is regulated where legal. I will give you an example: Polymarket do not comply with state regulator's exclusion/no market lists. This is immoral. Gambling companies should not take bets from users who have gambling problems, they should not market to them.
Offshore unregulated books will often market themselves to addicts saying that they do not comply with regulator's exclusion lists...this is an onshore book operating in Lexington Avenue New York, not out of a shed with a pig sty in Curaco. It is unbelievable at many levels.
I'm not familiar, but this sounds like lists of people who are not allowed to gamble? Do stockbrokers abide by these?
Example: I had a flutter on the US Election. The odds were well in favour of Trump winning and I figured that was never going to happen, so I thought I was putting 'smart money' on Kamala.
I stand by it being 'smart' money ;)
I underestimated 'dumb' (which, I guess, isn't 'smart').
But if you write uncovered options, your losses are theoretically unlimited.
Agreed, though. It's bizarre that this isn't regulated exactly like gambling. Because... that's what it is.
Reference: Andrew Dickson White (first president of Cornell) "Fiat Money Inflation In France", published 1896:
"The government now began, and continued by spasms to grind out still more paper; commerce was at first stimulated by the difference in exchange; but this cause soon ceased to operate, and commerce, having been stimulated unhealthfully, wasted away.
Manufactures at first received a great impulse; but, ere long, this overproduction and overstimulus proved as fatal to them as to commerce. From time to time there was a revival of hope caused by an apparent revival of business; but this revival of business was at last seen to be caused more and more by the desire of far-seeing and cunning men of affairs to exchange paper money for objects of permanent value. As to the people at large, the classes living on fixed incomes and small salaries felt the pressure first, as soon as the purchasing power of their fixed incomes was reduced. Soon the great class living on wages felt it even more sadly.
Prices of the necessities of life increased: merchants were obliged to increase them, not only to cover depreciation of their merchandise, but also to cover their risk of loss from fluctuation; and, while the prices of products thus rose, wages, which had at first gone up under the general stimulus, lagged behind. Under the universal doubt and discouragement, commerce and manufactures were checked or destroyed. As a consequence the demand for labor was diminished; laboring men were thrown out of employment, and, under the operation of the simplest law of supply and demand, the price of labor--the daily wages of the laboring class--went down until, at a time when prices of food, clothing and various articles of consumption were enormous, wages were nearly as low as at the time preceding the first issue of irredeemable currency."
New issues of paper were then clamored for as more drams are demanded by a drunkard. New issues only increased the evil; capitalists were all the more reluctant to embark their money on such a sea of doubt. Workmen of all sorts were more and more thrown out of employment. Issue after issue of currency came; but no relief resulted save a momentary stimulus, which aggravated the disease. The most ingenious evasions of natural laws in finance which the most subtle theorists could contrive were tried--all in vain; the most brilliant substitutes for those laws were tried; "self-regulating" schemes, "interconverting" schemes--all equally vain. All thoughtful men had lost confidence. All men were waiting; stagnation became worse and worse. At last came the collapse and then a return, by a fearful shock, to a state of things which presented something like certainty of remuneration to capital and labor. Then, and not till then, came the beginning of a new era of prosperity.
Just as dependent on the law of cause and effect was the moral development. Out of the inflation of prices grew a speculating class; and, in the complete uncertainty as to the future, all business became a game of chance, and all business men, gamblers. In city centers came a quick growth of stock-jobbers and speculators; and these set a debasing fashion in business which spread to the remotest parts of the country. Instead of satisfaction with legitimate profits, came a passion for inordinate gains. Then, too, as values became more and more uncertain, there was no longer any motive for care or economy, but every motive for immediate expenditure and present enjoyment. So came upon the nation the obliteration of thrift."
Thus was the history of France logically developed in obedience to natural laws; such has, to a greater or less degree, always been the result of irredeemable paper, created according to the whim or interest of legislative assemblies rather than based upon standards of value permanent in their nature and agreed upon throughout the entire world. Such, we may fairly expect, will always be the result of them until the ñat of the Almighty shall evolve laws in the universe radically different from those which at present obtain.
And, finally, as to the general development of the theory and practice which all this history records: my subject has been Fiat Money in France; How it came; What it brought; and How it ended.
It came by seeking a remedy for a comparatively small evil in an evil infinitely more dangerous. To cure a disease temporary in its character, a corrosive poison was administered, which ate out the vitals of French prosperity.
It progressed according to a law in social physics which we may call the "law of accelerating issue and depreciation." It was comparatively easy to refrain from the first issue; it was exceedingly difficult to refrain from the second; to refrain from the third and those following was practically impossible.
It brought, as we have seen, commerce and manufactures, the mercantile interest, the agricultural interest, to ruin. It brought on these the same destruction which would come to a Hollander opening the dykes of the sea to irrigate his garden in a dry summer. It ended in the complete financial, moral and political prostration of France--a prostration from which only a Napoleon could raise it."
It's like a dozen paragraphs, forming one complete argument. Is this too much material to take in all at once, in this brave new TLDR tomorrow?
Do as you wish, however I doubt this will have the effect you want here.
The issue is not that you cited a dozen-paragraph argument, it's that you inlined all the text directly into a series of comments instead of a link to the text on a separate page. It visually overwhelms the discussion thread and is disruptive to the broader discussion, which is not strictly against guidelines but generally seen as non-normative behavior.
(* I don't know why I said "dinner party", since I don't go to those, the conversation usually isn't good, and they aren't my idea of fun, but oh well, it makes the point)
What happened is that, independently of my reply, HN's software started killing your posts because your account had crossed some thresholds at which the software starts doing that.
Like I said, it may be a distinction without a difference to you, but that's what happened.
There are risks connected when prediction markets run wild but Polymarket ain't it. There is also utility. It has high predictive value (it beats polls for elections from a little sample I've looked at) and allows you to make better decisions.
The very low stakes you point out make this even easier to put a thumb on the scales.
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
The point of the article is that as soon as the "news" started reporting on prediction markets or corporatized gambling as if it was a measure of sentiment, it ceased to become a good measurement. That point has long passed.
>>out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to change the opinions.
It will then become more expensive. Out of all the manipulation news and journalists do every day I am not sure why "people bet money at 1 to 4 odds that Trump takes Greenland before 2027" is particularly problematic. It's true people bet money on it at those odds. How is that more problematic that news running pro or anti Trump segments or broadcasting some random crystal ball readings to justify stock price fluctuations of the day? You can see how much money is bet on the market as well. It's not like you can spend 5 figures and suddenly shape the narrative.
This person does not realise that most people do not pay attention to the news, that people in power are not glued to the news waiting for journalists to tell them what to say, or that the news is generally not very important...except to people like them who play out these fantasies about wealthy people mind-controlling them through CNN.
And yes, if it starts to be seen as one of the levers to manipulate in manipulating public opinion, it will become more expensive. That does not improve it's predictive value, since we never really know how expensive it is on either side relative to the bankrolls and motivations of those who might want to manipulate it.
But for anyone who wants to use it as a crystal ball, go right on ahead — good luck with that!
"Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Gambling isn’t a new problem, but apparently we thought it would turn out differently this time, for some vague unclear reason.
I think the simplified version of that reason is: no one really believes in anything anymore, except in the value that acquiring money by any means necessary is a good thing.
It’s perfectly fine to be for progressive social changes, as long as those criteria are met.
I’d call that a pragmatic approach, not a conservative one.
The other meaning of "conservative", the one that's opposite "reckless".
It should in theory be possible to take a conservative approach to being progressive.
That's likely how most of the middle see themselves (if not in those words) - open to new changes but only if they're fully understood and not drastic.
Conservatives think societies are hard to understand, which makes them hard to engineer, and replacing institutions that work with new inventions needs to be done carefully and slowly.
But once I label myself a conservative, I am stuck, and now have a new set of friends with the same label, because I am labeled myself, and they have all those radical ideas, and then I have to pretend to believe and ending up believing them too.
Of course, the same applies when you label yourself a progressive.
Moneyed interests saw a business opportunity, simple as that. Economic investment is becoming highly concentrated towards high-growth, high-risk opportunities and gambling has long thrived in the black market while staying current with technology.
> except in the value that acquiring money by any means necessary is a good thing.
And this will only become more true as the economy continues to worsen. Economic downturns and market collapses favor the elite.
Hit the nail on the head and these are my thoughts exactly. I don't really want to be the guy that thinks his time is extra-ordinary (cue fake quote of Socrates saying "kids these days have no manners"), but... maybe it is?
For me it's like people don't even feel the need to pretend anymore. Selfish geopolitical calculations and greed have dictated all actors' actions in the 20th, that isn't new, but at least then there was a need to appear to abide by laws or to uphold human rights, even to strive for the eradication of war (and often it wasn't a disguise; people actually cared about those things).
States used to care or at least appear to care about progress, betterment, social improvement, moral improvement. Today? All any government speaks of is raw GDP growth %. And so gambling is pushed on TVs, streets, subways, kids' entertainment... The idea that a government of a nation would strive for the moral well-being of its citizens (by heavily curtailing gambling for example) seems positively quaint in 2026.
Anyway I'm tired, excuse the incoherent ramble.
The things I've seen have been either "it's not right to tell me not to" or "non-participants can get useful information by observing the odds". What I haven't seen is claims that it won't be net-harmful to participants.
Maybe not with a specific pollster depending on their scruples, but you can definitely pay to be part of the poll. And that’s the first step to getting any stats whatsoever.
It's a trash platform.
And if it works so poorly, there's a lot of easy money to be made.
This is just another racket for those in power to continue making the world worse for just a little bit more gain for themselves.
Edit: Throttled like always, you guys hate me (and reality/law in this instance) https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/sports-gambling/20-charged-ba...
Oh c'mon now. This is completely impossible to police. Players and referees are not under constant supervision. They have families, friends, partners. Some of them got caught but you can be certain most weren't because it's just very difficult to catch.
There are always multiple people who know about key players' injuries, illness, other factors. The game is negative sum and additionally insiders take a a chunk for themselves. It's worse then roulette which at least doesn't pretend to be fair.
As an example, there was a football player in England who had a friend that bet on a transfer market (a market that is extremely prone to inside information). It was detected immediately (despite being a relatively small bet of $10k, I have heard anecdotally that insiders have been detected in this market down to $500 bets), the player was banned, fined $500k, etc.
Btw, the reason these systems exist is because there are certain sports that are too lucrative not to make a market in but the economics/nature of the game mean that matches are easily fixed: 99.99% of this activity is low-ranked professional tennis, and surveillance has been very effective (all of this is funded, not by professional tennis, but by gambling companies). Generally, this isn't as prevalent with US sports because none of those preconditions exist for the major sports.
A market is open to all, with the odds influenced by all participants. In established betting markets such as for stocks, pros dedicate their careers and their organizations to improving the public estimates emerging from the market (though not for the sake of that improvement).
General prediction markets might turn out bad, but the above isn't an argument why, it's namecalling.
Well, only if they are thinly traded. If they get mentioned a lot more on CNN and CNBC, that is likely to change.
Edited to add: I'd like to rephrase that a bit actually. It doesn't even have to help bring about the particular outcome being bet on. It's enough that it can be used to shift public opinion in some way that's worth the cost to the manipulator.
> It's enough that it can be used to shift public opinion in some way that's worth the cost to the manipulator.
This has been tried in the real world and is just not very effective. It's just too hard to move the price in ways that will shift public opinion when literally anyone else has a huge incentive to bet against you.
Right now, they're all thin traded at their open. As soon as they are created is when you see the volatility that makes them enticing. Once you get volume, there doesn't seem to be as much value to be had.
People who are unfamiliar with how regulated gamblings works assume that the "market" is just lots of informed people rationally trading with each other. This is not how it works. Bookmakers post lines to a small group of syndicates up to a limit, they will often do this non-publicly, and this is how prices are set. They are not set by the "wisdom of crowds", they are set by people who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in predicting the outcome because bookmakers have an economic need for accurate lines.
When lines open to the public, there is often no significant movement after opening prices set by syndicates. That is because the public has no idea what the actual price should be, they are just uninformed noise traders clicking buttons randomly...that is the product too, the purpose of the product is entertainment not economic efficiency.
It is true that some lines are set incorrectly but the public is not able to benefit from this, because they do not have the information. I would guess that 95% of money made from gambling has been made by under 50 people. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, most of the time these people trading does not have an impact on price because they deliberately trade in a way that does not impact price. Again, the purpose is the same: they trade to make money, not produce economic efficiency.
The people who think prediction markets are useful in any way are people who never traded any markets and couldn't predict if the sun is going to come up tomorrow. If gamblers are noise traders, these people are noise speakers. These markets are completely pointless, gambling is economically pointless outside of the pleasure that people get from entertainment.
Again, it is fairly common assumption that people make that it must be noise traders who are incentivizing syndicates. This is the case at open but not after, and there is a significant distinction between noise traders and noise traders through retail books. Retail books do not set the lines, they do not post lines early to syndicates, their product is completely different. There is literally no incentive for accurate prediction because the economic gain from noise trading does not accrue to anyone who has information. 95% accrues to firms with the greatest marketing advantage, again...this is entertainment, it is not about accurate prediction, you are misunderstanding at a very fundamental level what is going on here. It is like going to see the Minecraft Movie and thinking this is artistic expression on the level of Tokyo Story.
This would all be different if there were real markets underpinned by economic demand for this risk but there isn't. This is why Betfair failed. This is why these "prices" you see aren't actually real prices.
The other is accepting the bribe, sorry, taking the other side of the bet, and making something happen. That only becomes worse with scale. When you're in the position to accept a million dollar payout to cause the press conference to only last 64 minutes, or to invade a foreign country, suddenly you have a million new reasons to do so.
On any prediction market where a reasonably small group of humans decide the outcome, and there's enough money to matter, "betting no" is better understood as offering a fee to make it happen, conditioned on damages should someone accept your offer and fail to do so. "Betting yes" is better understood as agreeing to facilitate the outcome - or assisting in the price discovery mechanism that says facilitators are over charging.
For fucks sake...
Insider trading seeks to trade with secret information and minimally obvious trades to avoid moving the markets until their position is locked in, in order to profit when the previously secret information becomes public and the market finally moves to a different price level.
Manipulators seek to move the market to create a false narrative that market-moving info exists when actual market-moving does NOT exist; the expectation is that people will see the price change and ASSUME there is information behind it, when there is actually just a manipulator willing to lose money to create that impression.
In a small market, such manipulation can be more cost-effective (make more of an impression for the same cost) vs buying advertisements.
With this I mean: I can think of several ways in which this would go in the other direction (bad for society). And I am not an economics expert.
But, one silver lining, maybe, is gamblers are a little less likely to fall for fake news. Maybe?
It seems hard to be a climate change denier when you're about to gamble on it.
Or maybe people will find a way to gamble while still living in completely different reality bubbles. Probably.
If you thought your neighbor was politically extreme last election, just wait until next election when he also has $100,000 on the line...
Only in a truth-agnostic sense. Good gamblers in player-banked games (poker; rock, scissors, paper) vs house-banked games (slots) are good at figuring out what the other guy is representing. The actual truth is much less significant.
5 minutes browsing polymarket comments will dispel that notion really fast.
In fact, they are often opposite.
Long time ago I was working for a betting company and we had a product where virtual (horses, dogs, bikes, cars) were racing in a virtual environment. This was displayed on a TV in physical branches and on the website, along with completely transparent information that it is all random, source of randomness was even some government audited hardware. The customers could place bets on these virtual racers, identified by numbers. Essentially if there were 8 'dogs' in a race, there was a 1/8 chance your pick would win. And then a new set of random numbers would be generated and based on that a new 'race' video would play. The 'races' would go on every day, 4 in hour or something like that.
And the customers (in the live chat or sitting in the physical locations) were often debating the form of the individual 'dogs', how they would perform in the next race and so on. Yes, really.
It’s more like the stock market brokerages. They just take a fee on each trade and don’t need to give you a spread over the stock price
You have to watch out for resolutions are don’t depend on the truth or could be abused.
Examples of markets to avoid are those that a single individual can manipulate. They could take the most profitable side and corrupt the result.
I've seen the comment that prediction markets can be viewed as a tool for making conflicts more intractable.
Crypto bros. Remember when all of them were saying that NFTs were the future?
And that's before we get into discussing the social damage to country that already sees more school shootings than weeks in a year (actually, 4x more), with rising political and civil tensions including assassinated politicians, adding potential "lose your house" to random events. As if it'll help calm things down and let us all keep a level head.
Or the implications of news companies reporting on these odds as if they reflect actual statistical likelihood, and how that gives the ultra wealthy yet another lever to control the view of reality the common people have.
Right now Polymarket is subject to a federal agreement that they don't let US people participate. Apparently this is just a checkbox for the user to attest to. They don't even do IP geolocation, never mind payment checks.
So it's currently illegal for them to run this in the US. But is it illegal for users to participate?
This changed last month.
I don't think this convoluted setup is enough to avoid US gambling laws, but it is important to keep in mind how it actually works.
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1Upfdb
As I understand it, the main argument is that for prediction markets that aim to incentivize the thing they're predicting, better to invest in the thing directly. Otherwise, "prediction markets" are successful precisely when they can't influence the outcome, like sports betting.
I remember finding the election betting interesting last presidential election, but I also remember that it was spiked when Musk invested to change the odds.
[0] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-prediction-markets-aren...
There's a level of irrational spending which only institutional investors can counterbalance, and they might not have the risk appetite to get into a single market on a relatively less regulated platform that could rug pull them.
While the reverse is not used as an argument against unchecked wealth.
There’s no functional difference in how markets work when 99% of wealth is owned by a handful of kings vs 99% of wealth being owned by a handful of oligarchs.
pardon me I wrote king instead of kings and what you wrote in this comment felt like questionable to me first but now comical LMAO.
But my point still stands and aside from this mistake, I am curious in knowing the real answer to my question even now!
I meant that from the perspective of how market forces play out, hyper concentration of wealth into a few actors looks the same whether the title of the those actors is “king” or “oligarch”.
You start losing the wisdom of the crowds effect the market gives if you have a handful of people making the decisions for the entire market
Which is to say that Elon Musk can inflate any market he wants, but only by losing sums of money that will become increasingly significant as more and more people find out about the free cash giveaway.
Regular people just didn’t know it cause the ticket to entry was to expensive.
I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that makes them known.
If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death, I would use that as a trigger for whatever defense strategies I had in place. Someone has really good reason to bet a lot of money on the prospect that I'm about to die. It's probably someone who knows of an active plot in motion to try to kill me! The sooner I can find out about that, the better. I would much rather give them an incentive to make that known somewhat earlier than wait.
I feel like there must be some big piece of this puzzle that I'm missing that makes it so these cannot operate the way I imagine them, but I haven't heard anyone explaining what it is. Someone fill me in on what I'm missing here?
The people "betting against" you dying just paid to have you killed.
There's already lots of examples where they are of sufficient scale, like paying the press secretary to shut up after 64 minutes. Or paying someone to falsify ISWs map of the front line in Ukraine.
Are you fucking kidding? Based just on current events, that is absolutely not a statement you can make without at least trying to prove it.
If you do try to prove that you will fail as the idea that people would start wars for profit is as old as wars.
Just evaluate the sentence you've just created. How many people exist who have the capability to start wars or influence the start of wars? It's a lot. What else do you know about these people and their motivations?
Imagine if 10 million people bet on starting a war vs 5 million who say no war. Those net 5 million people are going on social media saying why the war is justified. They’ll vote in war mongers. They’ll support the military. The bet literally influences the result. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
Many newsworthy events (and even more events that actually reach prediction markets, many of which are at best marginally newsworthy) are actions ultimately pivot on a human decision, so the first part isn’t true.
> And no person in a position to start a war would do it to affect a Polymarket bet.
Are you saying “no one would start a war with personal financial gain being part of the motivation”, or “it is impossible for the payoff of a prediction market bet to be of sufficient magnitude to alter the calculus in even the tiniest iota in that case”?
Because the first seems extremely clearly false, and the second seems improbable in the case where the first is false.
No person in position to start a war and to influence economic policies would become a crypto scammer... erm wait...
See, there are two major flavours of pro-market attitudes. The first one is "if we allow many independent individuals to try their own approaches to a problem and let the people with "better" approach to personally profit from it handsomely and make them compete against each other in an environment with objective-ish judgement of "what is better" instead of "impress the (inevitably corruptible) officials to be judged victorious and awarded the fortunes", and also manually guard and regulate against several universally known ways to sabotage such competition, then we'll be able to channel human ingenuity into solving difficult to solve technical problems while also rewarding those who are able to come up with (and implement) such solutions with low overseeing overhead". Of course, such an attitude isn't strictly speaking "pro-market", it's been around since ancient times; hell, the USSR of all places had this attitude in spades until about the 70s or so.
The second one is "Nah, we don't have to try and think about anything ourselves, just let people fend for themselves, they'll figure it out, and it won't have any unforeseen bad side effects, why would it; markets are magical like that!" Yeah, about that...
Because that's what money is for, to purchase things, like hitmen (apparently).
Why go through the "prediction market" at all then? The hitman still killed someone, payments are not anonymous in this market, and its certainly not clean. Further, you share the pot with however many are involved, proportional to the allotted bets on each side and presuming binary prediction. And if the winds change on the market for the bet proportional to the "hitman's" side, you lose out on dollars that would otherwise be paid to you (the hitman).
And it'd be so easy to stiff the hitman just by equalizing the positions by timing it.
All that risk for something that's far simpler to just pay directly?
It's there. It's not actually easy to find hitman for hire. This is a publicly advertised market for it.
Plausible deniability. We weren't paying for the witness to be murdered, we were expressing our confidence that no one would murder the witness.
Price discovery. The market tells you how much you need to pay a hitman (if you overpay hedge funds swoop in and take the difference, telling you for next time. If the hedge funds underestimate the cost they end up paying a significant penalty to the people who they prevented from hiring a hitman).
Crowd funding. The market means that every can chip in however much they want towards paying the hitman, and they only end up paying if its enough. In fact the middlemen who accepted the bets in the meantime may promise to pay some small amount of damages if enough isn't collected.
It is impossible to stiff the hitman, and there is no risk for the hitman that the "winds change". The hitman takes out the entire "yes" position before committing the murder. If it's not enough, they don't commit the murder.
It requires that they put down collateral (the purchase of the the yes bets) that they lose if they don't meet the contract, so they do have to have starting capital.
> because other people have to take the opposite side.
That is to say that there must be people offering the bounty.
The size of the bounty isn't defined by the price of the contract, but the total upside available in the order book.
> and as the odds move, they make less money.
They have to put up more collateral for the remainder of the contract if they want that upside - but they make all the money that they already put up collateral for.
But one person doesn't get the whole thing. ALL the people holding that side of the contract split the payout, in proportion to the size of their holdings in that side of the market.
I think if I use hypothetical numbers, it will help me explain how I think it works, and maybe this will help someone figure out where my error is.
Let's imagine the market is about whether I will die by the end of the day. So far, there are $500,000 in total bets in the market, and there are 5,000 shares in this market. Let's say it's currently sitting at only 10% odds that I'm going to die. I think that means 4,500 shares, or $450,000, is on the "No" side and 500 shares, or $50,000 is on the "Yes" side. Do I have that right so far?
If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of them, so they each get $111.11 per share.
But suppose someone has a solid plan to kill me by the end of the day. They decide they want to dump $50,000 in on the "Yes" side. That's not going to buy them 500 shares, because they would need someone willing to sell 500 shares at the current price. They'll actually get well under 500 shares, and probably not even half that many, and they'll still be splitting the pot among the other people who already have the 500 shares on the "Yes" side. So they're still at not even half the "Yes" side of the market. They can probably double or triple their money, but we're talking about making another $50-100k on top of getting their own $50k back. It's not like they get the whole $500k.
That's what I mean when I say it's "not a bounty." A "bounty" makes it sound like, "If you're the one who kills smeej, you get $500k," but that's not what's happening here.
Lots of people might be willing to try to kill me for $500k. A heck of a lot fewer are going to be willing to try to kill me for 2-3x whatever capital they can come up with right before the hit.
Am I at least understanding this part of it correctly, how the payouts actually work? If I'm not, that would go a long way toward helping me figure out what I'm missing.
No - there's always an equal number of contract outstanding on both sides of the bet. A contract is a promise from the person who sold "no" to pay the person who bought "yes" a dollar if the outcome happens. These contracts can trade from anywhere between 1 cent to 99 cents corresponding to a 1% chance to a 99% chance that you would die*. The odds the market reports is just whatever price the last contract traded at (or alternatively whatever price sits between the current open offers to buy/sell contracts. In liquid markets these tend to be the same).
> If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of them, so they each get $111.11 per share.
They each get $1 per share. Their profit is $1 minus how much they paid for the share. It's not (meaningfully) a shared pot which is divided up, it's a fixed amount per share.
> They decide they want to dump $50,000 in on the "Yes" side. That's not going to buy them 500 shares, because they would need someone willing to sell 500 shares at the current price.
Ignoring the numbers at this point - you're generally right that they need to find someone willing to sell them the contracts. The existence of a large number of outstanding contracts doesn't guarantee this - they might be held by someone who is holding them to minimize the payout a hitman could get for killing you for instance.
The most direct guarantee is the order book The order book is the collection of open offers "I'm willing to sell X yes-contracts at Y price" that the market has for potential purchasers. The hitman can look at this and snatch up all of these simultaneously (up to some race conditions in the market - we can mostly pretend those don't exist but they do introduce some risk on the hitmans side). This can be thought of as the size of the currently available bounty.
There's a chance the market will continually over-price these yes contracts - and the hitman will never kill you as a result. That would be a huge mistake on all the financially motivated holders of yes contracts though - their positions go from worth something (if they sell to the aspiring hitman) to worth nothing if they don't price them low enough. In general you should expect the market to find the price at which a hitman will carry out the contract - so long as there's enough money in the market in the first place.
* Ignoring transaction fees and the time value of money, it's close enough for this discussion.
I think I understand what you're saying about the pricing. Am I correct in saying, then, that if the odds are 90% in favor of my living through the contract, the "No, smeej won't die today" price should be close to $0.10 (again, ignoring fees and the time value of money)?
If the hitman tries to buy in with 10% of the total funds already in the market, the odds/price are going to shift hard. It's going to devour a huge chunk of the order book. Any market that suddenly has someone come in at 10% of the whole market value is going to get a massive trading wick. So yeah, he'd get some shares at $0.10, but he's probably going to eat the open order book to a much higher cost. He can 10x some very small portion of his money (however many shares are on the book at $0.10), but he can only 5x his money at $0.20, or 3x at $0.33.
Even if we assume he does have $50k to dump into the market, I still don't see how he's going to more than triple his money, which is a heck of a lot less than taking the entire market's value as though it were a bounty.
The hitman shouldn't expect to capture the value of the entire open interest. The market here is serving to negotiate the bounty with speculators betting that too much was offered taking the rest (a privilege they pay for by buying contracts that only pay out if they don't take too much). It's a curious form of negotiation since the people paying for the murder don't participate... but should (in a very theoretical efficient market) come to a "fair" (large enough to get the job done, and no larger) payment for the hitman.
2xing your money in a night is a huge payout, I think you're overestimating how high the multiplier on the capital requirement needs to be. That said, if you aren't, and you need a 5x payout to find a hitman then no rational speculator would purchase contracts for more then $0.20...
Essentially it's a big straw goat in Sweden that vandals sometime set on fire.
Right towards the end as the probability approaches zero there's a huge profit incentive, "done deals" usually go under well under 1¢ meaning 100-200x returns.
A US man once traveled to Sweden to set the goat on fire, he was caught, fined $20k(?) and then fled the country before paying the fine.
Risk reward in a situation like this absolutely creates a situation for prediction markets similar to the observer effect in physics, it's no longer predicting the future and instead altering it.
> If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death
No, you definitely would not want that. You don't want to live in the world like this. That's the point.
It's fucking horrible and dystopian, people betting on extra-legal invasions of countries, murders, things that could hurt or harm people where they have incentives to do something else that you've just distorted.
Gambling has been illegal, immoral, and proscribed by religions for literally thousands of years, in all sorts of different forms and iterations, for a reason. Because it's incredibly toxic to society.
You can make some arguments that pure games of chance, like casino games, and even maybe sports betting (since sports is a spectacle) aren't that bad. Based on what we've seen recently, I tend to disagree, but at least it's an argument.
But now we're talking about betting on all sorts of political issues, things that are illegal, things where people are acting in an official capacity and shouldn't be given incentives to subvert that. And all these other examples are just bad. There's not really any upside to this at all. It's just bad for society and it shouldn't happen. It's horrible.
If you feel like you're missing a big piece of the puzzle you should take a couple of steps back and think about the consequences of a world where this is common.
But I don't think we should do anything because religion doesn't like it - that's a foolish thing to use to make your crucial choices or world view. A key reason is pretty much every terrible thing ever was excused as requirement of some religion or forever. Separate from the hurtful things in religious books at times, it's too easy for leaders or authorities to somehow justify actions.
Let's instead use a goal of treating each other respectfully, stop hating and killing each other. Yeah, that's all naive stuff, we aren't there, maybe we'll never be there. Still a good goal, treat each other with kindness. And yeah, I'm an optimistic sort.
It's not toxic because religion doesn't like it. Religion doesn't like it because it's toxic.
Religion has been the primary means throughout history by which humans have tried to figure out right and wrong. You can feel however you want about it, but that's just how it's worked. It's basically the ultimate example of Chesterton's fence.
To carry my analogy further, there are many, many, many times where the fence doesn't need to be there or where the fence has outlived its useful purpose. But it's still a good metaphor.
I already live in a world where people make odds about whether I'm going to die. They're called "actuaries," and they work at life insurance companies. There are also oddsmakers of the same kind at car insurance companies, etc.
Right now, I hate that people who can actually analyze enough data to make odds about these things can only earn a living working for companies that are incentivized to find ways not to pay out when the odds do break against them. I'd much rather these people be able to make their livings just calculating odds, placing bets, and being right. I would like to have access to their calculations, and not be in a position of "just take it or leave it" when I'm evaluating a prospective plan from a life insurance company, for example.
Yes, by all means, there will be gamblers in these markets. There will always be some amount of noise, just like there is in the stock market. But why would that end up being the bulk of the industry? Just like with Wall Street, I would expect companies to grow up around these markets that specialize in getting the odds of things right, and making money off of their predictions. If the market ever became truly efficient, I think we would have a MUCH better idea than we do now about the likelihood of all kinds of things.
Heck, even if I think of something as apparently mundane as weather forecasting, if somebody came up with a breakout model that was right substantially more often, I would expect they would be able to raise all sorts of capital around it and start winning in all the weather forecasting markets, which would then make their predictions a reliable signal, and we'd finally have better information about what the weather is going to do.
I think one part I must be missing is why so many people are assuming that the primary user of prediction markets would be gamblers instead of specialists, especially once they operated at scale. I just don't see why that would happen. Anywhere there's an opportunity to make money reliably by coming up with better analysis or prediction tools, capital will flock there and incentivize coming up with better analysis or prediction tools.
I think I really would like to live in a world where that was highly incentivized, and I'm confused why people would not want that.
ETA: I don't think the gamblers would ruin this any more than they ruin Wall Street. I don't think they have enough capital to matter. (They are, after all, prone to losing money.)
The criticism is about the systemic risk of converting prediction markets into "Assassination Markets"—mechanisms where the payout is not a reward for foresight, but a bounty for action.
In the case of Maduro, the operation cost around $300 million so a $400,000 payout isn’t providing a financial incentive.
But in the case of assassination, a $400,000 payout is sufficient motivation.
It is if you are spending someone else’s $300 million, and getting the $400,000 yourself.
I think there's a pretty good chance the person who took that money was opportunistic, this time, but $400k isn't a trivial sum of money, it's not impossible it was the difference between this happening and not.
Indeed. Insider trading is a feature of prediction markets, not a bug. There are two kinds of people who participate in prediction markets:
1. People who have insider information, or at least more sophisticated predictive capability than your average person.
2. Gamblers.
In effect, prediction markets are a way to move wealth from the second group to the first. If you understand that and still want to participate, cool. It's your money, and you're allowed to gamble it away if you find that entertaining.
At any rate, given the relatively small-potatoes level of bets going on at Polymarket and Kalshi, the article author's breathless anxiety about this is a bit overblown.
I mean, most stock trading prevents insider trading, unless of course you're a in congress.
Seemingly regulators consider this a bug in every other market type, but suddenly this gambling market allows it?
> breathless anxiety about this
All fun and games until people start dying from it.
The CEO and executive team has fiduciary responsibility to act in the financial best interest of the shareholders. Your broker too.
If you have insider info (Obtained legally) but no fiduciary responsibility you can act on it. That’s why congress members trading US equities based on decisions they’re privy to is not, from a legal perspective, insider trading. They don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to their constituents
1. The misappropriation theory of insider trading covers anyone who trades on material non public information sourced through a trusted relationship regardless of any fiduciary duty to the company. For example, if I tell my personal attorney a non public fact about the company I work at, and they trade on that information, they absolutely can be found guilty of insider trading despite having no relationship to the company at hand.
2. Congress is explicitly covered by insider trading law, which was affirmed in the STOCK Act of 2012. The fact that they’re rarely indicted has more to do with the legal and political challenges associated with doing so, not the legality of the act.
This bucket as you've defined it is too broad.
There are a few different kinds of non-gambler participants in prediction markets:
1. People with "insider information" as we think of it - they "know" the answer to the market because they are "involved" somehow.
2. People who aim to do superior analysis of publicly available information to produce an edge. For example, an AI firm with better hurricane prediction modeling may try to monetize that by betting on whether or not a hurricane will impact an area.
2b. People who do the work to create new information. For example, the Trump 2024 election market on polymarket famously had better odds for Trump than polling. It turned out that a mega whale was bidding Trump up because he had paid for his own private polling in battleground states and that gave him confidence Trump was going to win.
In short, it's mostly incorrect to suggest that prediction market participants are either illegitimate insiders or gamblers; there is a third class of actors that are a very important cohort: those who do the work to create better predictions and monetize their work by betting in the markets. This third cohort of professional predictors is the most important in long-term prediction market growth.
Except the paragraph you quoted nullify this benefit
> The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro
So we learnt nothing. For the entire duration the stock is online, its pretty much 50/50 then suddenly 1 day before, the ticker spikes to yes.
That's the whole point, isn't it?
And if you're going to tell me the paragraph I quoted nullifies what I've said, would you please explain how? Obviously I don't currently understand it the same way you do, and I have asked for help understanding what I'm missing. Saying, "You're missing it," isn't helpful.
e.g. two sports teams participating in a fair match tomorrow, someone runs a book and after 200,000 punters bet, the odds are 90/10 in favour of Team A indicates that 90% of the time Team A is going to win that game.
This assumes perfect and fully available information with punters availing themselves of this info (or at least an equal split of passionate/casual/informed/wreckless or even slightly "inside" punters on each side).
All I can really do in this case is ask for explanation. If you're enough higher and mightier than I am that you don't care to give me one, that's fine. You don't have to. It's just kind of...unnecessarily condescending to rub my face in it without even trying?
You're correct in your understanding of prediction markets with respect to traders using insider information. There are a couple things going on here. One is the subtext from most news media now that Technology Bad. New technologies are treated as guilty until proven innocent, because that is a more engaging narrative for readers. So in this case, those covering this stuff immediately latch onto the rich get richer, insider trading viewpoint, and that gets reported without any analysis of why that might actually be desirable.
Second, prediction markets, in trying to become broadly accessible to "normal" people and desiring liquidity, need a marketing strategy that is understandable. They can't put out a Robin Hanson article as marketing material. So they market by appealing to something people do already understand, which is gambling. The public has this idea now of prediction markets as a way to make money, not as a tool for learning information. So the default perspective on insider trading is now one of unfairness: somebody used their privileged position to make money. The correct perspective is, in fact, that prediction markets are providing users with value by eliciting information from those insiders, information that the public would not otherwise have. The latter perspective is mostly foreign to degenerate gamblers, and the marketing campaigns of Kalshi and Polymarket aren't helping.
Some people do it for for entertainment, some people are gambling addicts, some people think they have a strong grasp or inside knowledge when they don't.
It is, at root, a casino. Apply your lens to any casino game, and it shouldn't exist (some very narrow exceptions apply in the casino).
If you don't have inside information and you participate in prediction markets, you're there mostly to provide liquidity.
Part of me is careful what I wish for, starting with passengers bothering staff even more.
The plane eventually arrived like 8 hours late, luckily I had already bailed.
The essence of prediction markets.
In theory, insiders give correct signal. But in practice, their volume is often too low to meaningfully move the market in the correct direction, and the timing of their order flow can be too late for that signal to actually be useful as a tool for predicting the future.
Its also critical to note that insider trading laws don't just exist to protect investors. They exist to protect the organizations the insiders belong to. The order flow on both prediction markets and the stock market is public information. Its one thing to short the company you work at because you know they're going to announce bad earnings. Its another thing entirely to take out a million-dollar position on "US Strikes Venezuela before Jan 3: Yes" on January 2nd. Sophisticated geopolitical opponents are monitoring these order flow feeds, and it begins to become a genuine matter of national security.
Overall, I am fine with prediction markets. I think they're an improvement over sports betting in the sense that they better-align incentives between the participants and the market-maker. In typical sports betting, the casinos running them set the odds, and participants take out positions against the casino; which means the casinos are incentivized against allowing anyone to actually make money on their platforms. This has surfaced many times in "professional sports betters" getting blacklisted. In comparison, PMs are a contract between participants, and the market-maker only takes a fee on each transaction (Robinhood's is 2.5%; quite high), which means the market-maker is only incentivized to increase PM order book volume and provide interesting markets. There's more opportunity for actual skill and dedication to shine through.
But, KYC is critical.
Unlike stock markets, prediction markets also provide valuable data on important world events, such as elections. It's wisdom of the crowd with financial incentive.
Good example to show when people tout how great these are at predicting.
There is little incentive for someone with significant information, reason, or intuition to reveal it early leaving the market dumb for most of its existence or also open for someone influencing the outcome late.
They also aren't currently that reliable for gauging the wisdom of the crowds for situations where trust in the market effects its outcome. It's easy due to the scale of them for someone to just burn money to skew the perception of it for rhetorical and influential benefits.
I feel like there is no getting off this train though because news media companies are still desperate for revenue. Gambling around news will either increase advertising revenue for them, or if they do real information uncovering journalism, drive subscriptions because there's now incentive for getting news early on more than just financial news.
Yes but only if they know no one else has the same information and enough money to move the market
Even for insider trading, it's illegal not because it's unfair, but because the insider is considered to be stealing information from shareholders. For example, it's not illegal for a company to buy back stocks while holding insider information.
Not legal advice of course.