Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story(timesofisrael.com) |
Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story(timesofisrael.com) |
Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:
War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise.
Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism.
In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.
Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
A) They notice that it would land in the middle of nowhere and decided to not destroy it. It's better keep the interceptors for one that is going to hit an important target.
B) They partially intercepted it, perhaps only broke the motor or a fin, but the explosive head was intact. So instead of going to an important target, it crashed and exploded in the middle of nowhere.
The main reason for this is because the interceptors are very scarce and costly.
>More emails arrived in my inbox.
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
What do you think, could this help this issue?
It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider trading.
But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten / bribe someone into lying about what really happened. That’s the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of prediction markets has gone negative. You’ve no longer got a tool that helps predict reality, you’ve got a new way to reward people for lying about what is real and not real.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
"Player props are inherently more subject to manipulation because only one player needs to be involved in rigging the outcome. [...] Even as someone more sympathetic to gambling than most people you’re probably reading on this story, I’m not sure I’d really care if player prop bets were banned entirely. They produce abusive behavior toward players. They also often put team and individual performance into tension with one another..."
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...
If you read some of the now-copious reporting about gamblers targeting athletes with death threats, you'll see that they have people screaming at them and threatening them violently both for performing badly and for performing well.
Truly unhinged and alarming that gambling has been legalized and marketed so quickly and so extensively, in so many forms.
* https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
... and many, many other stories.
...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".
If you are a journalist, it comes with the territory, I'm sure you know.
- Blatant insider trading
- Angry people who were invested in an outcome
These are just a few of the reasons why such prediction markets were not permitted in the first place. It’s just incredibly toxic and creates vicious externalities. There is no way that it is healthy if you allow people to put gobs of money on any outcome because it just incentivizes toxic behavior in an endless positive feedback loop.
> A friend asked Baron Rothschild what he was doing in response to Paris Commune:
> “Why,” replied the famous banker musingly, “French government bonds are selling at sixty-five. I bought five millions yesterday.”
> “What!” exclaimed the friend. “Bought bonds? Why, France is without a government, and the sewers of Paris are running red with blood!”
> “Yes, it is deplorable,” remarked the baron, “but if the sewers of Paris were not running red with blood, I could not buy bonds at this price. France will survive this terrible calamity, as she survived the Revolution, and the seven coalitions against her of all the powers of Europe. Her credit will again be the highest of any nation, and her bonds will sell again above par.”
People who oppose gambling tend to see this as a foreign capitalist selfishly making money off of the dire situation of the French people. People who do not oppose gambling see it as financial support of the French in their times of trouble when others have abandoned them.
There will always be a market.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/sport/athlete-abuse-betting-s...
"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."
Bet on whether they get into a car accident, and then see what happens if all of a sudden that number starts spiking towards 100%.
This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.
Polymarket also bets on sports games and wars which makes it a categorically different market from a regulatory perspective.
But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?
The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.
This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.
Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).
If the prediction markets cannot produce a satisfactory solution to this problem, then their license to operate should be seriously cut back by regulators. Bets on a vast set of propositions that involve journalistic judgement should be banned, if they can't be blackmail-proofed. The social utility of these markets as info aggregators is marginal at best, and it is dwarfed by the harm of threats to reporters.
It is in Polymarket's court to figure out how to resolve this amicably. Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police. If your KYC has neglected to gather that info, then freeze all money on that side of the market until each bettor has identified themselves. Or some other means of fixing it, I don't know. Figure it out.
If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs. And if it comes down to it, I'm pretty sure that Shayne spends most of his time in the US, and we have extradition with Israel.
> Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police
Woah there, didn't see this coming to be honest. But, I mean we already trust Israel to spend our tax dollars on genocide, so heck, why not, they'll do a great job!
> If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs
First of all, why is it time to get tough on limiting human rights, why is your freedom of speech and freedom of privacy the first thing on the chopping block, rather than Polymarket's license to operate, which is a much more obvious target for all of our disdain.
And also, it's physically impossible to crack down on VPNs 100%, especially within the constitutional framework we have in the US, and the technical reality of the modern internet. Keep in mind the US Government itself invented TOR to help destabilize and leak information out of autocratic regimes that have implemented sweeping censorship and blocking of VPNs (you know, the sort of autocratic regime you apparently want to start here in the US given your comments on the matter).
From a technical perspective, with SSL being standard for most web traffic it is utterly trivial to set up VPNs that hide in all kinds of ways that look completely innocuous and are unblockable. You can even hide exfiltration traffic in DNS queries, and I even got to see this a few times in practice when I still worked for the DoD back in the day. People will go to all kinds of lengths to get information in and out of a closed system and stopping that is like trying to catch air with your hands, you will always just end up hurting/restricting the average citizen and the bad actor who wants to slip through will still slip through.
Such a ban or KYC program is also fundamentally against every notion of privacy and freedom enshrined by the constitution and even more so by the founding spirit and values of the internet and reputable tech circles that care about privacy and freedom. You sound just as bad as Zuckerberg and Palantir trying to push KYC on Linux right now to help build a better mass-surveillance state for their fascist overlords. You seem to be the sort who would be extremely supportive of that project, though I sincerely hope that is not the case.
> we have extradition with Israel
For now. Once the Boomers finish their reverse mortgages and are finally out of the equation we'll hopefully cut all funding, sanction Israel, and label them a terroristic genocidal state, which they are. As usual, moral progress is always delayed by rich old men refusing to let go. Ethnostates are also extremely problematic in their own right, never mind genocidal ones. Certainly not morally praiseworthy, certainly not good "ally" material. Should be sanctioned in the very very least, definitely not subsidized.
And the funniest part is I agree with you that Polymarket is bad, which is your underlying point that you care so strongly about throughout this thread, but your arrogance and sudden undeserved spitefulness, in response to completely innocuous, imaginative, on-topic comments, just comes off as really bitter and makes you hard to talk to and even harder to agree with. Like you really have an axe to grind and I think it is rooted in some sort of deep-seated fear that everyone around you is as evil and misanthropic as you claim to be through your espoused values.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-gu...
More to your point... I don't think economic theory has anything to do with it. I'm a capitalist and I think that "prediction markets" is just an idiotic rebranding of "legalized gambling" and generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned. The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes. It's shameful.
> “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”
But HN has increasingly been about having vigorous, opinionated discussion on a surface level understanding of topics (plus a growing number of AI participants), so I'm not sure there's much benefit to pointing it out.
I agree with you in theory, but remember that people frequently do illegal things, just illegally. If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate. That would be the same thing which happened with alcohol during Prohibition and which happens now with the many illegal drugs fueling today's Mexican cartels and US gang networks.
> The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes.
And because of a SCOTUS ruling overturning a federal prohibition on states' ability to legalize sports betting, but otherwise yes.
You are, quite succintly, a liberal in your beliefs here. This is not liberal in the CNN/Fox News sense, in case this comes off offensive.
People taking care of cats have done large damage to bird populations and many people are infected with pathogens carried by cats. How many people are killed by dogs each year? Should we ban caring for animals too? There are no 0 harm activities.
Reasonably splitting activities up into subcategories and regulating those makes way more sense. Your $100 attitude is just a shitty, less enforceable and more harmful way to regulate it. Calling the behavior of a system "shameful" is a total copout. You know what else creates negative externalities? (besides everything) DEBT! Why not ban debt, besides a token $100, I'm sure states will function just fine!
Do you have a religion that works on systems/corporations/states? If so I'd love to see it, cause the past 2000 years has been dogshit failure after pathetic failure
You can either take the libertarian view that it should be allowed until someone is put in harms way, or take the prohibitionist view that it should all be illegal.
With the latter approach, you will be doing more harm than good potentially, because it will just become an underground betting market, fully unregulated and with the worst of people abusing it.
I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match, or who will become the next presidential race nominee. At least no more than options trading, or betting on the price of oil, or a poker match.
I agree that betting on someone else coming into harms way, be that violence or other types of harm (loss of property, livelihood, wellbeing,etc..) shouldn't be allowed. A sports team losing, or your preferred politician losing are not someone coming into harms way.
I've commented on these lines before, but reactionary extremist approaches will always do more harm than good.
also, politicians shouldn't be allowed to bet in even so much as a poker game!
I do wonder - what if the sports teams or politician loses intentionally; which could either be to profit off the loss or due to threats from an actor who seeks to profit?
I heard that Kalshi paid out for when Khamenei was killed in Iran (the bet was for when he would go out of power), so murdering people could be another way to win such a bet on who will lose. Even injuring a sports player could easily change a game result. With so much money on the line, it doesn't seem like a good mix.
edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.
What on earth does this even mean?!
There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different.
To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.
Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about?
Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things.
Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side.
Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well.
Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that.
These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise.
There's no 'isms' here.
They're just villains, same as it ever was.
They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.
You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already heavily monetized—think Page Six, Access Hollywood, livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor Swift’s personal life.
Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made available to the wider public?
The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the voters want.
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
"The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock"
"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
"[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it"
"every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends... to raise the real rent of land."
- Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a highly relevant reddit thread(0)]
Adam Smith has wrote extensively about how much he disliked Landlords. It's a great tragedy that most people consider him with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that.
So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article talked about)
(Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith, the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on their platforms/algorithms too)
A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too. My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when he was so against the practices of rent-seeking.
(0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of mind." : https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...
(Also landlords only gain all the surplus when the entire system is super biased. It's not inherent to the concept of landlording. What's the alternative to having landlords anyway?)
Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.
I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.
Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore, regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you!
Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural" extreme?
Here's the actual headline:
> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story' | wc -c
107
I'd trim the bit about Polymarket to get under the cap.
> Gamblers [...] are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
You'll lose a little topical/karma sizzle (with no "Polymarket" keyword), but it's higher fidelity.
> Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.
A priori, you'd get different impressions between a regular journalist death threats and someone engaging to re-write an article leading to death threats.
I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.
Are you saying that the gamblers were actually the censors or that the reality was that the missile was indeed intercepted and somehow the censors forced the journalist to say it wasn't?
The author is being pressured (IMO) because the degens feel like they can threaten him (physical proximity)
These people believed that no Iranian missiles could possibly get through and instead of accepting they were misled they're shooting the messenger
How naive can you possibly be...
https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in the near term, it could be obscured.
This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.
Unlike the regular markets though, which are dominated by smart money, these markets are dominated by degen gamblers and idiots, so I guess they just shrug it off.
There was a decision made by the security establishment not to allow reporting on Iranian missile hits in order to make it harder for the Iranians to do BDA.
You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.
I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.
Someone largely agreeing doesn't mean they should ignore mistakes.
This was over a decade ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I'm sure this was covered by the wording of the agreement and I'd have been out of luck with the bookies.
Can't comment on unrelated legal penalties, but in Japan there was match fixing in sumo and nobody got arrested (couldn't prove gambling) but a lot were fired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_s... https://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat21/sub138/item1779.html
Unfortunately, combat sports are relatively easy to fix because you only have a few people involved in the live action at a time.
>This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.
As far as I can tell, it seems like the betting market sites explicitly encourage insider activities, and I would not be surprised if this happened for real. See:
https://www.rawstory.com/leavitt/
>Gamblers cry foul after White House briefing ends seconds before key betting cutoff
A slightly different example because if true, the insider would be changing her behavior rather than changing the reporting of the facts. But it still shows that a small number of insiders (or a single insider) can change betting results.
There are other imponderable factors at work. For example, does not-wealthy cause substance abuse or does substance abuse cause not-wealthy?
We are all the sum of our choices.
I'm also a "liberal."
May all your capital provide the most good it can! Godspeed.
We're not interested in expected value or winning the bet. If anything, it's the opposite: The "goal" is to lose the bet due to a situation caused by the pattern of betting, with something beyond any actuarial tables because it's not an independent event.
If I can presume to speak for up-thread commenters, we've agreed the system is inherently exploitable and harmful, and we're either (A) imagining the schadenfreude of using that same evil to harm the people who promote it, or at least (B) imagining them forced to fear the monster they're unleashing on others, so that they take steps to limit it.
A really fun book, also!
Leftists I've known are more likely to quote Smith than criticize him. He seems to be seen by leftists as an important figure in political economy (flawed in not reaching certain important questions, perhaps, but not much in how he addressed those questions he did consider.) Even his argument that the class whose understanding of their own interests is best aligned with the common interests is the landed aristocracy (the bourgeoisie having interests opposed to the common interest, while the working class shares—by its sheer size, defines—the common interests but lacks an understanding of what their real interests are in the domain of interest) [0] is seen as describing exactly a problem than the Left (see, e.g., Marx and discussions of class consciousness) sees as central to solve, rather than being a regressive idealized preference.
The Left criticizes a lot of the arguments people who appeal to a mythologized caricature of Smith use his name to defend, sure, but that's a different thing than criticizing Smith.
[0] Which is about as far as you can be from leaning liberal where there is a political choice to be made, though given the complete displacement of the landed aristocracy as an economically-meaningful distinct class it is largely irrelevant in practical terms in the 21st century.
Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option", as if that diminishes the fact that it's a death threat in any way whatsoever.
It's crazy for me to use the first person's own words? That's crazy?
Journalists get threats all the time. You just made my point on why it's more nuanced that this author engaged and was offered a chance to re-write.
As the article clearly explains, the author replied ("engaged") without knowing why his interlocutors were interested in the minor details of the story.
His initial interlocutor ("Aviv") seemed to be engaging in good faith: "Alternatively, if you have information that it was indeed a full missile that was not intercepted, I would be glad to be corrected."
The author was naturally interested in getting the story right, and wanted to understand what his interlocutors might know about it, how they might be misunderstanding it, or why it might be so important to them.
> … and was offered a chance to re-write.
Do you truly believe that an "offer" to rewrite a story in a way that the author believes to be inaccurate—accompanied by death threats—is an important "nuance" that must be conveyed in the headline of a posting about this?
That's wild.
I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.
It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.
The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.
The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had previously effectively achieved this goal by making any gambling habit include regular travel, which itself prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly activity.
"Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe consumption site, where you have to go through harm reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely have things like blood work done to check for potential disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.
The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the process, whereas addicts would go through the process trivially.
Except it's not the same gambling in both cases, they have qualitative differences beyond simply where they're happening. My unhinged neighbor who'd threaten a journalist probably doesn't have an invite to the Underground Gambling Den.
Even if he did, when a court case happens there's no presumption of normalcy. He can't say: "Pshaw, everybody legally gambles on all sorts of things there, the fact that I bet big on the journalist not having his fingers broken is just coincidence."
The immediate illegality of the gambling is also a check on corruption, since it's already disqualifying for Judge Stickyfingers McBriberson to be on the platform, let alone "betting" on the outcome of cases he presides over.
Crowley had a penchant for drama and provocation (which, hilariously, still seems effective today!), but writing off his work as "rantings" is really ignoring the scholarly work he did on Western esotericism (and he also did make a lot of progress bringing greater awareness of non-Western traditions as well), which has always been an important part of Western culture (even if commonly underplayed by mainstream academia).
Technology, science and the occult have always had an interesting relationship in the West. Pythagoras, in addition to his contributions mathematics, is famous for founding a Hermetic mystery cult. As I'm sure you know, inventing physics and calculus was basically a part of Isaac Newton's study of alchemy (which has long had a big of a mystical component pulling from the Hermetic tradition as it has a proto-chemical component), and even Jack Parsons followed in that tradition (being himself a student of Crowley).
It's completely understandable if you don't find Crowley work of interest, but plenty of people also don't find Adam Smith's work of much interest either. Dismissing the work of Western esotericism on the history of the West would be similar to dismissing Sufism on the history of the Middle East.
This discussion is ridiculous. We’re literally talking about the occult here.
I know he is always associated with the 'invisible hand of the market' idea, but a lot of his writings were about the PROBLEMS that arise because of this invisible hand. He had a lot of good insights into what we have to be careful of when the free market does what it does. We should actually take some of those lessons to shape policy to protect us from the invisible hand.
If you want to effect change, then state your critique precisely, or not at all. Your looney top-level comment has derailed what should be a discussion of how to reign in Polymarket, because you've overstated your case, messed up your references to authority, and apparently you've slandered Aleister f*cking Crowley, too, such that his defenders are arguing about him here, instead of about how to reign in Polymarket.
When you make your side appear detached from all sense and reason, you are functionally no better than controlled opposition.
Whether what was done in his name is or isn't directly attributable to his writings is somewhat academic. That has taken on a life of its own, and overshadowed all his other ideas.
It has also certainly made talking about class in America very difficult.
Smith wrote about the political economy. He absolutely considered the balance between public and market interests. Most people talking about The Wealth of Nations have never read it.
Are there any cases where truth matters to you? I hope that this is just a rare exception, but I struggle to see how it's a principled one in any way.
Anyhow, I guess I can't stop you. "Do what thou wilt", indeed.
The invisible hand in markets is a natural property with an effect that's dependent on the environment the market operates within. He may be the first person to describe the process in writing (that we know of), but human beings have been experiencing the effects of this since we first attempted to trade with one another.
The "invisible hand" was something of a minor metaphor that other people glommed on to later, and its clear that they, and not his actual work, are where your idea of Smith comes from if you can say "He didn't consider its shadow/consequences" with a straight face.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is almost entirely about the consequences of the (then-still-somewhat-emergent) capitalist economy system and its interactions with the political space. A very large part of it was warning about its dangers, and advising of how to manage and mitigate them.
This is just completely false. Wealth of Nations spends a HUGE portion of the text to talk about the negative consequences of the 'invisible hand'. Why would you say he never considered its consequences? What about his famous quote from Wealth of Nations:
> People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
> What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?
The median is kinda skewed to be honest. The median you and I think is very few percentage points in my opinion.
Second most malicious quintile?
I'm avoiding "average" because one bad actor will spoil the average. But if you exclude the worst ten percent, what's wrong with everyone else?
The people in the article are in that worst bunch. But you critiqued basically everyone on the site.
Also did you finish your first sentence?
> But you critiqued basically everyone on the site
My apologies in the sense, that I mean to critique the 19/20 people. I did think when writing the first comment that maybe I should've highlighted it more but I already partially did it by writing "degenerate" etc. words
So I definitely agree with you on that aspect. Not everyone especially not the people you are talking about now are parasitic in that sense but key point being the people mentioned in the article being the worst bunch as you mention.
> Also did you finish your first sentence?
Yea, I re-read it, it feels incomplete but in essence, I sort of agree.
TLDR: I can agree with ya in the sense that there are definitely some people on the platform who can use it in a decent manner but the people mentioned in the article aren't the ones. Also even with that being said, I feel like the platforms can push the people with decent manners to indecency.
Heck no, that's removing the important part of the news! Specifically, that a new kind of unregulated anonymous bet-making is leading to new kind of violence against journalists.
In contrast, the piece isn't really about Iran, or about Missiles, although those underscore the gravity or perversion of what's going on.
_____________
Such a cut isn't necessary either, compare the original versus this 79-character version:
Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
Gamblers on Polymarket vow to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
(To be clear, this whole story is horrifying. I hope there's a way to identify these bettors and bring them to justice.)
AFAICT this is (like a lot of the modern mythology of capitalism) started as a response (in the sense of an attempt to build a similar-but-opposed structure, not a response in conversation like a rebuttal) 19th Century anti-capitalist critics (and, in particular, Marx), part of which was setting Smith up as the preceding and opposing figure; a kind of capitalist Christ so that Marx could be the anti-Christ.
Is gambling a neg-negative? why do you care? how is that relevant? Things shouldn't be forbidden because of net impact, specific harm needs to be outlined and addressed. Most of the time, there are more specific problematic behaviors that should be legislated against, not gambling.
In your example, that person spending their rent money could maybe addressed by the law? Or if someone spends their family's savings on a bet, that specific behavior can be addressed. If you think about it, this lazy approach doesn't address root causes. Maybe that guy's rent money, or family's savings, he could have blown it on a fancy car, no law against that.
Conversely, what if someone bet all their money on a stock option? People kill themselves over this, but it isn't illegal. you see how the entire approach is crooked and lazy? categorizing "gambling" addresses the reactionary emotions of the crowd, it doesn't address root causes, it doesn't evaluate nuanced situations.
It isn't betting or speculating that is the problem.
1: https://commonwealthbeacon.org/by-the-numbers/sports-betting...
If what you're bothered by is fact that people are dying on the streets, that's pretty grime, maybe make that illegal so they can find a less visually unappealing way of dying?
Consider this: How many people commit suicide? How people do __NOT__ commit suicide because fentanyl bought them something to chase after for a little while longer? How about we worry about all the people that die because they can't get enough medical care? Why is society quick to neglect that, and yet so eager to take away liberties for drug abuse? Or homeless too, I suspect you wouldn't want homeless people sleeping in tents on the street either, because that bothers you visually?
Your neighbors on shrooms are just as dependent on drugs as someone on fentanyl, so clearly you don't care about the dependency factor. If you care about mortality, then address the top causes of mortality.
Even with fentanly, people overdose specifically because it is illegal. In a sane society, people would be able to get fentanly administered to them in free facilities/clinics that give them correct dosage after doing a quick check on their blood chemistry. That would be cheaper than pumping junkies full of narcan every day, dealing with body clean up, all the crime that comes with the criminality of it all, and other costs to society. Same as with home with homelessness you could just give people free housing and that would be a lot cheaper, and it will solve the visual displeasure you have as well.
But the cruelty and hypocrisy is the point of it all isn't it?
Bankers and investors at major cities are cocaine junkies, that's a well known fact. In some states, being a weed junkie is highly normalized. being addicted to cigarettes and alcohol (which both have a well established mortality rate, and high cost to society!) is normalized, even celebrated at times. A junkie with needles on him by the street bothers you, but the same junkie with a bottle of beer and a blunt might not.
As I argued earlier, with gambling you're focusing on the wrong thing, gambling is the how, not the what. Every argument you make about "gambling" can be made about day trading stocks, or betting on options. People take risks they shouldn't think with money in a way that affects others, that interaction should be legislated, and some costs (not criminal) should be imposed by society on people that do that, targeting both the platform/house and the participants. The solutions are highly nuanced though, they're not as lazy as "just ban gambling", and they have costs associated with them that people don't want the government to subsidize, but in the long run are cheaper.
Should I be able to spend my life's savings on a corvette or an RV, without the seller asking how that would impact those around me, or how I would survive if additional costs arise later on? If I end up homeless, or my family becomes destitute because of that decision, the "blast radius" to society is the same as if I did spent that money at a casino. If your concern truly is "blast radius" then that could be addressed directly, root caused solved at the root.
I'm not a libertarian for the record, I'm simply trying to analyze the problems at hand and find the best solutions.
I don't know if prediction markets will be an important improvement, but it might be, so we should let them run.
Good enough, maybe somebody is working on a study of that.
I have no idea what your point is.
Certainly not an exculpatory one.
Do you get that point?
You're confusing yourself.
It's the author's own language.
Why did the author use if not important?
> Why did the author use if not important?
The headline cannot possibly convey every detail that's in the story.
The headlines chosen by the author of the TOI story, and by the author of his HN post, both adequately summarize the story.
After reading it in full, I found absolutely nothing misleading about either headline.
I said the author chose to put that language in their own title, otherwise they wouldn't have deemed it important.
Your position doesn't make any sense.
God help those using this newspaper as their source for betting
It was said Australians would bet on two flies climbing up a wall. But this is madness.
Not to mention, they all prey on people. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and people would come in regularly and drop everything they had on scratch-offs. And a lot of these people clearly did not have the money to spare. It's gross.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nigh...
And polymarket isn’t even the wisdom of crowds lol. At its greatest possible adoption it’s still the wisdom of internet-connected (mostly) white men with time and money to spend on gambling.
On a side note, I find it incredible crypto trading/day trading/meme stock trading etc is not recognised as a bigger societal problem. It is 100% gambling and has the same negative externalities associated with it. But none of the tools gambling companies need to abide by (blocklists, warnings, limits, etc) apply to trading.
Regarding meme stocks: I do not see how this should work compared to the "real market", as on the real market you have clear signals when it is useful to enter a position (e.g. institutional attention), but on the meme "stock" market lacking those features it is much much harder to make any money - unfortunately, a lot of young people are trying their fortuna
The entertainment value of betting does not meet that standard, in my opinion.
[0] Edit: Originally wrote "currently", but then I remembered the current White House, whose various crimes are being studiously ignored by the Republican congress.
There's nothing wrong with a prediction market. There are a lot of reasons why they're helpful in judging the probability of future events more accurately than any single analyst, and are therefore a net benefit to society, no different from newspapers and stock markets.
These are just individuals making criminal threats. They're the bad guys here. They don't work for Polymarket or anything. Your comment is like saying you can't imagine how anyone could go to work at the Olympics after Nancy Kerrigan got struck by Tonya Harding's ex-husband. Something criminal happened, but the Olypmics are not the one responsible.
Answer this and I think you'll discover that "no different" is actually quite different.
Regarding the stock market: nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future. People predict the stock market, not the other way around.
1) “I believe in what we’re doing as a mostly positive force in the world”
2) “Eh, the money is good”
Probably the same way FB people feel, probably the same way Palantir people feel, etc etc
Gambling (yes, this is gambling yet not subject to its industry regulations) is a public health crisis and the US government is too corrupt and intentionally ossified to react.
The trump administration is not too ossified to react, it's in full support of. It dropped two investigations into polymarket mid-2025, and polymarket is crypto-adjacent, a field which the trump family takes full advantage of.
It's odd that we allow this to happen.
- the emails
- the whatsapp messages
- the discord messages
- the X messages
Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing, in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his direct threats, some of those public like X replies.
We've all been looking around for the trigger for the market-crash-we-all-know-is-coming. Seems like "too much betting on a stupid war of choice" is just dumb enough to fit the timeline we've been trapped in. Very on-brand.
In other news: I'm almost entirely out of volatiles in my own portfolio right now. Cash and bonds until this pops. Frankly the chances are that today will be the day[1] are about as high as they've ever been.
[1] Trump, sigh, basically went on camera and capitulated, telling the world that there is no plan, the US doesn't have the capability to ensure trade through Hormuz and that Iran will deny access until Iran decides otherwise. Markets don't like uncertainty, but they really, really hate losing wars.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/46906636/guardians-emman...
-- Cyborg Upton Sinclair
Robin Hood options trading is just lighting money on fire under the guise of "investing", which insidiously somehow seems more responsible than gambling on roulette.
What is the reader assumed to do about an article that does not bring any proof?
The video of the missile exploding is also easy to fake, but it's an important element behind the reporting.
And how could it be otherwise? You aren't the customer. Ads, or worse, billionaire political patronage, is what pays the bills for media companies. Their authority - the blind trust people have in them - is what makes them valuable for their actual customers. They're not doing science, the last thing they want is to make it easy to check their work (although, maybe I'm too charitable to scientists too here, if they make it easier to check their work it's often the bare minimum, but I digress).
One of the original points of WikiLeaks was to make a kind of journalism where claims were easy to check from the sources. But you can see how controversial that was.
2. The author mentions X replies, those are public, where are they?
I'm gonna stand by my opinion: you deliver information, you provide all the evidence that is sensible to share. That's what journalism, especially investigative journalism does, and OSint can go a long way in helping.
Downvoters:
I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned anything in the history of technology.
Prediction markets on terrorist attacks and wars are one step back from that, but similar negative side effects are possible. And, regardless of what people are betting on, the corruption incentive appears where it did not previously, resulting in things like this.
(I don't think there's literally an Iranian missile operator opening Polymarket, taking out a position for "missile lands on Israel", and then pressing the launch button, but ultimately that's what uncensored markets with uncensored movement of money would enable)
2. The reason it is illegal it is beyond obvious: basic economics and game theory explain you how dangerous it is tying real world events with financial incentives.
Prediction markets have value for people as a source of reliable information because they tend to be very accurate compared to any other human mechanism for creating forecasts.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...
Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?
Nor there's evidence that providing information about the fact that US will strike Venezuela does it either.
What value any of that has? None, especially considering the perverse incentives on the other side of acting on the outcome probability for financial gain which has already happened. US executive insiders have definitely bet on US attacking Venezuela on Polymarket.
You see this as "information discovery", I see it as the fact that I can lobby for dangerous events to happen just for financial gain.
Future markets have some value in some scenarios where you can hedge the outcome.
E.g. a farmer hedging crop prices can de risk his operations.
There is a hedging and the hedge works as insurance.
What's exactly the value of betting on elections or military strikes? What's being hedged?
How can you not see the financial incentives?
We have a long history of regulating both futures, derivatives and betting for very specific reasons.
But now we've relabeled it all as information gathering and price discovery.
How can you not see how the financial incentives here are speedrunning terrible events to happen?
I'm gonna rephrase it like that: would you like for a contract to exist on whether you'll be sent to hospital tomorrow in a crash accident?
Are you gonna tell me: "well, it's information discovery and it's valuable that I can wake up knowing the odds have increased!" while ignoring that there are now people out there financially motivated to make this happen?
Imagine the conversation went like this:
A: "Maybe we shouldn't sacrifice 500 virgins to the Aztec God to predict the harvest next hear?"
B "Why not? Killing virgins to predict the harvest are well calibrated (ie accurate).."
But even so, you're missing my point: even compulsive gamblers don't as a general rule resort to criminal extortion to cover their losses. The interpretation here isn't about the psychology of the criminals, that's sort of speciously true.
It's that the fact that "regular bettors" become "criminals", and are doing so at scale, is a proxy measurement for the amount of leverage in the system.
But what evidence do you have that only over-leveraged gamblers resort to criminal behavior? Why do you think that some rich person who bet, say, $1 million they can actually afford will not still seek to recoup their investment, especially if it only takes some bribes and threats?
Because "only bribes and threats" are crimes for which people go to jail, and most "rich people" in the west, even in our authoritarian corruption hellhole timeline, are unwilling to engage in that nonsense because the benefits don't outweigh the risks.
Do I get to demand you cite evidence here, too? Has a wealthy person ever been caught in criminal extortion trying to goose a losing position that they could cover? I don't think that's ever happened, honestly.
I mean, yeah, it's my opinion. My gut says that the "bro" markets are all overleveraged right now, there aren't any easy winning positions at the moment (even AI stock valuations seem to have topped), and now the loans are coming due. Something's going to pop, and we're all looking for proxy measurements. This is one.
But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.
Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls.
Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours.
So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul.
Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say.
No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said.
That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially.
You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat.
It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades.
[0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.
The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord...
The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(
>But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight
The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.
A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy.
A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit.
Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.
You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.
And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part.
It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.
We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.
I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right?
I had fun betting $5 here and there
Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?
What about calling it "gambling" rather then "prediction market"? And then applying the gambling regulation on what is gambling.
People betting on stuff is not exactly a novel idea, the novel thing is how they are avoiding the regulations.
If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.
I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.
Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
It's important to remember that for a brief time, people argued that gatekeeping was generally and usually a bad thing.
Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb.
Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb.
This needs to be banned.
https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...
I'd argue that prediction markets are more like stock markets. Very useful, but they also create opportunities for abuse which will need to be addressed. If they are eliminated later because the current administration refuses to regulate them, that would be a huge shame.
Why "can look", "but", "just"?
Yes, humans can be bad. But humans can change. Let's not start accepting bad stuff as not so bad, simply because it is "just human behavior".
In a sense, prediction markets are all forms of insurance. A "war market" is just an insurance market against war. If you do business in someplace that is at risk at war, placing a huge bet on the war happening mitigates the risk of doing business in that place.
There is a reason that insurance has taken the shape that it has -- incredibly detailed contracts, requirements that the insured have an interest in the thing being insured, etc, and the reason is exactly that pure prediction markets went through this exact cycle hundreds of years ago which lead to laws being passed banning the practice. That is why LLoyd's of London exists. It started as a pure gambling and became insurance through regulation and business evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774
I'm not incredibly against the concept of prediction markets, per se, but running them _globally, _at scale_ with _no regulations_ is going to lead to really awful outcomes, up to and including murder.
Regardless of whether or not that anecdote is true, insurance is one of the oldest human institutions. We have records of Hammurabi's code from ancient Babylon that pertain to insurance (including ship insurance).
Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).
It's always a honeypot, no one besides local junkies and people with personal beefs will do a murder for hire that a working person can afford.
There are people who are dumb enough to go to prison after paying like $1k-$10k for a "murder", like after a flight and hotel how much are you expecting your would-be assassin to make?
But I think we can all agree there are a lot of negative effects of the new world where online gaming is without limits and government intervention is needed to some extent.
When this existed, it was quite literally done using the prediction market model. It was an early prototype for all this insanity.
There's a very long list.
bet that someone will die by certain date
But it's fairly close to a tontine. But those are banned in the USA. But in those cases, rewards are split regularly between survivors. People who die with a tontine lose their share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine
I could see a movie about that, with living tontine holders sending out hitmen to remove other tontine holders, so they can get more money.
- More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction.
- Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.
If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.
Its a sports book.
A sports book of alternatives.
It's absolutely bonkers but hey, the grifters need a new costume, the crypto one is practically strings at this point
Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.
The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped.
Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.
Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.
How would you know it was caused by that bill? Maybe politicians should just be paid based on something we want to incentivize, like lower quartile wages.
It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling over things that involve the death of people. Things like missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.
yeah, you can treat investing in markets as a game (fallacy: stock markets are gambling casinos), but people who are serious don't do that, so don't lay the sins of insincerity on markets.
"Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse.
Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation.
Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care.
Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP.
Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos.
A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive.
And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does.
Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true.
So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves.
But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.
I don't think Polymarket bans consistent winners. You gamble against other users and Polymarket makes the same fee either way.
So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.
As the odds shift and the potential payout grows, prediction markets can essentially fund crimes of all kinds and cause disasters. Simple example: Imagine if the payout for someone being assassinated goes really high. Eventually, people will be placing bets on that person being assassinated and make sure it happens.
But it can get much worse than that! Imagine bets on dam collapse, buildings burning down, school shootings, even traffic accidents!
Prediction markets are a bad idea all around and should be banned everywhere. It should be a no-brainer. In fact, we should all place bets that the world leaders of countries that allow prediction markets will be assassinated!
How? If I get two phone numbers and send myself a message and make a screenshot, how are you going to debunk that? It’s a legit screenshot, you have no way of verifying anything.
And I can also just import self written emails into thunderbird and take a screenshot. There’s nothing to analyze.
I agree that he could have linked the Public stuff though.
The argument is that prediction markets incentivize insider trading and backroom power brokership. The “potential energy” behind surprise upsets is most profitably exploited when the outcome sharply differs from the public calibrated consensus, so these two incentives - calibration vs potential for exploitation - are in fundamental tension. I think this tension undermines the whole purpose of prediction markets IMO.
Basically, a fake "Cricket league" was setup up in rural India, complete with online streaming, play by play commentary, etc. just to fool gamblers in Russia. Worth the read.
But I think your idea is probably a better idea than betting.
See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet.
As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open...
(To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)
we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." story.
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past.
These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey
He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level.
Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show.
We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
I don't have the slightest idea what point you're trying to make with this. Journalists make lots of people unhappy with their reporting, if you're referring to risks to journalists? Indeed that's part of the job of being a truth teller.
> nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future
I don't think you understand. If you think you can do a better job of predicting the future than the stock market, you will become extremely wealthy. So how exactly do you think it isn't basically the best publicly available indicator of the future, specifically the net present value of future expected profits?
Sophisticated analysts absolutely use current stock prices/market value for modeling the future.
> I don't think you understand. [...]
I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario: the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%. What does that tell you about the future?
You can try to derive information out of a stock market price, but it is not a prediction tool. The newspaper and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the context of prediction tools, because they both tell you exactly what they predict.
The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the function is completely different.
> What does that tell you about the future?
Are these supposed to be trick questions or something? They tell you exactly what they tell you. I already told you -- the stock price is a prediction of NPV of future profits. Did you see that in my last comment? Do you understand that? If that isn't a concrete, actionable and valuable prediction, I don't know what is.
Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."
https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-khamene...
A weird synthesis of the goofy, the immature, the delusional, and the grandiose shot through with mental illness.
Which countries would be best for them to operate out of if they were outlawed? What percentage of their user-base would use the Tor Browser?
Odd, I just noticed both Polymarket and Kalshi are hosted on the same IP address in San Fransisco. The IP belongs to Amazon but is not part of their cloud. That CIDR used to belong to Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and then Aptum Technologies and now Amazon in SF. Kalshi used to be based out of SF but moved to NY.
So any argument that starts from the assumption that rich people don't commit crimes for relatively low gains, and/or that they would be caught and put in jail if they did commit crimes, is obviously false.
I think the Epstein files even have specific examples of blackmail among said rich people (e.g. Epstein's letter draft to Bill Gates).
Actually what I really said is that no one does this, because it's insane. So I therefore infer that the people doing this are looking at losses that are not routine, they're faced with bets they can't cover.
People routinely commit crimes for money, rich and poor alike, often for relatively irrelevant sums - and very often for money they don't even have yet. The incentive to commit crimes to prevent losses is even higher, given the well established loss aversion bias in all people.
And we don't even have to discuss losses. Many people commit crimes to get money quickly, from murder to insider trading to insurance fraud. If you agree that many people would be willing to kill for a few thousand or million dollars, you have to admit they'd be willing to threaten and blackmail a newspaper editor or production crew to try to fix a bet - especially when the internet brings them anonimity, and even if they bet a small sum that they wouldn't even care to lose.
If you don't believe this, try to go to a betting place in a poorer area and offer 1000:1 odds that no one punches you in the face hard enough to break your nose (a crime which could easily land whoever does this in prison). According to you, as long as you don't allow anyone to bet more than, say, $1 on this, it should be a very safe bet for you, surely no one would be insane to risk prison time for losing just $1, right?
Does the lamentations of women count as a musical number?
I routinely read the news, and I've been taught in school that critical reading involves doubting and focusing on facts, sources and proofs. No sources and verifiable proofs? No facts.
Which is why the journalist put emphasis on his sources behind the missile attack: he knows how much sources and proofs are important.
If you can fake screenshots, why not fake them, which is something that can be at least analyzed for tampering?
Even more: the author mentions X public replies, where are the links?
Whether or not it should work that way is a separate question. But claiming that raw sources not being included is cause for suspicion is incorrect.
You'll just push it underground and it will get even worse.
The cat is out of the bag.
What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?
If your argument is "people are going to bet and influence world events on the dark web", the argument ignores economics.
The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to access and liquidity is small.
E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to influence the events at the same time, let alone how complex would such a system be.
"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
But don't you think that will be the "good" majority? And the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?
I agree that these markets also create bad incentives, I just think that on net the information provided tends to be more valuable.
Yes, of course! If you had some advance warning your home town was likely to be struck with missiles soon, are you seriously saying you can't think of a single thing you could do to prepare? I would, at a minimum, make sure I was stocked up on first aid supplies, water, and food that I could eat without needing power or gas to cook it.
Stock markets also incentivize murder. Short a company, then kill the CEO. Boom, profit.
More seriously - I used to think this was a good argument. But the night before the war broke out, I checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to move fast to get closer to shelter.
Yes, it's anecdata, etc etc
That there are economical incentives to make it happen just to make money?
Such events have little-to-no "wisdom of the crowds" those events decided by a handful of people. And their consequences catastrophic.
What if there was a derivative for whether you will be hit by a car tomorrow?
What would you say if there was a contract on whether your county will burst in flames this month?
Are you happy because you can hedge this event, or don't you realize the obvious peril?
I don't see how there is. The liquidity in a prediction market is not high enough to compensate for the expense of going to war.
The war was going to happen irregardless of the prediction market. The prediction market only let us know when it was going to happen with some hours to spare.
If there was a prediction market for whether I'll be hit by a car tomorrow, and it was lucrative enough that it would actually be worth anyone's time to deliberately hit me with a car, I'd stay home and bid on "no". Pretty sure I'd make more than enough to cover the cost of ordering pizza.
There are already perverse incentives to commit arson, like insurance. And it's entirely possible that prediction markets can make insurance even more cost-effective.
and where did I say I liked it?
Why do you (obviously) think betting markets are good?
Maybe you should calm down re-read the thread before you turn red hot with anger.
…which they already did before this market was made mainstream.
In such cases, the journalist likely will publish raw data/screenshots, since they're functioning both as the source and the reporter.
Not your money, you can be just a random in the executive and lobby for it.
"you're talking about death threats, those have happened before"
I am talking about THESE death threats. THESE death threats would not have happened if it wasn't possible for any sociopath to stake a million bucks on an arbitrary event of journalist interest.
that is why I am extremely comfortable never replying to you again. good luck on the next bridge burning.
You are very very naive.
I am still waiting to see whether you can find if I explicitly liked it or not.
If you can, see you tomorrow.
When there's a crisis, it's still worth checking in to see what the LessWrongers are saying about it, because it might be very useful, and it's pretty easy to tell: you just check whether it looks like they're doing science, or Rationalism™®, and only investigate further in the rare cases where it's the former.
[citation needed]
And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
And like any other gambling (see 1919 Black Sox), they can also incentivize behavior for actors who can influence the outcome of what’s being gambled upon.
Personally, that’s a significant enough negative externality for me to not want to live in a society where “prediction markets” are popular.
But if you are going to allow them at all, you want as much expertise as possible in them. Sharks eating minnows is what that looks like.
So if a war with Iran is going to happen, and so a general bets that it will, the odds will jump and go very high.
Now at least theoretically, people in the Middle East can see the high odds, and travel elsewhere.
After seeing how many people got trapped in the UAE, I might check these prediction markets in the future for similar things.
so why would a newspaper pay money for information they cannot recover or monetize? Where would this money come from in the first place, because even if they wanted to do this out of altruism, they will simply run out of money after a while.
Says who?
Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
> “The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/01/09/why-predi...
Seems like you should read more about these markets.
If I work at the company and count the inputs and outputs, and trade on it, I am a morally bankrupt scumbag and I have hurt society and all of the traders in the market.
Hmmmmmmm
I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn if you believe that when you bet on the stock market or on the sports market for each and every particular bet involving millions of people the maximum profit is not reaped by a half a dozen of insiders who trade on inside informations and their only problem is not being too obvious about it.
Also even if they get caught the millions of people wagering are still getting fucked because there is not a redo or making people whole when the insider traders get caught (which is a tiny percentage of the time)
Wouldn’t the good old-fashioned fraud laws present in basically every jurisdiction apply?
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.
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.
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].
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.
> 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...
"Red futures pay out at 2:1!"
"Get your future here on whether the dealer's cards are higher than your own!"
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.
not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating each others' humanity.
"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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.
Maybe prediction markets are net positives, or maybe regulating them will make them so, but banning them does resolve most of their negative effects.
For illegal drugs, people who want them want them a lot, so them being illegal isn't a strong deterrent; although, legalization has still absolutely increased the number of users (i.e. legality was acting as an effective deterrent for some.)
For illegal gambling, sure _some_ people won't be deterred by legality, but most people aren't hardcore gambling addicts; they're just engaging as a form of "harmless fun." They're not looking to go to jail to toss $20 on a sports game.
I have never in my life placed a sport bet, nor a polymarket bet. It strikes me as one of the dumbest things to do with your money and time.
But a lot of people seem to genuinely enjoy it. Gambling is part of human heritage. Regulate? Sure! Ban? I don't understand why
Many things that people enjoy are banned because it causes harm to other individuals or to society as a whole.
Not a difficult concept to understand.
The existence of something in no way encourages someone to commit a crime. That is victim blaming (if the concept of 'sport' can be a victim in this case). Sport and people who enjoy sport and people who enjoy gambling on sport don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to materially gain from it. If you banned sports those people would just move on to some other criminal enterprise to get rich with minimal effort.
In what's happening in the story the fact that people are gambling on a war is certainly quite grim, but it's not really a problem. People do distasteful things all the time. The problem is that they're issuing death threats to someone. That's not really anything to do with gambling.
Saying that people who enjoy sport/ gambling "don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to gain materially from it" is a false dichotomy. It's nature. Ask yourself, would you throw a game in your sport of choice in a hobby league for 100 million dollars or whatever? Why not, no one gets harmed, it is a lot of money, it's not even a proper league. This applies to all levels of real world consequences, some people have a larger apetite for risk.
In a very strict sense, you are right. But people influence other people, and people who wouldn't act this aggressively otherwise find themselves inspired to after taking a bet.
The problem can indeed be "the asshat contingent", but at the same time, it's not blaming the victim to say that certain situations open up opportunities.
A lot of our laws are in place to prevent people from taking advantage of such opportunities. That's why some laws seem bizarrely harsh, where you can earn more jail time than physically assaulting someone, for a financial crime. Or computer hacking.
The logic is "this is an easy way to break the law", and "we'll have to make the penalty worse to compensate". That's not blaming the victim. In fact, it's an attempt to protect the victim.
This sensible approach is akin to what you'd do if you entered certain 'sketchy' sections of many cities, at 2am. You certainly wouldn't walk around carrying a big box of 100 iphones, and people would say you were nuts to go into that area at 2am and do so.
Yes, the asshats who assaulted you, beat you unconscious, and stole your $100k worth of iphones were wrong. But, you'd certainly be considered a little dim for doing so I'd think. Why?
Because you're ignoring reality for a catch phrase.
Reality is just that.
And doesn't that just mean more resources and energy is going into solving the problem of determining the truth of past events (and, as a result given that these are prediction markets, the likelihood of future ones?)
And isn't that a good thing?
Making it less vulnerable to manipulation would entail exposing less information too. You probably wouldn't be allowed to know the current odds, which makes gambling the same as reading tea leaves.
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.
Just call it gambling. They aren't "prediction markets," they're just gambling. Gambling incentivizes the absolute worst in humanity.
No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
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.
That is why modern reportings best practice is to always support both sides. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.
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.
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.
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...
"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.)
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.
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?"
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.
In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?
You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.
A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.
If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?
It's not democratized, in the sense that everybody can play. But, the markets are for sure giving people with power/access/money reason to vote (in the markets) and vote (in whatever org they hold power).
It's disgusting.
This caught my attention today as it was in dispute and there were a lot of comments (moslty angry). I like browsing polymarket (never placed a bet myself but it is fun to see the prices). Always thought this would kill someone someday..
Except this is even crazier because the bets aren't on people dying, it's about a reportable event. Any of Polymarket's silence in voicing whether the outcome was determined by this unwilling participant's writing makes them complicit. When there's a single source of truth, it makes a target for vested parties that doesn't benefit from the security the platform and their employees get from hosting the bet.
You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.
Or we could, you know, not legalize gambling.
Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't think people have really noticed that profit is also available if you can influence other people's predictions to manipulate the price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do that at scale? Agentic AI can help.
We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.
Could work in some crime procedural.
A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.
Never go to Nevada.
You don't have Nevada 24/7 in your pocket. Or you shouldn't.
While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets.
At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).
Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
[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.
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.
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...
There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.
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.
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.)
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
This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets, where you can get information about the probability of an event based on how much people are betting on it.
I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there
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.
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.
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...
"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...
That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.
Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats concentrating around certain bet genres?
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.
https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...
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.
A related issue is that war news is heavily censored in Israel; it's difficult for news outlets to report it.
Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address.
Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit.
The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in different jurisdictions.
Subpoena Meta for all of the IPs of the account. Subpoena the ISPs for data who was using the IP. Bring in the likely people who were sending the message for questioning.
A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.
So it's common and hard to prosecute because the person threatening is most likely in another country.
Just a pedantic, nit pick: you said "should be removed from civil society" but I think you just mean "removed from society" as in prosecuted and imprisoned.
"Civil society" has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society
Cool! Since you know who the involved persons are (as you agreed with it being an "open and shut case"), why don't you let the rest of us know, too? And while you're at it, tell the police as well. I'm sure it will help their investigation!
The question is whether they deem this case important enough, this is a journalist so there is a higher chance but I don't think this specific journalist carry a lot of weight locally
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...
Kalshi is worse in a sense that it also accepts fiat payments.
If you’re in that telegram channel, though, I imagine the threats on your life are a lot more credible than the ones discussed in TFA.
Just because you might agree with the actions and behaviour of your current government enough, that you don't mind them being able to have a hand in your currency, doesn't mean that can't change.
But yes, something used to work around bad governments, will also be used against good governments. Every legit tool can be also abused.
E.g. a Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks?
Cryptocurrency (although I hate it) you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
With AI, you're participating whether you like it or not. Layoffs, Job displacement, etc. There is no opt out here.
Once you're replaced with AI, that is it.
At least with cryptocurrency and prediction markets you can make money but it's obviously risky.
Ultimately with AI it would just push people to cryptocurrencies and prediction markets.
What if there's a prediction market on your life? Would you say you're still "not participating, so no harm done" ?
> Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
Harm: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
Harm: https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...
Harm: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/prediction-markets-merkley-b...
Did you read the article? It is about a journalist getting death threats from members of a prediction market.
this isn't correct. slot machines are random. my first job out of school was, in part, making sure slot machines were random.
people think the machines are rigged because they don't understand the rules. the machines are fair, it's the pay tables that are rigged.
My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low. But look at it as paying for the experience of the possibility of a jackpot and realize when you buy one ticket or multiple so just buy one and it becomes a cheap thrill.
And I didn't have a response.
You know you’re going to lose.
You know the money is wasted.
You do it anyway — and knowingly just pretend those first two facts aren’t true.
Then you lose your money. Which you knew was going to happen.
But, an alternative goal is to maximize your probability of qualitative changes up, and minimize the probability of qualitative changes down, for your living conditions. If somebody is in a situation where they can spend a qualitatively inconsequential amount of money on lotteries, then playing the lottery is a rational way of maximizing this metric, right?
Of course, it does add the hard-to-quantify risk that they’ll become addicted to gambling and start spending a qualitatively meaningful amount of money gambling!
OTOH if we as a society all started putting a small percentage of our wealth toward the lottery we’re essentially misallocating whatever that percentage was. So it produces a somehow less efficient economy I guess. So maybe there’s a social bias against it.
If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and player.
$50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you’ve broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just feeds an addiction. But there’s no skill here; the odds of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player does.
Only fair until the manufacturer of said lootboxes gets in on the action. This is why gambling is so highly regulated in all jurisdictions.
I don't think so. At least you have a 50% chance of winning. Unlike say a lottery or a slot machine.
If you have a 50% chance of losing $2 or gaining $1, you have a negative expected value and that's bad.
If you have a 10% chance of gaining 100$ and 90% chance of losing $1, that's an expected value of $9 and it's a great deal.
I didn't say it isn't bad, just that it isn't the worst.
If your buddy is somewhat famous, then get on the socials and network with the players in the files already, they all seem really open as it's still a big and unaddressed market. Payouts are gonna be small at first, think beer leagues and largeish friends groups. And from what I can tell the competition for big gigs is tougher as you go up in the field.
Honestly give it a try, seems like a great side hustle.
Edit: be a great idea for AI in the low end, but it's the human touch that really makes it. The guy I know is pretty funny and I assume his wisecracks help him
Have business cards ready to go and have them laying out.
How is this any more degenerate than slot machines? At least it is truly random, rather than rigged.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
For sporting events, for example, the alternative to prediction markets 5-10 years ago was to use a website where you bet against the house directly, and they'd usually take around a 15-20% spread, and they'd ban you and keep your account funds if they decided you're winning too much. Now you can bet on the same events on prediction market sites, with around a 1-5% spread, and the house doesn't care how much you win (so there's actually an argument that you're playing a game of skill, compared to the old format where you definitely weren't, since you'd be banned for being too skilled).
Simultaneously: Insiders have power to coerce an outcome, the market creates a corrupt payoff for them to abuse that power.
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...
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.
I can't believe how many betting ads I see or hear every time I consume US media. It's worse then all the ads about drugs they want you to request from your doctor.
We already have a model for this in the casino system.
Like sure, there’s some small black market here, but it’s relatively minuscule.
Robertson Davies is another bellwether author I should mention.
For example, this from House of Cards: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/arts/television/house-of-...
> Pollyhop is a fictional, Google-esque search engine that according to Leann’s polling expert is being exploited by the Republican candidate Will Conway in ways that suggest Underwood can’t possibly beat him in the general election. The explanation of how Pollyhop works is convoluted at best, but the gist is that Conway and his people are manipulating search engine results so that only positive coverage of their side appears.
Or more recent examples of what essentially boils down to the plot device of "media manipulation" aka manipulating the "news reporting of the act":
- See the most recent season of Industry, which included several plot points about manipulating news coverage as a short-seller and the company being targeted fought back and forth (including specific focus on the individual journalists involved)
- See Andor, everything about how the Empire twists perception of what's happening on Ghorman, leading up the Ghorman massacre itself, and then culminating in Mon Mothma's speech in the Senate denouncing "the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil"
- See The Orville, a particular episode: https://orville.fandom.com/wiki/Majority_Rule which includes the plot point of hacking that society's "master feed" to plant false manipulative stories to curry public favor and save a character from being punished
- See The Boys, how Vought manipulates the media to twist coverage of their "heroes" even when they commit atrocities
- See other House of Cards plotlines involving Zoe Barnes and being a direct mouthpiece for Frank Underwood
I think the only real difference if any, is that in the most common form of portrayal, maybe less attention is paid to the journalist as the point of leverage, and how they deal with threats or bribes or whatever. The fact that such manipulation occurs, is commonly accepted as a trope, without requiring too much of a deep dive. Whether a story choose to focus on the "reporter's perspective" is perhaps less common, but not uncommon IMO.
2. If it’s only banned in the US, yes it pays out, you just need to get a VPN or go to another country.
Also even it’s banned everywhere, the markets are blockchain contracts so you should be able to access it without the website, which is just the frontend. (this is where my technical expertise breaks down, someone who knows blockchain is a better expert)
Surely you aren’t saying that because prediction markets can’t save every single life, that it’s somehow useless to save a few.
Another example, if odds jump on a missile strike on a particular city, you might have the chance to move out of the way.
What you are describing is governmental corruption and that should be handled via corruption laws not insider trading laws.
Punishing a corporate entity however is much easier.
We don't seem to have much luck getting it to happen. The larger the corporate entity the more unlikely they'll see any meaningful punishment.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette...
Alcohol and tobacco are regulated too. Perhaps less than it should, in no small part for cultural reasons. I say this as someone that enjoys the occasional whiskey and smoking a pipe.
I am unaware of evidence of gaming causing harm to society. Maybe it exists. I can't comment on it.
That's not my argument though. Gambling is not the equivalent of a gun in this situation. Gambling is the catalyst, sure, but the crime is making death threats. Removing all the reasons why people might make death threats in order to stop the death threats is going to be tricky.
If you want an analogy it's like the argument is 'Let's not have banks because they only encourage bank robbers!', and I'm here arguing that really we just need to make bank robbery a crime.
ATMs have long had devices that stain cash if you try to steal from them. Bank cashiers used to have "we don't have the keys to the vault" signs. Vaults that open at fixed times beyond the control of the cashiers are a thing.
Regulation and enforcement are important but removing opportunity and motive are also important.
Why not look at the primary source evidence yourself?
> It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST
https://understandingwar.org/newsroom/statement-on-isw-mappi...
https://polymarket.com/event/arch-will-russia-capture-myrnoh...
> Settled as: Proposal: Yes
> This market will resolve to “Yes” if, according to the ISW map, Russia captures the intersection between Vatutina Vulytsya and Puhachova Vulytsya located in Myrnohrad by November 15, 2025, at 11:59 PM ET.
The intersection station will be considered captured if any part of the intersection is shaded red on the ISW map (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641...) by the resolution date. If the area is not shaded red by November 15, 2025, 11:59 PM ET, the market will resolve to “No”.
https://oracle.uma.xyz/settled?project=Polymarket&transactio...
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.
> as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic.
Yeah, I should really revisit Future Shock. That book might have been a little ahead of its time.
> Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.
100% agree, and I think it's almost a bigger flaw here. I'm not saying "it gets better in the second season" but I wouldn't be surprised if some people bounce off the future slang.
Interestingly enough, Brunner might be one of the only white authors I've read who describes his characters by skin tone.
That is how theoretical mathematical construction works. Which has nothing to do with how real world people behave in iterated gambling games. And the less you regulate what the gambling company can or can not do, the less the real world version resembles the theoretical construction.
Since sport betting became legal the issues with gambling addiction have skyrocketed but the state is addicted to the trickle of provents from it and can't cut it back.
There was an attempt to limit sport bets advertising, and that was widely sidestepped (you advertise for bet.news instead of bet.com, with the former linking to the latter)
If you hold a position of fiduciary responsibility within the company (or gain information from someone who does) that's a different matter. But the analogy there would be hacking into the company to read internal records, not just looking over a fence. in both cases, it's a crime.
The reason insider trading is illegal is because it undermines confidence in the markets by establishing a pattern by which insiders with privileged, secret information leverage it to profit off people who cannot access this information.
It also incentivizes insiders to leverage their position within a company to manipulate the business in order to profit. This also undermines integrity of markets.
Your second example, setting aside all your troll bait inflammatory verbiage about moral bankruptcy, is an illustration of this risk. I don't care if it rises to the level of moral bankruptcy, it is harmful to a capitalist society in a serious way.
Your first example is a depiction of someone leveraging information that anyone can gather. It does not undermine the integrity of markets because it is just an investor acting on publicly-accessible information.
Consider the case where a company knows that the drug they are selling is dangerous but keeps it a secret. Insiders know of the dangers and so bet against the company in the market (obviously this is illegal right now). The insiders make a profit in the short term, and investors also in the short term lose out (which they were going to do anyway, the losses come sooner), but in the long term the secret information is revealed to the benefit of everybody.
But I never said insider trading was bad because it caused people to keep information a secret. You're responding to an argument I didn't make.
What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?
Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.
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...
Then say civilians. Don't claim what you can't provide. And DO provide context (like, was it still while the massacre was ongoing [1]). But all I can do is to suggest.
> Good job cherry-picking
Me cherry-picking: Taking the literally first entries, Array[0] and Array[1].
Also, you can't claim cherry-picking as invalid against gish-gallop. Since you can't enjoy the size argument only to retract items on the list after the smallest pushback.
Otherwise I can prove God. How? Every sentence in the Bible... Oh, you found some that are wrong? "Good job cherry-picking"!
And not to mention dozens of more problems with the list (no mentioning any IDF comments, no source for titles, etc.). This is just a bad list. Simple as.
> ICC is clearly investigating
Investigating != Judgment. But good, send them more. But please send them a list starting with items that might hold the smallest of scrutinies. And don't prove it by hinting at conspiracies just because Israel has a security censor. But all I can do is to suggest.
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
Also, having nuance and historical context does not mean they are "pro-Russia". We should be celebrating institutions that challenge propaganda narratives with context not hunting down anyone that doesn't fall in line with a narrative that requires you to believe history started last year
https://quincyinst.org/research/frequently-asked-questions-a...
Saying we categorically condemn is not a position. Saying Russia is entitled to 20% of Ukraine's pre-2022 territory is a position.
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.
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
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.
"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
That's not how I read GP; "Why would you want to do an end-run around the government when using currency?" is different to, well, whatever it is you are saying (I'm not sure I can decipher it well enough - seems to be "using currency is bad when it goes against laws", but I think that's fine too, so not really sure what your message is - maybe you can clarify?)
Using legal tender is not a problem. Using barter (which is what using crypocurrencies boils down to) is also not a problem. Lack of reporting your income to the tax authorities is a problem. Most bartering systems are too small to warrant the attention of tax authorities, but cryptocurrencies facilitate bartering at scale, which does warrant interest.
If you happen to be at a casino, make exactly one bet in your lifetime and there’s a significant chance you’ll end up ahead. On average you’ll be out money but we don’t live out every possibility and average them. It’s just one event and you could easily end up ahead, it’s only as you repeat it with minimal gains and negative returns that things quickly become a near certainty.
With Powerball the odds are low but not astronomical that you buy 1 or 1000 tickets and end up ahead. It’s the most likely outcome by a massive margin but due to non jackpot prizes a long way from zero.
However again the odds of breakeven just reduce the cost of play they aren’t the only thing people get for their money.
Oh, trump made some money?
Death markets are banned in the US. Personally, I tend to think of this as a crypto problem, not a prediction market problem.
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.)
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.
The other involves the brutal deaths and suffering of exponentially more innocent people than those who want to be involved.
The question was, what if any is the fundamental difference between betting on a sports event vs a war?
If you have an argument, please share it. If you don't, please don't waste everyone's time.
GP did not claim it was associated with Russia or that it had made specific claims about the invasion.
> They have simply written critically about the role NATO has played in making this conflict inevitable and the history of NATO sabotage of peace negotiations.
That seems aligned with the original claims.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
Would you honestly genuinely describe this as "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"? Dishonesty
[1]: "Following the end of the investigations, Polymarket announced the acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. The acquisition allowed Polymarket to legally operate within the United States under regulatory compliance. The company received an Amended Order of Designation from the CFTC in November 2025 and began actively expanding in the United States market."
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/21/prediction-market-polymarke...
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/polymarket-receives...
The same can't be said for war (bombings), which Polymarket allows betting on.
Seems like a fundamental difference to me.
If you have a point to make about how the age of the person being murdered means it's a categorical difference rather than a difference of degree I'll read it.
Eg, to be rid of a turbulent priest, you'd place a bet that Thomas Becket will live to see the year 1171, which is a "good" outcome to bet on happening.
Also, how does a large, national newspaper reporting on it indicate a lack of free press?
"Date on which this journalist will die"?
Similar with war in general: the moment the decision makers can earn $$$ by betting on something unlikely and then doing it, we have a problem...
"Coincidentally", they also gave a bullshit advisory position to Trump Jr. and accepted an investment from his firm (1789 Capital), which I'm sure had nothing to do with them getting that licence. But to be "fair and balanced" to Polymarket, Trump Jr. is also Kalshi's "strategic advisor", so there's that!
Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will (on average) lose money.
Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely change the life of most people and therefore the marginal utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on the ticket.
It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling companies are arbitraging. And for people who become addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The companies are just exploiting people who have a disease and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
[1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
[2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by probability. This could be seen as how much of a difference the payoff would make to their life.
They have some disposable income, and spend it at the casino for a bit of fun. Sometimes, they come out richer, and they are happy, sometimes, they lose, they come out a bit disappointed, but that's the cost of of entertainment.
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.
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.
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.
"Everyone I disagree with is Not A Real American and should just leave the country. Who's a Real American? Well, someone who agrees with my personal political views, of course."
utterly idiotic worldview
I assume the author would have noted in his blog post if the Hebrew used in making the threats came across as non-native or non-fluent.
Machine translation is really good these days, but I still think there are some "tells" for a truly vernacular and local command of a language.
What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.
(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)
> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.
You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?
I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.
But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
It has been suggested that QI’s approach is insufficiently critical of Russia. A cursory search of our writings and our website shows this to be false.
I wonder why would anyone suggest that, and frequently enough they have to get out of their way to write a disclaimer?
> How is that possibly aligned with GP's blatant lies?
Mate it's 2026, your gaslighting doesn't work for a few years now.
For that very reason, insider knowledge, and especially the ability to influence future outcomes, become the subject of heavy regulation. And, the lack of such regulation for congressional members is also why their net worth tends to skyrocket once entering office.
But I think the way our current system solves this is by forcing companies to disclose important insider information to shareholders all at once, rather than by letting insiders profit by leaking the information through their market transactions. (The one possibly being related to the other, because insiders who could legally profit by keeping information secret rather than disclose it would be incentivised to do so.) I don't think a similar restriction is feasible for prediction markets, because often the thing you're trying to predict is not something that can be legally cajoled into giving up its secrets.
Before Salman vs US (2016) it basically was, how do you think the oracle made bank?
With prediction markets, the "purpose" is information discovery, and "insider trading" actually helps (=> via information from insiders).
Disclaimer: I'm somewhat playing devils advocate here, I personally think that prediction markets are for now mostly an ineffective zero-sum game (and legalized gambling with all the drawbacks that brings).
But you don't usually buy the stocks from the company itself, do you? Unless there is some shenanigans with buyouts going on...
Accurately predicting the outcome of a war, election, or other nationally important event though can potentially have immense value.
I don't contest that, but again, you haven't explained why "predictions" is the point of prediction markets. People place bets on things they want to be true as much as things they believe to be true. They can market themselves as whatever they like but no one has made a case that this is any different from sports betting.
> At no point do I say the oracle target should be private
Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment.
Instead, your original said stuff like:
> they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity
> no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side
> where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation.
In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance:
"The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor."
Did you read... his comment? My comment? TFA?
Remotely relevant? It's not like I'm talking about cats, I'm talking about prediction markets, which is the topic of the article. You would have to be extremely uncharitable to not see a holistic discussion about other problems prediction markets face and possible solutions to those problems as relevant. These topics very seldom come up on HN so a mere mention of prediction markets can and should be a very good excuse to have many side threads on the topic that have been waiting to happen.
I think the point is more that if it's already happening at this level of adoption, and these are only the ones we know about, surely there are many more where this is happening and we don't know, and as adoption increases, it will get worse and worse since the liquidity on the line will be much higher.
Elections, wars, the economy, healthcare systems, laws, court cases?
The example you provided does look like some insider trading type of stuff, just like how 1v1 professional sports players will sometimes intentionally lose after receiving a bribe to do so, but both your example and sports don't really seem to have any kind of meaningful impact on anything or anyone who isn't gambling, no?
What you're showing me is a death threat, which has existed for time in humans.
Betting markets of all kinds have existed for a long time and haven't been banned.
Banning on particular betting market prediction markets altogether and pushing it underground would make things far worse.
Given that the article is discussing some of the bad behavior typically associated with dark markets (death threats, extortion, fixing) happening in the light, what makes you think that banning them would make things worse?
What you're showing me is a [war crime], which has existed for time in humans.
[Wars] of all kinds have existed for a long time and haven't been banned.
Banning on [particular tactics in war] altogether and pushing it underground would make things far worse.
There is a difference.
Where is the particular and specific assassination market that says:
"Date on which this journalist will die"?
As to your exact proposal, I do have some criticism (less hostile this time). I don't think it would be easy to get people to do trades when they can't see the price. It's not enough to just ask everybody for limit orders, and then only pair off the ones that cross, because you're asking people to tie up capital on a trade they don't even know the price of.
Basically, somebody does a trade on a prediction market not because he believes he knows the probability, but because he believe he knows it better than the market.
Is there a way in your proposal to get around this limitation?
Plenty of people have been murdered over sports betting. It's more than your reductive "oh it's just consenting players".
Just because sports and war are morally different doesn't mean "$verb about sports" and "$verb about war" are morally different. E.g. "reading".
You're 1 for 3 on comment reading comprehension here so I don't think we should continue. Even if you said you agreed with me there's no way for me to know what you think you're agreeing with.
I'm setting the bar really low here
Just calling it gambling emphasizes the former problem while dismissing the latter problem.
Personally I consider any monetary wager where the individual isn't personally invested in corresponding productive events to constitute gambling. By that logic poker, horse races, prediction markets, futures, and even the vast majority of day trading all constitute forms of gambling.
Betting on sports is not pure chance. If I play a game of tennis against roger federer, I am sure to lose. I can predict this event with 100% certainty.
https://polymarket.com/event/btc-updown-5m-1773764400
Bitcoin up or down is another non-chance event. I can easily sway the price of bitcoin by just buying some.
Recently there was a market to predict how long the US government shutdown would last. This is not gambling--you can look at historical data of shutdown durations and form a prediction based on researching each politician's views.
Sure, an idiot might gamble by just picking an option at random, but the game itself isn't gambling because it's not a game of pure chance.
You're also assuming Ethereum-clone chains work the same way as Bitcoin. They do not. An Ethereum wallet has a single long-term identity.
As the comments on that article rightfully point out, restricting the data analysed to 12 hours before the resolution feels like cherry picking.
The implication seems to be "12 hours before the resolution things are obvious anyway". But if that were the case, then I could pick some wager that is obviously true but has, for example, 70% chance, and putting my money on that. If it was true that "12 hours before the resolution it's obvious what the result is", everything would be in 0% or 100% buckets. I believe getting event with 30% confidence right exactly 30% times is impressive no matter if that's 12h or 120h before.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about prediction markets, just what I understood from the blog post.
1. As pointed out in the comments, you can inflate your prediction success rate by predicting things that are 100% to happen. There are plenty of 99.9% bets on Polymarket with degens betting on some 0.01% lottery event trying to strike a jackpot against the odds, and those will inflate the perceived accuracy.
2. All you're really doing is paying insiders to leak information a few hours ahead of time. Insofar as Polymarket is unusually accurate on things that aren't ~100% to happen, it's likely because in the 12-hour-window that post measures is when all of the insiders place their last-minute bets telling you what will happen. This is extremely bad for society. It's wealth redistribution from stupid people to unethical people[1], and it could completely compromise national security when eg. an insider tells you 12 hours ahead of time that the US is about to launch an invasion of Venezuela. There is no societal benefit to this.
[1] Even if you have no sympathy for idiots who bet their life savings on markets without having insider information, gambling addiction has extremely detrimental effects on society and directly results in increased crime rates, divorce rates, etc. as people lose all of their money and do bad things in desperation, so it is a problem that becomes everyone else's problem.
https://calibration.city/introduction
https://manifold.markets/calibration
2. That is just obviously not all these markets are doing. They're aligning incentives and aggregating information in the same way other markets do.
Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.
In situations like this, where you wouldn't expect to see evidence of something even if it were happening, you're basically left to make a judgement based on prior probability. So here that would come down to: is the financial incentive provided by the prediction market high enough relative to the decisionmaker's perceived risk and penalty of being caught? IMO, the answer is currently 'no' for most high-profile cases, but in a future where more money is riding on the bets, or where decisionmakers are insulated from consequences, that could swing to 'yes'.
Possibly because you're too emotional and raging everywhere and not stopping to think what happens when you think the answer to everything is a complete ban.
I'm not the one apologising for my position, you're not completely rational at all since you don't think about the second order effects.
Polymarket, for example, makes money on the data. So it must be worth something because people are paying for that predication data. They don’t take a slice of the winnings.
They don’t make money by taking a spread, they make it by providing information.
And people bet on emotion for sure, but “wisdom of crowds” suggests that generally that will balance out to somewhat accurate odds.
So as previously stated I can tell the difference but still have no idea what point you were originally trying to make. Prediction markets are still a form of gambling however impure, no? Just as betting on a horse race is.
Let me give you an example. On average, there are 14 storms big enough to be named in the 6 month long Atlantic hurricane season. If a prediction market was saying 30% odds of a storm big enough to be named every day for all 183 days, betting against that would be free money. Would you call it gambling to make the same bet on all 183 days? The day-by-day outcome is uncertain, but the overall outcome is extremely certain.
The entire point of there being a gambling "line" is because two parties have to agree on a wager that they both think has positive EV. That's effectively gambling. Somebody has to lose for the other party to win.
Obviously if the counter-party is an institution with a legitimate need to hedge, it becomes an insurance policy, but that is a world of difference than just two counterparties wanting to make bets for fun.
One participant in a market can be gambling while another participant isn't gambling. In particular, casinos don't gamble.
Also for many things there exists a scale from fully random to fully skill-based. So in my opinion things can be semi-gambling with a lot of gray area.
I completely agree. I'm not trying to equate "casino gambling" to "gambling." Casino gambling is trivially stupid and should basically be illegal for large sums of money (again > $100 in expected losses/hour). I still think "gambling" is also bad for society, and I especially think it's bad when the payout structure is bar-belled where a lifetime gambling can somehow convince gamblers that they are "due."
>you need to consider the situations where one person doesn't have a positive EV expectation, or where that expectation is provably wrong.
I mean, this is de facto a discussion of the past. My point about "prediction market" is that their externalities start to spiral rapidly. Market reflexivity, where the gamblers starts effecting the outcome, or at least the oracle, is a very obvious and predictable result such that it's literally cliche to talk about athletes taking a dive for the money.
When it's sports, it's not really a huge deal because -- outside of gambling spaces -- we are ultimately just talking about entertainment. The problem with prediction market gambling, is that it starts affecting peoples lives. The price of oil, the leaders of countries, the results of elections. When you create legal avenues that incentivize organized crime to manipulate the outcome to future events, you've basically created a machine that fights back against pro-social, cooperative outcomes in politics and the economy that everyone benefits from. It's a horrible idea.
Polymarket US is starting to roll out in the US and other countries where Polymarket cannot operate, but that's a separate company and they do abide by KYC laws similar to Kalshi.
The lunacy of the mysticism of money.
This is a hackneyed neoliberal fundamentalist myth.
If power is concentrated anywhere, it should only ever be in government - where it's answerable to the public electorally.
Governments become corrupt when they are weak, and turn to serving private interests rather than the public they represent.
Corruption in general is far more prolific and fruitful where government is weak (the neoliberal ideal) - which is one of the reasons corrupt private actors look to weaken government - for instance by undermining public trust in it or lobbying for its parasitization by private entities. Or by stuffing their acolytes minds with foolish neoliberal fundamentalist myths.
"If power is concentrated anywhere..." The libertarian ideal is that it is not concentrated anywhere, because power corrupts. Maybe neoliberals want power concentrated in some entity that isn't government, and that's what you are arguing against? I guess I better do a little research on this new (to me at least) word
If CISOs can be held criminally liable for data breaches, the rest of C-suite can be held criminally liable for their own decisions as well.
In this case, the guy knowingly operates a betting market that illegally does not require KYC.
It's not illegal where he is. You can't go around arresting people in other countries just because they don't follow your country's law.
It would make more sense to campaign for better background checks on WhatsApp. A case can be made that a chat system with discoverable identities should have better safeguards. If the incentive to make a threat is financial gain rather than a pure desire to kill, restricting the means in which a threat can even be made (or identifying the participants) would help silence the noise and give actionable insights to law enforcment.
I’m generally opposed to KYC and similar measures, but if a platform is already collecting massive amounts of user data, it should at least use that data to help protect the people who become vulnerable because of it.
There is a fundamental architectural problem here with no easy band-aid fix, and the companies involved are desperate to deny it because their founders have personal fortunes riding on it.
why do all NBA players seem so tall?
"Lack of regulation clarity on your part does not constitute a crime on mine". Why is that not a valid defence?
Do you seriously think fraudulent Xbox live transactions are on the same level of the heinous insider trading going on in betting markets?
Or do you just think C-suite should be legally immune from accountability overall?
Polymarket's decentralized and anonymous nature was an intentional choice by its creator precisely because it enables illegal, anonymous transactions.
It's the responsibility of the lawmakers to make them illegal or force them to do kyc.
If you fantasize about China or Russia way of doing things you should move there.
Anybody can send anonymous threats, that has nothing to do with any betting company, unless they are sent through that platform.
The type of person at the top of a hierarchical system is always a direct reflection of its play rules. In late-stage internet capitalism you win by being the most unhinged and un-emphatic. Today's young adults grew up on twitter, 4chan, video game gambling and with influencers telling them that the only thing that matters is material wealth and status. This culture has moved more and more into the mainstream in the last decade.
This isn't a thing.
Capitalism is just capitalism.
Because no ethical person would accumulate a billion dollars. An ethical person would share the wealth they're creating with those around them instead of hording that wealth.
What can you do with 100 million that you couldn't do with 10?
Those investors don't want to give /you/ money, they want to give the billionaire money.
loads of banks all over the world now demands to know what you plan to spend the money on just to withdraw a bit cash. Some will even deny you saying "well.. you shouldnt buy a new car anyway". all the KYC shit. how about just no?
A world in which these people bet on heinous things while insider trading/influencing those very things.
Privacy in gambling or insider trading is not a constitutional right.
<facepalm>
A capricious system that interprets based on whim, politics and influence is a large part of how we got here.
People like this and their less than moral path in which they further their endeavors succeed specifically because of this environment.
Polymarket is basically a platform to monetize petty stuff while also being able to monetize bad stuff. There is soooo much pressure to monetize bad stuff that once you poke a hole it's an uncontrolled leak. Polymarket recognized this, used it to scale, and then wisely used that money to get the legitimization and buy in that they needed to make the system (capriciously) say "this is fine for now you can keep going".
They basically pulled a "actually Mr. Banker, I owe you so much money that it's your problem" but for insider information. The other metaphor you could use if people with a steady supply of prescription opioids don't turn to street drugs.
If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches, CEOs can have personal liability for intentionally creating an illegal platform.
Instead we reward these people with billions for degrading the fabric of society.
Where’s this, now?
There's nothing sane about KYC, it's a fundamental assault on the right to financial privacy. And the people with power can always bypass it; only the little people suffer.
2 points - 1) “credible” is carrying a lot of water in that statement, and 2) your implication is that any activity which could eventually or conceivably involve a lunatic making a death threat is not compatible with any level of privacy.
The second is incredibly disturbing - people have made death threats over E2E encrypted chat channels, therefore we must remove any privacy built in to such a model?
That seems to be assuming a world where CEOs actually face meaningful consequences and that feels like a good start.
I think discouraging investment is the opposite of what leads to a prosperous society. We'll just have a bunch of rich landlord sitting on piles of cash, afraid to give it to anyone because the risk of any jail time at all is probably too high for most.
And that doesn't even account for non-institutional investors. Can you imagine putting people in jail because of the meme stock they bought on Robin Hood?
“In most jurisdictions, death threats are a serious type of criminal offence” [1].
If they have built a thing they can't maintain that isn't bully for them and we should feel sorry that their best efforts aren't working well enough - it's proof that that thing (or at least the way they built that thing) isn't feasible.
Edit: Personally I think betting on war is immoral and should be condemned by all sane people, but saying that everything needs 100% safety and 100% no harm is very naive.
Besides that I'm all for strict personal liability for the execs and the investors of the companies they invest in. That's of course the exact opposite of the way it works right now but that actually institutionalized externalization, one of the key issues with why the world is the mess that it is.
Corporations are fine, limited liability corporations are not, I'm becoming more and more convinced that they are in fact the root of all evil because they allow the erection of financial 'diodes' that allow you to partition your stash from your liabilities and the two should always be linked. They are a very effective mechanism to allow people to screw over society and claim it's all perfectly legal.
> Capitalism is just capitalism.
If you want to just debate the validity of the specific term “late stage capitalism” then sure go ahead, but that’s not all you did in your prior comment. Capitalism comes in many forms and variations.
That being said, late stage capitalism is such a common term now that to say “it isn’t a thing“ feels more like something you feel should be the case than anything else. The fact that everyone in this conversation is able to understand the phrase without anyone needing to explain it is pretty indicative of that.
Are you confusing capitalism with class society in general? Yes, class society exists since the neolithic revolution. Those economic systems had barely anything in common with capitalism though. Even medieval feudalism is very different.
And yes, late stage capitalism is a term. It was coined by Lenin in his book about Imperialism. You might not agree with the term but that doesn't mean it is not real.
I think it is very obvious that 20th and 21st century monopoly capitalism is qualitatively different to 18th and 19th century free market capitalism.
The effects and consequences of capitalism under feudalism or the age of slavery is, for example, fundamentally different from capitalism under a freer modern democracy. A slave or serf did not have the opportunities of capitalism, which changes how the system behaves and its effects.
The term "capitalism" becomes kind of meaningless, because it just describes a broad set of mechanisms. In the case of the question in this thread it is much more descriptive to include the context of which it exists within.