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margalabargala
rtkwe
At least with sports betting it's limited in scope. Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or players are altering their play to make or break bets but ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited. And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly impossible to enforce.
Barbing
Was I a sucker for believing that Kalshi was going to [e.g.] help farmers hedge against drought years or is the problem just morally bankrupt selection of events?
rtkwe
If they said that and you believed it kinda. There are already markets and insurance schemes to allow farmers to do that though through crop insurance, it's a very old and even government subsidized to keep the prices down in many countries. Farmers in need of that can already insure their crops to make $XXX amount of money to make sure they break even on the crop for the year for example there's no real need to bet on the amount of rain to reach that same goal.
7jjjjjjj
We already have an extremely complicated system of farm insurance and commodity futures for that.
gettingoverit
The word "Polymarket" can be replaced by "market" there.
Global market is just the largest gambling venue. Always has been. No amount of "monitoring" and "leagues" will keep people from going Boeing whistleblower way.
StrauXX
The "market" isn't a zero-sum-game though. Polymarket is.
derf_
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this.
There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].
margalabargala
Yeah, regulations are only as strong as the consequences given those who break them.
If people can threaten journalists for money and get away with it, they will. If people who threaten journalists over money are sent to prison, then after a brief transition period it will mostly stop.
tuple
It's braindead easy to anonymously threaten people on the internet. It's getting easier to steal identities or create new ones out of whole cloth and cypto wallets means you can't functionally know where the money comes from. I'm not sure attempting to punish people you can't realistically identify can be considered an effective strategy.
Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
thayne
Seems like bets on missile strikes would violate that...
DoctorOetker
This is the sanest reply on the thread.
During WW2 when Britain captured all incoming german spies and ran a fake german spy network, they could redirect the german V1 or V2 bombs, by misreporting what they did or didn't hit.
Allowing bets on acts of violence allows the perpetrators to assess their success rate...
thaumasiotes
They do. It's moot, though, because Polymarket isn't subject to US law.
There has been an ongoing controversy over the fact that Kalshi (which is subject to US law) chose to comply with the law over the market on Khomeini "leaving office", when the bettors assumed that it wouldn't.
gepiti
What happens if someone bets on a terrorist attack in an unlikely place and then puts the bomb himself? This can turn ugly very easily.
kmacdough
Well that is a high enough level even the bet would probably be enforced. But the point is valid, this is a slippery slope and there's a reason these bets are illegal.
alephnerd
> I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences...
Functionally, you are correct.
But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.
Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.
It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/little-tech-startup...
margalabargala
Which is of course a blatant abuse of our legal system, since they are doing nothing different than a casino's roulette or blackjack tables.
"Red futures pay out at 2:1!"
"Get your future here on whether the dealer's cards are higher than your own!"
Pay08
I'd agree with the blackjack comparison, but not roulette. Both "futures betting" and blackjack need skill to be able to win even if luck plays a significant part, as opposed to roulette, which is just pure luck.
hgomersall
Well the real insight here is that most "investing" is gambling.
throwawayffffas
> As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.
bnlxbnlx
> there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating each others' humanity.
margalabargala
I honestly don't know what your point is. The best I can come up with is:
"The whole point of sports (in my opinion) is X good thing therefore betting on sports is more acceptable"
Making bets on good things doesn't make the betting better. Just because Polymarket would allow you to bet money that the infant homicide rate goes down next year, doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow betting on.
gusgus01
His point is pretty simple. Sports don't inherently involve life or death, the whole point is that it's a competition that "respects each other's humanity", eg not a competition to the death.
The same can't be said for war (bombings), which Polymarket allows betting on.
Seems like a fundamental difference to me.
saalweachter
... if I post a multi-paragraph long reply on the incentives created by betting on less infant homicide, am I going to find out that you understand perfectly well what the incentives are, and that was the entire point of your comment?
esalman
The Good Work channel on YouTube did a really good video on this topic recently- https://youtu.be/mOptJl8Xkx0?si=4jyNnXweXp7V9VkM
In a nutshell, these platforms operate by classifying their bets as 'futures contracts' with 'meaningful real world economic consequences' rather than traditional gambling, allowing them to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than stricter state gambling laws.
It's going to take strong push from lawmakers to close the loophole, and even stronger push from the platforms to stop anything meaningful being done.
basilikum
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
margalabargala
I wouldn't say one in the last decade is "tons of people"
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pindab0ter
I think time and time again that incentives are most important in determining how a market and by extension a society behaves. These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.
These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.
scoofy
>These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.
Just call it gambling. They aren't "prediction markets," they're just gambling. Gambling incentivizes the absolute worst in humanity.
fritzo
We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction. We're talking about gambling as big players paying participants to throw fights, paying referees to call shots, and the players are the real world and the referees are journalists.
scoofy
I agree.
trashb
> We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction.
What makes you think this is not "gambling-as-addiction"?
It seems to me that these players, big or small, either have too much skin in the game or are compulsive gambling. To me the threats only make sense in that context.
arcticfox
I used to be pro-betting legalization and now I see the light. It is a corrosive influence On everything it touches. I hope there's another opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle.
cybernoodles
I feel like we need a new word for this because it is far worse than gambling when you can effectively put a hit on someone.
bagacrap
Technically you can't bet on the demise of a person, at least in the US, as participants recently discovered when the previous supreme leader of Iran was killed and their "leadership change" bet did not pay out.
ptsneves
This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..
loeg
Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though, arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).
[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.
fer
Polymarket doesn't operate in the US.
thrance
There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.
impjohn
Then this person better bet their entire life savings on them dying, since it would reduce incentive (profit). Crazy thought experiment, gave me lots to think about
awakeasleep
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there was no safe course of action for the journalist because there was money on both sides of this outcome.
No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
hattmall
Defer to an actual authority. Where is the official report on whether or not it was an interception? Even with a large explosion the fact that it landed in a wooded area implies it was intercepted. Those are targeted missiles, an acceptable result of an interception is to bring it down in an undeveloped area.
So I would think there should be some sort of authority with official capacity to state what happened, not just a random journalist that doesn't give concrete sources.
Pay08
Iranians primarily use rockets, not missiles. It's perfectly possible, even likely, that said rocket just missed. If you read the article, the journalist did actually say he had a military source...
heisenbit
> No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
That is why modern reportings best practice is to always support both sides. /s
strathmeyer
[dead]
ntonozzi
Perhaps because he is a journalist whose job is to report reality, not avoid threats?
abracadaniel
Until they start trying the carrot instead of the stick. Then it becomes a bidding war to determine the "reality"
zadikian
They can also just do that bidding war in the resolution contract
asdff
Always is. 'Reality' is a subjective accounting.
bigyabai
Avoiding threats is non-optional for most Israeli journalists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
yonixw
The reason no one responds to this list is because it's just one big gish gallop
It's enough to see that you brought a link to the Israeli Military Censor to hint at a conspiracy, to understand who you're dealing with.
But even if you go into the list, you'll see at the top that those who were shot were in the middle of the battle, where Israeli forces were surprised, to the point of massacre alongside civilians. And there, it turns out, they didn't shoot to save themselves by the skin of their teeth, but simply wanted to kill journalists.
Also, a quick search shows that "Mohammad Jarghoun" ("מוחמד ג'רגון") was not a journalist at all, but a media worker, that according to the CPJ [1], during wartime he receives journalistic status. (Also not mentioned in AJ [2]. what a surprise...)
Another comment to the pantheon of "the most logical failures, in the fewest words". And then no one understands why the ICC will never consider such reports..
[1]: https://www.the7eye.org.il/501320
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/10/at-least-six-pales...
munificent
I feel like being a journalist in a warzone is already exposure to a sufficient number of threats for the benefit of human society that we shouldn't simply accept them being exposed to any entirely different set of completely unnecessary threats from a pile of sociopaths running their own sick gambling dead pools.
sam0x17
I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
andai
>outcome shaping markets
I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations.
When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the bet by default.
Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to wonder about the model itself.
I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it. (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get divided between them for prototypes.)
For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your wallet.
Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope they will launch something you're interested in. But what if you could push?
I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people actually do know what they want.
And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in government as well.
masklinn
> Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors.
polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran https://www.npr.org/2026/03/01/nx-s1-5731568/polymarket-trad...
jacquesm
> and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran
Oh, trump made some money?
fwipsy
nit: The article you linked says half a billion, not a billion.
Death markets are banned in the US. Personally, I tend to think of this as a crypto problem, not a prediction market problem.
jacquesm
You are describing:
casey2
Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away. Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that increases the amount of money behind assassinations.
Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and death, but seriously, grow up.
[0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount
ciaranmca
I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market of validated ideas and could submit a ‘bid’ before a set deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best product.
hcs
> But what if you could push?
There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.
bluGill
Kickstarter exists. The real problem is most things cost more than the average person should dare risk. Some widget today is worth more than the same tommorow. Most people should not back your eink laptop even though if it existed they would pay more for it.
andai
Yeah it's about trust and risk.
I'm not sure how to align the incentives on that.
For the consumer the ideal case is that the money is not released from the escrow until their product actually arrives.
But that would be overly restrictive, and limit development to companies with significant funds.
Kickstarter has a balance where, you only pledge money after deciding you trust the company.
I think we could do it so the initial fundraiser is provisional. And then everyone would know that some portion of that would fall through. Over time you would learn what the ratio is. If a million is pledged, maybe you can expect 200k to be committed in the final round.
We could even divide it further. There is some portion of users which are more open-minded and enthusiastic. They might be happy to fund a round of crappy prototypes. So in this way smaller players could gain trust and credibility.
bpp
If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?
janalsncm
That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.
necovek
Problem intrinsic to gambling is that people appropriate expected winnings instead of what they really put in, thus making the feeling of loss even greater than what it objectively is.
sam0x17
The problem in the article is sort of boring, this is nothing new, centralized authorities who run prediction markets have been doing a terrible job at wording the predictions and then people get pissed when those poorly written words are put through a forcing function. Incompetence is boring.
arduanika
Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true:
Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems.
or
Case 2. sam0x17 goes through his life wielding a giant hammer called "privacy", which he swings about wildly without ever feeling the need to look very closely at any given nail. In fact, he'll even shout "privacy" in the face of a situation where privacy *is the problem*. Goons are hiding behind privacy to threaten a reporter and his family? Let's give them more privacy, that'll fix it!
HN can be very predictable sometimes, but hey, at least nobody ITT has suggested Rust yet.
sam0x17
You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.
dlenski
This doesn't make any sense…
If you want to bet on a binary outcome without knowing how much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes, that's a bookie, not a prediction market.
The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and credible way.
(And that's even before we get to the fact that any kind of betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize outcomes like the death threats reported here.)
sam0x17
You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome
I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad
Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough
Legend2440
> but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes
This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets, where you can get information about the probability of an event based on how much people are betting on it.
sam0x17
I mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.
patcon
Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community.
I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there
ActorNightly
Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should exist on websites that are publicly accessible.
If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of the type of people who make death threats to journalists.
geor9e
Surely I am misreading what you mean here. But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10. I'll search the space of other interpretations in the mean time, but if you could help me out here and clarify…
derangedHorse
> But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10
I don't know how you extrapolated that from the parent's comment. It literally said nothing about the cause and effect of this particular event.
Knowing the odds in a prediction market IS a big part of the problem brought up in the linked article though (and the bets themselves). Knowing how much can be made from being right creates an upper-bound on what a financially-rational malicious actor will spend in trying to change the outcome.
adrianmonk
Their comment proposed something that would "be the answer here".
What does "here" mean? It's logical to expect "here" to refer to a scenario that includes cases like the one in the article. If it's some scenario that excludes cases like the one in the article, then it's not actually relevant to the discussion.
(Tangents are OK. It's just confusing if they're introduced with phrasing that makes them sound like they're not tangents.)
geor9e
>how you extrapolated that
I wasn't extrapolating - it was the literal meaning of the words. The context was that someone commented "shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called outcome-shaping markets" in direct reply to "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over…[the prediction market "Iran strikes Israel on March 10"]. I interpret that as polymarket gamblers outcome-shaped Iran striking Israel. It was at 25% odds when they struck. I don't think the commenter actually meant that literally, which is why I asked them to clarify. I'm just doing my best here.
sam0x17
I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The problem with prediction markets that has been talked about for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines the outcome not the other way around
geor9e
Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the outcome of an event?
asdff
Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting, at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on. Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going into a free agency period.
This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge.
https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...
LeifCarrotson
I was confused as well: After further consideration, I realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and credibly reports on those events and their resolution criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg. national militaries.
"Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel’s military correspondent or other credible sources reports that Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money.
In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully, your worst crime is publishing a fictional news article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.
Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks", where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the Internet through another financial instrument.
[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rul...
echoangle
> you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.
You don't even need the market to actually resolve, as soon as your rumor becomes credible the market pricing will adjust and you can just sell your shares before resolution.
lordnacho
I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business.
"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
emporas
That's superb. A very good literature story could be written based on that.
malfist
Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or payout?
TimTheTinker
A lot of people habitually make bets out of addiction without thinking carefully about the expected payoff.
bandrami
That's how pari mutuel betting works; the odds are set by the bettors betting and unknown until the book closes.
That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.
gcr
One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This only works if your intuition is better than the market's current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any particular knowledge.
mathgeek
Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing them don’t know or care about the odds.
coppsilgold
At the time of the threats the odds were likely very skewed, as in over 99% to one side.
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
mvdtnz
> Most people on Polymarket are gamblers
Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.
Dylan16807
If a casino sets up a normal roulette wheel but pays out red at 1.5x and black at 2.5x, betting 5% of your bankroll on black over and over is "gambling" but it's not "gambling", if you get what I'm saying.
November_Echo
I think they mean "most people are gamblers _who_ have no idea what they're doing"
LoganDark
Some people are insiders though.
ubj
There was an interesting article in the Atlantic recently where a journalist spent a year participating in sports gambling. Part of the article discusses the effect it had on his psychology towards participants he had put his money on.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...
Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.
gcr
Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is a great game, I highly recommend it to anyone in this thread.
It opens with a content warning saying that the player will likely become very angry at least once when a baby who you are financially incentivized to watch crash and burn pulls their life together, and that's okay.
I appreciate that they're explicitly covering this psychological phenomenon.
defly
FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...
varjag
(as reported by Quincy Institute, a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank)
waffleiron
ISW confirmed unauthorised edits were made, and fired a staffer over it. Not sure why you feel the need to comment this. Classic lowbrow dismissal
varjag
Your link points to a 2012 discussion of "Why an Airline That Travelers Love Is Failing". Not super convincing.
culi
Please give me a single example backing up the claim that Quincy Institute is "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"
On their page "Quincy Institute’s Position on Russia-Ukraine" they say at the very beginning:
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
varjag
It has been suggested that QI’s approach is insufficiently critical of Russia.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
senderista
ISW is a shill for neoconservatism (just look at their board!) and is funded by US defense contractors. They try to give the appearance of neutrality via technical jargon etc. but are anything but.
culi
Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the invasion
varjag
You're welcome to find a piece of their writing where they unequivocally support Ukraine without ifs, buts, and NATO-didits.
DrProtic
And ISW is tied to Victoria Nuland.
senderista
Not sure why you're being downvoted, you're absolutely correct.
zarathustreal
(Ad-hominem is not a counter-example btw)
loeg
Nothing about GP's comment is ad-hominem; it's neutral, factual context. Unless you dispute the factual claims?
elicash
Here's what a spokesperson for Polymarket said:
"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/polymarket-bett...
(I'd prefer if it said they were evaluating whether to limit the types of bets accepted to make the possibility of harassing journalists less likely.)
mayneack
"this violates our TOS" is a classic Accountability Sink. "Polymarket has a rule against harassment, so we obviously did all we could!"
JumpCrisscross
> whether to limit the types of bets accepted
Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats concentrating around certain bet genres?
elicash
Yes in sports. NCAA is trying to specifically get player prop bets banned in part because they are more likely not just to be corrupt, but also they specifically mention player safety.
https://www.ncaa.org/news/2026/1/15/media-center-ncaa-urges-...
I linked this elsewhere, but I found Nate Silver's take interesting here. He specifically takes on the problem of player prop bets and says they produce abusive behavior toward players.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...
I think it's reasonable to research if there's some equivalent to player prop bets in other contexts, like anything that might hinge on what a reporter writes. There's the safety angle and there's also just the "more likely to be corrupted" angle. Like I said in my original comment, I'd just like them to evaluate this.
foobarish
Polymarket should do the right thing. Unfortunately that means shut down entirely.
MallocVoidstar
[dead]
Lliora
Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48 hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent: above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.
eek2121
Definitely an unpopular opinion: The whole with the internet is anonymity. Keep in mind, I support an anonymous internet, however, political interests, corporate interests, hate groups, etc. are all using it to undermine society.
Example: When Twitter ("X") suddenly started showing the locations of accounts, a lot of folks with MAGA talking points were shown to be anywhere except the U.S. Accounts with millions of followers and tons of influence have never even set foot in the U.S.
Another Example: Polymarket (not the "US" one) is anonymous. Because of this, events like the headline talks about happens. Certain government leaders worldwide could easily be seeding the bets, and playing the market, and you would never know.
Anonymity is nice, however, it is being taken advantage of for power plays. This is why we can't have nice things.
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phkahler
The pull quote "The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings" misses something. If the reporter changes his story, then the people on the other side of the bet might start harassing him. OTOH individual betters anger will depend which side of the odds they're on.
bagacrap
Also that journalists are paid for their work, often by someone with political interests, so they are already subject to pressure to modify their reporting. Hopefully not usually threats of violence though!
Terr_
I think this is way worse. Traditionally violence towards journalists comes from (A) predictable entities and (B) they are curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.
In contrast:
1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.
2. The violence can arrive from all sides, simultaneously. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one way to ensure an existing report is not revised is to put the journalist out of commission.
3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, with a new bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"
alkonaut
So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet heavily myself if I were the reporter.
postexitus
Not even that. It is settling a bet on voting. But you are taking a bet on voting on the right side of the outcome. This is independent on the actual bet - this is outcome voting. You make very little money if you vote on correct outcome, and lose a lot if you vote on wrong outcome. So there is an incentive on voting on correct outcome.
https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...
fer
Not going to defend Polymarket, but that's usually the case for markets that should never existed that depend heavily on opinion and/or reporting.
For example, "Will Trump talk Macron before 31 of March?". Someone is going to get scammed no matter what: the market rules will set some basic resolution scenarios, but you'll find sources saying it was a letter, or sources several countries and in several languages saying that it was an exchange between their offices/assistants, or smoke signals, or god knows what, while a single US source will say they talked without any further detail, or it is simply reported 1 month after the fact when the money has long moved wallets, and then people vote based on the combination of factoids they've been exposed to. In principle the perverse incentive of voting wrong to earn money will make you lose money on the UMA itself (unless there's a coordinated effort, which has already happened, but IME it's rather rare).
Other markets are indisputable bar black swan events, like, "how many Oscars will X win", if it's 6 it's 6 and no source will say 5 or 7. That makes opening disputes 100% a money-losing option.
banannaise
If you can keep the public misinformed for long enough, you can gradually sell off your position instead of losing the whole bet.
OutOfHere
There exists a sensible way to handle this. It is to require at least three independent news outlet reports of an event (as defined in the bet).
A related issue is that war news is heavily censored in Israel; it's difficult for news outlets to report it.
bagacrap
Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
alkonaut
It's really hard I think. I mean if we assume sports betting is never going away (Outside of the US at least, sports betting is barely controversial and is basically now, unfortunately the oxygen of a lot of the whole sports industry).
A lot of the large sports betting orgs (Unibet, Bet365, Ladbrokes, etc) allow betting on at least some contests that aren't sports. Like elections, Eurovision song contests and so on. So it becomes difficult to draw a line between the things that are legal to bet on, and those that aren't.
And as we know, even if two things are clearly on either side of what should be legal but you can't make a good distinction of what makes one of them illegal, it tends to be the case that both remain legal.
I think the easier short term fix for this is to have KYC laws and actually enforce them.
happyopossum
> Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
Ban it where exactly? If you’ve got personal knowledge of where these knuckleheads reside, speak up. It’s entirely possible that it is banned where they are and they just got a VPN and did it anyway.
OutOfHere
It already is not accessible in the US, although ideally it should be in the same of freedom. If you are from the US and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet of what is American.
Making death threats to a journalist or anyone already is illegal. There is zero reason to ban betting considering the sensible mitigation that was noted.
inerte
It's also hard to have 3 independent outlets report on all the thing.s This seems like a small story that only some people in Polymarket cared about I guess? It's not like 3 different news outlets were calling authorities to confirm what really happened here. It wasn't big enough to deserve more than 1 journalist going to the source and doing all this work.
OutOfHere
Israel doesn't have a free press, so it stays largely suppressed. If it did, surely more local news outlets would cover it. Israel strongly censors domestic war news.
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maxerickson
And the people taking the other side of the bets. You have to kind of be a fool to take an anonymous bet with an outcome that can more or less be chosen.
throw4847285
I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.
gopher_space
Delphi markets feature prominently in Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It's an important book, and Brunner is amazing if you've never read him before.
He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.
throw4847285
I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in before getting distracted by something else. I should give Brunner another shot.
natechols
"The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone users, ubiquitous privacy violations, and governments run by criminal gangs; the other is like if Paul Ehrlich wrote a sci-fi novel. I don't think "The Shockwave Runner" is as well written as any of the other cyberpunk classics, but as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic. (Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.)
nvader
Look everyone, this person believes talking Tortoises are real!
In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?
gopher_space
In my experience book stores either have multiple copies or zero copies.
Robertson Davies is another bellwether author I should mention.
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As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.
My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.