Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/

by defly • 4 months ago

1606 1000 4 months ago

timesofisrael.com

pydry• 4 months ago

The level of censorship in Israel right now is off the charts: https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/

I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.

mickwe• 4 months ago

But the Times of Israel reporter reported that a missile hit - and where. The censor tries to prevent reports like that, for (ostensibly) security reasons - telling the enemy where their missiles hit.

shell0x• 4 months ago

Is there a trustworthy independent source? I don't trust anything coming from Iranian or Israeli news outlets.

bootsmann• 4 months ago

There is a clip embedded within the article that corroborates what the journalist wrote.

gpderetta• 4 months ago

I don't understand what are you saying. The journalist published an article claiming that a missile struck without being intercepted (although with no damage). The gamblers wanted the journalist to retract and say that the missile was intercepted.

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?

damageboy• 4 months ago

The rules don't apply for reporters outside of Israel, and this was historically been the way that Israeli journos and other bypass the censorship completely.

The author is being pressured (IMO) because the degens feel like they can threaten him (physical proximity)

jrjeksjd8d• 4 months ago

I think it's the opposite - the censorship has made the Israeli public believe they're safer than they really are. The US is lying about their stockpiles and frantically moving resources from East Asia to try and shore up missile defense in the Middle East.

These people believed that no Iranian missiles could possibly get through and instead of accepting they were misled they're shooting the messenger

Pay0812• 4 months ago

You're plainly misinformed. Both the USA and Israel running low on munitions has been all over the media for months.

mvelbaum• 4 months ago

I live in Israel. There is fake news being spread about Tel Aviv being destroyed and Israel being hit hard. This is absolutely false. The volume of rockets is way lower than the 12 Day War. In fact, I do the irresponsible thing of not even going to the bomb shelter when the odd siren rings out.

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.

fzil• 4 months ago

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 months ago

By far?!

There's a very long list.

Waterluvian2• 4 months ago

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?"

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)

lotsofpulp• 4 months ago

And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys?"

I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.

ipaddr2• 4 months ago

The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.

yyyk• 4 months ago

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting...
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.

Balgair2• 4 months ago

Friend of a friend does announcing online.

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.

walthamstow• 4 months ago

You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.

RIMR• 4 months ago

Yeah, but even "harmless" bets like the one you describe are too easy to rig. Who is to say that someone who works on Conan's show won't have some influence over the programming and intentionally steer the show so that they win their bet?

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.

dfxm12• 4 months ago

I think it is naive to assume that under capitalism, with no guardrails in place, that the people involved with these markets will leave money on the table purely by self restraint/acting in good faith.

If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.

skywhopper• 4 months ago

Sure, it’s fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn’t shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.

watwut2• 4 months ago

And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?"

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.

mapt2• 4 months ago

It's a matter of market size and the inherent goal of the market; The factors are implicitly at odds.

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.

btilly2• 4 months ago

Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination.

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. :-(

EGreg• 4 months ago

Here is a much more moral and useful prediction market: https://unblockers.org

brightball• 4 months ago

Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports.

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.

akudha• 4 months ago

if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals

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?

uoaei2• 4 months ago

It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.

azan_• 4 months ago

I’d say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it’s not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful things related to internet in my opinion.

ipaddr2• 4 months ago

Or from the death of family and friends.

manphone2• 4 months ago

We can walk and chew gum at the same time, the government can regulate thousands or millions of different types of things at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it.

echoangle7• 4 months ago

It’s not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).

Jeff_Brown• 4 months ago

As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.

mattmaroon• 4 months ago

Yeah CSAM is worse.

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.

heavyset_go• 4 months ago

people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

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?

creatonez3• 4 months ago

and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

When this existed, it was quite literally done using the prediction market model. It was an early prototype for all this insanity.

coole-wurst• 4 months ago

I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.

ambicapter2• 4 months ago

That existed before the internet.

laurentiurad5• 4 months ago

it's a hyperbole dude. It accelerates the moral decay of a society, and the barriers for entry are very low. The one you mentioned is straight illegal and punishable in any jurisdiction across the globe.

loeg5• 4 months ago

The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.

tartoran• 4 months ago

One has nothing to do with the other and it's a poor argument to defend prediciton markets.

mathisfun123• 4 months ago

Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days

RGamma2• 4 months ago

And goatse is harmless compared to the shit that's out there, especially because it only affects the dude himself. Even 3 guys 1 hammer isn't the worst yet (though pretty bad already).

cannonpr2• 4 months ago

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.

victorbjorklund• 4 months ago

Sounds like a urban legend.

happytoexplain2• 4 months ago

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior

Why "can look", "but", "just"?

Aurornis• 4 months ago

That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one among college students is that if your roommate dies you get straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their roommates.

proggy• 4 months ago

I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.

PaulHoule2• 4 months ago

"Suicide is Painless"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0xy-LoDi94

tomtomtom7772• 4 months ago

I think that's horribly fatalistic perspective.

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".

thinkingtoilet3• 4 months ago

Your comparison is not even close to what is happening here.

dominicrose• 4 months ago

It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.

riskable• 4 months ago

You've got the problem of prediction gambling framed incorrectly. It's not a matter of people losing money on bad bets, it's all about incentivized corruption and causing bad events (even catastrophic) so that a few may profit from them. It creates a perverse incentive for bad things to happen.

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!

swingboy• 4 months ago

Easily the worst thing and it’s not even close? Really?

tomtomtom7772• 4 months ago

Absolutely horrifying.

Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb.

Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb.

This needs to be banned.

bagacrap6• 4 months ago

Who needs a bribe when they can participate in the market directly?

kibwen3• 4 months ago

Make a bet for "$PUBLIC_FIGURE will be dead by $DATE" and see how quickly people realize that this is just a distributed assassination contract.

efdee• 4 months ago

Already banned in several European countries, mostly because of the betting on political events.

rich_sasha• 4 months ago

Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter.

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.

applfanboysbgon5• 4 months ago

On aggregate, humans will engage in exactly as terrible and selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is use our collective power as a social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.

base698• 4 months ago

It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.

jbxntuehineoh2• 4 months ago

I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos

vincnetas• 4 months ago

But wait, there is more: Assassination market

bet that someone will die by certain date

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

nekusar• 4 months ago

Huh, I figured they were rumors.

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.

Bender4• 4 months ago

I ⤻ predict ⤺ that prediction markets will be more tightly regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. i.e. CFTC loses jurisdiction.

- 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.

hnfong• 4 months ago

What do you mean outlawed? It will simply just happen in a jurisdiction that does not care about it.

If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.

empath75• 4 months ago

So, a fun historical fact is that insurance markets started with people in coffee houses betting on whether or not ships would sink for fun. Eventually ship owners realized that if they bet on their own ship sinking, that it reduced the financial risk of travel, then betters realized that ship owners were doing that and decided to research before taking the other side of the bet, and so on until you end up with ship insurance.

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.

dboreham• 4 months ago

Yes but if you're a bloke toking on your pipe in Lloyds Coffee House in 1713 you don't know that you already ordered a submarine to sink a ship you're placing a bet will sink...

kibwen3• 4 months ago

insurance markets started with people in coffee houses

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).

pfortuny• 4 months ago

As a sibling says, the story is for ships, other insurance has existed for millenials.

nurettin• 4 months ago

moral degradation is off the charts

Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

I'm wondering how long it's going to take people to see the bigger picture and start connecting the dots.

"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.

gzread14• 4 months ago

It's more like the dots aren't connected but they're all the same size and color because that kind of dot is in fashion.

I don't think Polymarket bans consistent winners. You gamble against other users and Polymarket makes the same fee either way.

bspammer• 4 months ago

Just to play devil’s advocate, I have found prediction markets genuinely useful despite never placing a bet.

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”.

tombert2• 4 months ago

I've hated the idea of Polymarket for about as long as I've known about it.

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.

fsckboy3• 4 months ago

you need to learn a little finance, i.e. that subset of economics dealing with financial markets. Markets "crowdsource" values in the face of changing needs, preferences, probability and volatility, and that's an incredibly useful thing.

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.

mlsu• 4 months ago

Moral degradation? Buddy think about how much money can be made here. Eye on the ball. Try to think about what's truly important in life: making money by _monetizing every difference of opinion_.

https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...

Zigurd2• 4 months ago

You will no doubt find some rational sounding arguments in favor of prediction markets here. Lots of useless and harmful things are fascinating. The math behind cryptocurrency, and things like the difference between proof of work and proof of stake are fascinating. But that doesn't make cryptocurrencies good. The genetics of tulip bulbs must be fascinating too.

fwipsy3• 4 months ago

Prediction markets are a separate concept from cryptocurrency. You can run one on cash within the typical KYC regime. If the arguments in favor of prediction markets sound rational, maybe they are rational?

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.

basisword2• 4 months ago

We need to stop with the "prediction markets" bs naming. They're gambling websites with a larger variety of things you can gamble on.

gzread14• 4 months ago

They don't call themselves that, because online gambling is illegal. It's a bit like all the piracy websites being "an archive of Nintendo content to preserve it for future generations"

duxup• 4 months ago

I wonder if part of the deal is people gambling believe they have insider info, so any story to the contrary to them is clearly a lie costing them money, something that seems extra offensive?

red_admiral• 4 months ago

They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.

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.

SpicyLemonZest2• 4 months ago

They didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would take place because sports betting was illegal almost everywhere in the US until 2018.

creatonez3• 4 months ago

You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.

ModernMech• 4 months ago

The failure of the rationalist community is they mistook rationalization for rationality.

everdrive• 4 months ago

once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.

It's important to remember that for a brief time, people argued that gatekeeping was generally and usually a bad thing.

m3kw9• 4 months ago

Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure

ACCount37• 4 months ago

Cool it with the moral outrage. Even if I did believe that prediction markets are bad, "easily the worst things to grace the internet by far" is such a ridiculous hyperbole that it strains any belief.

gzread14• 4 months ago

There aren't that many things bad on this scale that I can think of.

abustamam2• 4 months ago

Someone on HN suggested that prediction markets would be interesting if only politicians were allowed to participate. For example, politician says that this bill will make the economy better (insert tangible metric here). Well Mr politician, put your money where your mouth is. If you indeed believe this is best for your constituents, bet on it, and if you're right, you'll reap the benefits of your legislation. If not, you're either incompetent or a liar; in either case, your people deserve to know.

Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.

gzread14• 4 months ago

I do find that to be a fun thought experiment, but HN doesn't seem to agree.

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.

seydor2• 4 months ago

Yep, far worse than cryptocurrency

colesantiago10• 4 months ago

AI is 1000%+ far worse to be fair.

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.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r2• 4 months ago

Dude, stop.

mpalmer8• 4 months ago

Do you have a positive defense of betting markets? You're spraying defensive whataboutism all over this thread and lowering the discourse.

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...

tasuki2• 4 months ago

Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.

What if there's a prediction market on your life? Would you say you're still "not participating, so no harm done" ?

zbentley8• 4 months ago

Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.

Did you read the article? It is about a journalist getting death threats from members of a prediction market.

littlecranky672• 4 months ago

Wait until they ban prediction markets, then they will re-appear, and you will have to use cryptocurrency :)

zbentley8• 4 months ago

I’d be surprised if there wasn’t already a huge crypto-only dark market where lots of rich criminals bet huge sums.

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.

input_sh2• 4 months ago

Polymarket already only accepts cryptocurrencies. :)

Kalshi is worse in a sense that it also accepts fiat payments.

seydor2• 4 months ago

not easy because you d need a trusted central to settle the outcomes. So far, crypto has only solved the betting part

somelamer567• 4 months ago

Cryptocurrency itself was designed to enable crime. Why else would one want an end-run around governments and law-enforcement, unless one were a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free?

hollerith• 4 months ago

So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?

8-prime• 4 months ago

A statement made from either privilige, ignorance or both.

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.

dalmo3• 4 months ago

a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free

E.g. a Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks?

PurpleRamen2• 4 months ago

Not all governments are good, trustworthy or even exist at all. For people in an oppressed or even full out broken society, being this level of criminal is acceptable.

But yes, something used to work around bad governments, will also be used against good governments. Every legit tool can be also abused.

fnands5• 4 months ago

At least cryptocurrencies had some nice ideas behind them. Just sad they almost immediately got co-opted by swindlers and criminals.

Hammershaft7• 4 months ago

Prediction markets also have very interesting ideas.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...

epolanski9• 4 months ago

Prediction markets need to be banned globally ASAP, but it would've helped the article to bring proof of:

- 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.

colesantiago10• 4 months ago

Why does everything you don't like need to be banned?

Downvoters:

I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned anything in the history of technology.

dwroberts• 4 months ago

Why is everything you like protected from being banned?

pjc504• 4 months ago

Prediction markets on death are an assassination market. That's why they're against the rules even on Polymarket and Kalshi.

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)

epolanski9• 4 months ago

1. It's not something I don't like, it's something plain illegal in most of the world, including the US under the Dodd-Frank act, which the current executive has decided to not enforce.

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.

mpalmer8• 4 months ago

Why do you apparently like a system that lets people bet on atrocities and then take steps to make said atrocities more likely?

camgunz• 4 months ago

This is an argument against all laws, which probably deserves more than a couple sentences.

pjc504• 4 months ago

Journalists do not normally work like that. That might be how beefs are fought on social media, but of course screenshots are easy to fake anyway.

epolanski9• 4 months ago

I don't understand what your point is.

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.

vintermann• 4 months ago

That is correct, but it's not to media's credit. Most journalists say basically, "Trust me, I'm the authority, I wouldn't be allowed to say this if it were simply lies. I could prove it to you but I won't, at worst I'll be forced to prove it to my peers. (And you aren't one, peasant)." They practically never link to the scientific paper they just reported on, certainly not to anything that could let us check politically controversial claims ourselves.

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.

echoangle7• 4 months ago

Quoting vs providing screenshots makes exactly 0 difference regarding level of proof. Faking an email or WhatsApp message is about 2 minutes of work.

epolanski9• 4 months ago

1. Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and questioned and they are regularly debunked.

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.

Hammershaft7• 4 months ago

I disagree.

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...

leshenka• 4 months ago

I wouldn't be able to say this with a straight face after reading this article.

epolanski9• 4 months ago

There is no evidence that people betting on whether Iran will strike Israel on March 15th has any benefit. Who would be the beneficiary of that?

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?

staticman22• 4 months ago

Are you talking about the same thing everyone else is?

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).."

mpalmer8• 4 months ago

I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.

RGamma2• 4 months ago

Psychopaths don't care about ethics, much less if money is involved. At best they feel indifference, at worst enjoyment.

Pay0812• 4 months ago

Same way anyone working at a traditional casino does, I'd imagine.

Esophagus4• 4 months ago

I would bet it’s some combination of

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

NicuCalcea3• 4 months ago

3) If I won't do it, someone even worse will.

crazygringo3• 4 months ago

What the heck does the company (Polymarket) have to do with any of this?

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.

Zambyte3• 4 months ago

What are the risks involved with the newspaper versus the risks involved with Polymarket?

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.

mmmlinux• 4 months ago

same as you. wake up, go to work, waste your day on hackernews, collect a big fat pay check, take a 2 week vacation to Disney world with the stacks your bringing in.

markus_zhang3• 4 months ago

The gambling market is really bringing out the worst of us.

gcr5• 4 months ago

B-b-but futarchy and unbiased decisionmaking means well-calibrated markets could be a net good for society!! /hj

fnands5• 4 months ago

Ugh, the sophistry (or at least self-deceiving arguments) people throw around to defend these markets makes my stomach churn.

markus_zhang3• 4 months ago

I don't know, man, looks like we are now literally gambling on whether people die today or tomorrow. This is even worse than underground sports gambling.

zbentley8• 4 months ago

Yeah, that claim was always ludicrous to me too. Wisdom-of-crowds isn’t an unbiased decision making strategy, it’s quite biased. Crowd-wisdom works best as a limiter on the bias of other decision making strategies—this is why democracies use representatives rather than direct votes for most decisions.

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.

indymike• 4 months ago

Reply of the year. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.

Hammershaft7• 4 months ago

The question isn't whether futarchy isn't perfect, it's whether its better than our existing democracy.

TimTheTinker2• 4 months ago

Anything that requires a ton of criminal law, regulation, and enforcement around it should have to meet some kind of standard of societal benefit.

The entertainment value of betting does not meet that standard, in my opinion.

amarcheschi• 4 months ago

Years ago I was friend with a guy who played tennis at international levels (say top 1000 players). He regularly received death treats on social networks from people Gambling on him to win/lose (and the opposite happened)

astura2• 4 months ago

Getting death threats from aggrieved gamblers, MLB players starting to fear for their safety

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nigh...

markus_zhang3• 4 months ago

This is insane. And I'm sure he doesn't want to hire bodyguards just for that. I hope he get over with it eventually.

NickC25• 4 months ago

Still happens at all levels of professional sport. Even the top women get messages on their IG accounts all the time by degenerate gamblers pissed off after a loss.

cael450• 4 months ago

I feel like America is re-learning why gambling was so widely outlawed. It just ruins everything it touches. At least casinos are mostly contained. I'm tired of seeing gambling ads on every sport and hearing the news talk about prediction markets.

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.

civvv5• 4 months ago

Online (foreign based, read: tax and regulation havens) gambling casinos are flooding the social media feeds of children with AI slop or memes that have their logo/branding slapped on it. They are posting thousands of videos per day, trying to get kids to gamble on their casinos. Who are behind? The owners of gaming communities/e-sport brands like FaZe Clan etc. Basically, if you were a large youtuber in the 2010's, the goto seems to be get in on some kind of online gambling site for kids.

xXSLAYERXx2• 4 months ago

The marketing is what bothers me the most. These books market very aggressively in app: Take Daves 5 leg parlay; Share your picks! 30% profit boost if you do a 4 leg parlay that'll never hit. Its constant engagement. Contrast this to a real bookie: Open app. Place bet. Meet once a week in parking lot. Small chatter. Pass envelope.

boelboel• 4 months ago

Many people just think certain things in history were outlawed because of 'stupid religious people'. Most of the time there's genuine reasons for banning things even if they weren't perfect or brought other harms with them. Something like usury was banned in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and it wasn't because people prior to 1900 were imbeciles, these things can cause immense instability.

ffsm8• 4 months ago

I feel like this is worse then gambling even, because it's not only luck. You can actually influence an outcome without cheating, hence credible deaths threats

postalrat2• 4 months ago

Replace gamblers with futures market and I agree.

bagacrap6• 4 months ago

Commodities futures markets have an actual purpose, which is to make business inputs (or outputs) more predictable. Like if I know I need ten tons of corn next year, it's safer to buy futures now than to wait and see how the price of corn fluctuates over that time, potentially sabotaging my business operation. (Of making corn chips.)

Terr_11• 4 months ago

Do we typically [0] have a problem with people sabotaging industries to manipulate the futures market?

[0] Edit: Originally wrote "currently", but then I remembered the current White House, whose various crimes are being studiously ignored by the Republican congress.

alpineman• 4 months ago

Day trading too, and day trading led us down this path. Everyone is a gambler now. All morals are out the window.

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.

globular-toast• 4 months ago

It's true but it's just revealing what Wall Street et al have been up to for the past several decades. There's this perception that they're all doing Very Important Work(tm), when in fact they're just making up silly rules and playing games with each other, aka gambling.

KellyCriterion• 4 months ago

I do not know about daytrading, but trading in the long term works, if you have a (technical/IT) system.

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

fnands5• 4 months ago

Man, something like this is going to be a plot point in a movie/tv series soon.

Could work in some crime procedural.

PurpleRamen2• 4 months ago

This is an old plot, done already in dozens of different variations.

fnands5• 4 months ago

I think there are lots of plots that revolve around rigging sports betting (e.g. sub-plot in Pulp Fiction), but I can't really think of a case where it is not so much about manipulating the actual act that occurred, but rather the news reporting of the act.

V__• 4 months ago

Bond's Casino Royal had a stock short sell bet with a planned attack.

defly• 4 months ago

FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...

varjag7• 4 months ago

(as reported by Quincy Institute, a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank)

zarathustreal• 4 months ago

(Ad-hominem is not a counter-example btw)

waffleiron• 4 months ago

ISW confirmed unauthorised edits were made, and fired a staffer over it. Not sure why you feel the need to comment this. Classic lowbrow dismissal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248

DrProtic• 4 months ago

And ISW is tied to Victoria Nuland.

culi8• 4 months ago

Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the invasion

senderista5• 4 months ago

ISW is a shill for neoconservatism (just look at their board!) and is funded by US defense contractors. They try to give the appearance of neutrality via technical jargon etc. but are anything but.

culi8• 4 months ago

Please give me a single example backing up the claim that Quincy Institute is "a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank"

On their page "Quincy Institute’s Position on Russia-Ukraine" they say at the very beginning:

We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.

https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...

carefulfungi• 4 months ago

Athletes are also receiving death threats from gamblers.

* https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...

... and many, many other stories.

bitmasher93• 4 months ago

I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.

pjc504• 4 months ago

If the gamblers are outwith Israel, there's not a lot the Israeli police can do. They're not going to go full Operation 'Wrath of God' for this guy.

ryan_j_naughton• 4 months ago

I agree. This involved should be investigated and prosecuted.

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

bitmasher93• 4 months ago

Thanks. I’m not trained as a lawyer so sometimes make these types of mistakes. I’m happy to learn.

baobabKoodaa• 4 months ago

I agree. This involved should be investigated and prosecuted.

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!

TheDong• 4 months ago

Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?

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.

xvector7• 4 months ago

Polymarket's founder is Shayne Coplan, 27-year old "youngest self-made billionaire" (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?)

A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.

charcircuit2• 4 months ago

Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?

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.

gzread14• 4 months ago

Polymarket runs on Polygon, which, like most blockchains, has public history. If the user wasn't very careful about how they got their money into the system, it traces back to a public cryptocurrency exchange with KYC records.

senderista5• 4 months ago

In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in Israel.

TurdF3rguson2• 4 months ago

Polymarket has KYC for US users now. Can you get around it with a VPN though? I think so.

echoangle7• 4 months ago

It’s probably an open and shut case regarding being illegal but prosecution could be hard. How are you going to find the person?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 months ago

I don't like that the internet can be used to harm you without any recourse.

breppp• 4 months ago

The Israeli police can contact Google, Meta, etc and get the user details.

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

wmil• 4 months ago

Reporters for The Times of Israel get a lot of death threats. I doubt this was the author's first one.

So it's common and hard to prosecute because the person threatening is most likely in another country.

Pay0812• 4 months ago

Especially since a lot of the quotes in the article sound like Google-translated Hebrew.

maybelsyrup• 4 months ago

Honestly this behavior is pretty representative of the place, in my experience.

AngryData• 4 months ago

US cops don't care about solving crimes or making people safe, they only care about making a profit. And harassing random motorists on the side of the road is way easier and safer profits than trying to deal with real crime involving people with money that can afford their own lawyers to fight back.

mikkupikku3• 4 months ago

US cops? It's Israel.

voidUpdate• 4 months ago

Does the "Continue without disabling" button on the adblock popup just not do anything for anyone else?

newAccount2025• 4 months ago

The site is completely unusable. Even with reader mode it somehow aggressively refreshed. Gave up in disgust.

ajross4• 4 months ago

So, just to point it out: people don't get violent and criminal magically because they made a bet. They get violent and criminal to backstop a bet they can't cover. The story here isn't that horrible criminals are using Polymarket. It's that Polymarket bettors are overleveraged, and at the margin some of them turn to crime to avoid losing their shirts.

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.

ambicapter2• 4 months ago

This argument is sophistry, the nature of gambling is that gamblers over-leverage themselves compulsively.

ajross4• 4 months ago

So... no, it's not? You're saying everyone who makes a bet on anything is doing so compulsively? Literally everyone has bet on something. The absolutely overwhelming majority of "bets" placed (via whatever definition you want to give them) are basically benign and don't reflect mental illness.

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.

tsimionescu6• 4 months ago

This is said with very high authority, and nothing whatsoever to back it up. Sure, not all, nor even the majority, nor even the plurality or a large minority of gamblers resort to criminal behavior.

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?

ajross4• 4 months ago

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.

ratg13• 4 months ago

One has to wonder if the people placing these bets didn’t have some plans of their own.

A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.

bitmasher93• 4 months ago

A million dollars is high stakes, but not extremely high. We’ve seen much much higher wagers.

giarc• 4 months ago

Iran could fund their war by manipulating these markets.

bhouston3• 4 months ago

An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely to control the narrative:

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.

MiddleEndian2• 4 months ago

I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.

bhouston3• 4 months ago

Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?

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.

WarmWash• 4 months ago

The effect of this is that those markets should dry up as the information quality is so poor. So bad that even insiders are taking risk by betting on an outcome.

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.

worldsavior• 4 months ago

What censorship does Israel do?

bhouston3• 4 months ago

Check the article linked in that comment.

gzread14• 4 months ago

I guess for a start they won't let me view this article with a VPN on.

fsckboy3• 4 months ago

Israel does military censorship, same as any other country, you can't communicate information that would harm the defense of the country or aid its enemies. Israel is in a hostile and armed neighborhood with frequent hot conflicts, both regular military and irregular forces, so the issue is fairly everpresent compared to other Western style democracies such as in Europe where their neighbors are peaceful.

caminante13• 4 months ago

Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines.

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

Bender4• 4 months ago

    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

HN also forces editorializing to less than 81 characters. I too sometimes struggle to editorialize the title to something that fits and ideally does not lose context.

caminante13• 4 months ago

Fair point.

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.

user982• 4 months ago

That original headline is longer than what HN accepts. What editorialized message are you accusing the shorter "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story" of inserting?

caminante13• 4 months ago

For starters, no mention of re-write option. The HN headline makes me assume pre-emptive death threats instead of escalation over dialogue to re-write.

tantalor• 4 months ago

Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.

caminante13• 4 months ago

You're saying that after having read the article.

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.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r2• 4 months ago

I’d suggest that you brush up on HN character limits before playing hall monitor.

caminante13• 4 months ago

How'd you get to here and miss all of the discussion?

logicallee• 4 months ago

This part of the story stood out for me:

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?

htrp• 4 months ago

isn't this basically the crypto oracle problem?

dandanua• 4 months ago

Yes, and BTW this problem is another proof that crypto doesn't solve any of the real world issues apart from avoiding (very natural) institutional regulations.

iamacyborg6• 4 months ago

I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).

snowwrestler• 4 months ago

Alan Kay had a great quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” A quote that many technologists and inventors have used as inspiration over the years as they create things.

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.

_wire_• 4 months ago

When "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is combined with crime it seems clear that betting on crime is acting as an accessory. A business facilitating betting on crime is a criminal enterprise, in the sense of RICO.

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.

EcommerceFlow• 4 months ago

Same thing has been happening with sports bets for years, this particular point (threats) isn't unique to political betting.

Pay0812• 4 months ago

Good news, Polymarket also does sports betting, but since it's a "prediction market", it's not covered by gambling laws.

pindab0ter• 4 months ago

I think time and time again that incentives are most important in determining how a market and by extension a society behaves. These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.

These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.

bagacrap6• 4 months ago

Technically you can't bet on the demise of a person, at least in the US, as participants recently discovered when the previous supreme leader of Iran was killed and their "leadership change" bet did not pay out.

thrance2• 4 months ago

There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.

ptsneves• 4 months ago

This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..

loeg5• 4 months ago

Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though, arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).

[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.

scoofy15• 4 months ago

These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.

Just call it gambling. They aren't "prediction markets," they're just gambling. Gambling incentivizes the absolute worst in humanity.

fritzo2• 4 months ago

We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction. We're talking about gambling as big players paying participants to throw fights, paying referees to call shots, and the players are the real world and the referees are journalists.

Invictus05• 4 months ago

That's fundamentally wrong

arcticfox• 4 months ago

I used to be pro-betting legalization and now I see the light. It is a corrosive influence On everything it touches. I hope there's another opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle.

cybernoodles• 4 months ago

I feel like we need a new word for this because it is far worse than gambling when you can effectively put a hit on someone.

impjohn• 4 months ago

Then this person better bet their entire life savings on them dying, since it would reduce incentive (profit). Crazy thought experiment, gave me lots to think about

hashstring• 4 months ago

If there’s something that screams late-stage capitalism any louder, I don’t want it…

throw48472852• 4 months ago

I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.

gopher_space3• 4 months ago

Delphi markets feature prominently in Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It's an important book, and Brunner is amazing if you've never read him before.

He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.

throw48472852• 4 months ago

I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in before getting distracted by something else. I should give Brunner another shot.

nvader• 4 months ago

Look everyone, this person believes talking Tortoises are real!

In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?

porridgeraisin• 4 months ago

The Economic Times, an Indian English-language business-focused news site

God help those using this newspaper as their source for betting

AlexandrB2• 4 months ago

Prediction markets remind of the "Safety Training" episode[1] of the Office where Kevin and others are betting on the outcome of various situations. It was pretty funny and absurd back then. Didn't expect it to be so prescient.

[1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Safety_Training

sharp_runner_843• 4 months ago

this was kind of inevitable once prediction markets got large enough. when traders have millions in open positions on geopolitical events, they have direct financial incentive to suppress or promote specific narratives. same dynamic as short sellers attacking companies, but applied to real-world events instead of stocks. the whole prediction market thesis assumes information flows freely into prices — breaks down when participants start trying to influence the information itself

jacquesm8• 4 months ago

the whole prediction market thesis assumes information flows freely into prices — breaks down when participants start trying to influence the information itself

How naive can you possibly be...

sharp_runner_843• 4 months ago

lol fair enough, naive is a strong word but yeah i get your point. i didnt mean nobody tries to manipulate markets — obviously they do. my point was more that the original thesis behind prediction markets assumed this would be a minor problem because the financial incentive to correct misinformation would outweigh the incentive to create it. turns out thats not always true when you can make more money threatening a journalist than trading the actual contract

phkahler• 4 months ago

The pull quote "The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings" misses something. If the reporter changes his story, then the people on the other side of the bet might start harassing him. OTOH individual betters anger will depend which side of the odds they're on.

bagacrap6• 4 months ago

Also that journalists are paid for their work, often by someone with political interests, so they are already subject to pressure to modify their reporting. Hopefully not usually threats of violence though!

Terr_11• 4 months ago

I think this is way worse. Traditionally violence towards journalists comes from (A) predictable entities and (B) they are curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.

In contrast:

1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.

2. The violence can arrive from all sides, simultaneously. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one way to ensure an existing report is not revised is to put the journalist out of commission.

3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, with a new bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"

ordu• 4 months ago

It is a sad story, showing why all these bright ideas about using hive-mind to predict a future are not going to work. It is sad, and I can feel the author worries, but still I want to laugh. It was so fucking predictable and prediction markets didn't predict it.

alkonaut2• 4 months ago

So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet heavily myself if I were the reporter.

OutOfHere4• 4 months ago

There exists a sensible way to handle this. It is to require at least three independent news outlet reports of an event (as defined in the bet).

A related issue is that war news is heavily censored in Israel; it's difficult for news outlets to report it.

bagacrap6• 4 months ago

Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.

inerte• 4 months ago

It's also hard to have 3 independent outlets report on all the thing.s This seems like a small story that only some people in Polymarket cared about I guess? It's not like 3 different news outlets were calling authorities to confirm what really happened here. It wasn't big enough to deserve more than 1 journalist going to the source and doing all this work.

maxerickson• 4 months ago

And the people taking the other side of the bets. You have to kind of be a fool to take an anonymous bet with an outcome that can more or less be chosen.

banannaise2• 4 months ago

If you can keep the public misinformed for long enough, you can gradually sell off your position instead of losing the whole bet.

postexitus• 4 months ago

Not even that. It is settling a bet on voting. But you are taking a bet on voting on the right side of the outcome. This is independent on the actual bet - this is outcome voting. You make very little money if you vote on correct outcome, and lose a lot if you vote on wrong outcome. So there is an incentive on voting on correct outcome.

https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...

fer2• 4 months ago

Not going to defend Polymarket, but that's usually the case for markets that should never existed that depend heavily on opinion and/or reporting.

For example, "Will Trump talk Macron before 31 of March?". Someone is going to get scammed no matter what: the market rules will set some basic resolution scenarios, but you'll find sources saying it was a letter, or sources several countries and in several languages saying that it was an exchange between their offices/assistants, or smoke signals, or god knows what, while a single US source will say they talked without any further detail, or it is simply reported 1 month after the fact when the money has long moved wallets, and then people vote based on the combination of factoids they've been exposed to. In principle the perverse incentive of voting wrong to earn money will make you lose money on the UMA itself (unless there's a coordinated effort, which has already happened, but IME it's rather rare).

Other markets are indisputable bar black swan events, like, "how many Oscars will X win", if it's 6 it's 6 and no source will say 5 or 7. That makes opening disputes 100% a money-losing option.

evklein2• 4 months ago

I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the same time:

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.

dbspin• 4 months ago

Unfortunately what you're describing is precisely the opposite of the meaning of 'democratised'. A more accurate term would be commoditised. In this case the capacity to manipulate events becomes as tied to wealth as it is to access to information.

evklein2• 4 months ago

Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.

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?

alistairSH• 4 months ago

We're sort of already there... there were several reports about massive "wins" in these "markets" on betting on the day the US would strike Iran.

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.

recursivedoubts• 4 months ago

Sooner or later a college athlete is gonna get killed for missing a shot.

Freedom ain't free I guess.

dlenski7• 4 months ago

Yes. Or for making a shot.

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.

elicash3• 4 months ago

Related to your comment, see Nate Silver's take on the NBA gambling scandal.

"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...

Lliora• 4 months ago

Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48 hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent: above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.

eek21212• 4 months ago

Definitely an unpopular opinion: The whole with the internet is anonymity. Keep in mind, I support an anonymous internet, however, political interests, corporate interests, hate groups, etc. are all using it to undermine society.

Example: When Twitter ("X") suddenly started showing the locations of accounts, a lot of folks with MAGA talking points were shown to be anywhere except the U.S. Accounts with millions of followers and tons of influence have never even set foot in the U.S.

Another Example: Polymarket (not the "US" one) is anonymous. Because of this, events like the headline talks about happens. Certain government leaders worldwide could easily be seeding the bets, and playing the market, and you would never know.

Anonymity is nice, however, it is being taken advantage of for power plays. This is why we can't have nice things.

ubj• 4 months ago

There was an interesting article in the Atlantic recently where a journalist spent a year participating in sports gambling. Part of the article discusses the effect it had on his psychology towards participants he had put his money on.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...

Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.

gcr5• 4 months ago

Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator is a great game, I highly recommend it to anyone in this thread.

It opens with a content warning saying that the player will likely become very angry at least once when a baby who you are financially incentivized to watch crash and burn pulls their life together, and that's okay.

I appreciate that they're explicitly covering this psychological phenomenon.

emsign3• 4 months ago

Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia!!!

banannaise2• 4 months ago

I would expect a dramatic rise in things like this, because they can be (1) monetized, and (2) scaled.

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.

RevEng• 4 months ago

The same thing already happens with the stock market.

GolfPopper• 4 months ago

Why is everyone assuming at face value that the threats are actually coming from gamblers, and not from the Israeli government trying to downplay the domestic impact of the war?

tptacek• 4 months ago

Probably because it's 100% par for the course for online betting, unless you think it's Israel sending death threats to French tennis players for blowing people's prop bets.

Pay0812• 4 months ago

I've seen crazier conspiracy theories...

andrewflnr• 4 months ago

Because that's a silly idea. When missiles are flying over people's heads and everyone is running into bomb shelters, Israel would get approximately no benefit from nitpicking a single story, certainly not enough to justify a harassment campaign involving lots of people with cover stories. On the other hand, gamblers have a very concrete motivation and a long history of doing unhinged things to get it. There's no reason to look for depth.

litoE• 4 months ago

Because it's in the Israeli government's interest to make the threat from Iran look bigger, rather than smaller?

Pay0812• 4 months ago

You could reasonably argue that both are in their interest, and which one they choose to push is down to a decision. The war already has popular support in Israel (last time I checked, the quoted number was 86% in support) so the government wouldn't gain all that much from extra fearmongering, especially with the messaging coming from the Iranian government.

eknkc• 4 months ago

I believe this is the bet in question: https://polymarket.com/event/iran-strikes-israel-on

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..

nusl3• 4 months ago

Polymarket and similar platforms are a cancer and need to be shut down. This is an early symptom of something that will become much, much worse in an increasing manner. Stories like these make more people aware of the platform, adding users and further degrading humanity.

tootie• 4 months ago

It's gambling which has been a bane forever. It poisoned the NBA even before the internet.

padjo• 4 months ago

It's far worse than regular gambling

nusl3• 4 months ago

People are getting death threats for writing news articles as part of their job. How is this comparable?

logicchains4• 4 months ago

It's impossible to shut them down without implementing completely totalitarian internet controls that would make even the Chinese government blush. That's the nature of the defi ecosystem.

danny_codes4• 4 months ago

Making them illegal is perfectly sufficient. Underground gambling has always existed, it’s just not accessible so few people do it. A couple high profile convictions for criminals like the polymarket guy should help to limit bad actors

ccppurcell• 4 months ago

Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate a poly market bet by 2040.

kahrl• 4 months ago

Already happened.

Zambyte3• 4 months ago

Source?

awakeasleep• 4 months ago

I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there was no safe course of action for the journalist because there was money on both sides of this outcome.

No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.

ntonozzi• 4 months ago

Perhaps because he is a journalist whose job is to report reality, not avoid threats?

bigyabai• 4 months ago

Avoiding threats is non-optional for most Israeli journalists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor

abracadaniel• 4 months ago

Until they start trying the carrot instead of the stick. Then it becomes a bidding war to determine the "reality"

munificent• 4 months ago

I feel like being a journalist in a warzone is already exposure to a sufficient number of threats for the benefit of human society that we shouldn't simply accept them being exposed to any entirely different set of completely unnecessary threats from a pile of sociopaths running their own sick gambling dead pools.

heisenbit• 4 months ago

No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.

That is why modern reportings best practice is to always support both sides. /s

hattmall• 4 months ago

Defer to an actual authority. Where is the official report on whether or not it was an interception? Even with a large explosion the fact that it landed in a wooded area implies it was intercepted. Those are targeted missiles, an acceptable result of an interception is to bring it down in an undeveloped area.

So I would think there should be some sort of authority with official capacity to state what happened, not just a random journalist that doesn't give concrete sources.

Pay0812• 4 months ago

Iranians primarily use rockets, not missiles. It's perfectly possible, even likely, that said rocket just missed. If you read the article, the journalist did actually say he had a military source...

smadge• 4 months ago

I found it interesting that the bettors who threatened the journalist accused him of being motivated to manipulate the market. The journalist was motivated to report honestly, the bettors were the one trying to manipulate the market by changing the reporting.

keeda• 4 months ago

Conspiracy theory: the missile hit an unpopulated area. Would it have been possible for someone in charge of intercepting incoming missiles to have been in on this bet? I know these things are automated, because human control would be too slow... but I wonder if there's an angle here. Won't be the first time someone on the inside made money on classified Israeli plans: https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-indicted-for-using-classif...

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 ;-)

unstyledcontent• 4 months ago

I don't know the case of this particular situation, but its certainly plausible that people will make decisions based on trying to secure a certain bet outcome. The prediction markets are clearly not a passive presence...

gus_massa3• 4 months ago

My unsupported non-conspiracy opinion:

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.

dlenski7• 4 months ago

(A) is extremely plausible. It is well-known that Iron Dome specifically avoided targeting rockets for interception when they not going to land in areas with people or infrastructure.

The main reason for this is because the interceptors are very scarce and costly.

null_deref• 4 months ago

Not a conspiracy theory, IDF official policy is to not use interceptors when the missile is confirmed by calculations to hit unpopulated areas. (This calculation does not work for every type of missile or on every occasion)

emsign3• 4 months ago

The gamblers would have had a much easier time convincing a journalism LLMs that their article was "a lie".

hermitcrab• 4 months ago

Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.

derangedHorse3• 4 months ago

Reminiscent of Jim Bell and his idea for an assassination market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell

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.

JohnMakin2• 4 months ago

This is a major example why we can't have these things, unfortunately. It sucks because they can be powerful tools, but you're never going to be able to fully police this behavior as one of these platforms.

danny_codes4• 4 months ago

Gambling has a heavy association with criminality. By allowing open gambling we must also accept the externalities.

Or we could, you know, not legalize gambling.

JohnMakin2• 4 months ago

I do not think it is so clear cut as legalize/not legalize. Current legislation often doesn't even consider this gambling - however, even if you took the viewpoint that making it illegal helps, you then have to accept the externalities that arise - crime rings will develop that offer the services, and now their users are criminals and completely vulnerable to any amount of bad/malicious practices there.

squibonpig• 4 months ago

To be fair gambling, like criminality, has been illegal. Similar to mobs running speakeasies.

sam0x1711• 4 months ago

I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"

geor9e3• 4 months ago

Surely I am misreading what you mean here. But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10. I'll search the space of other interpretations in the mean time, but if you could help me out here and clarify…

sam0x1711• 4 months ago

I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The problem with prediction markets that has been talked about for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines the outcome not the other way around

derangedHorse3• 4 months ago

But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10

I don't know how you extrapolated that from the parent's comment. It literally said nothing about the cause and effect of this particular event.

Knowing the odds in a prediction market IS a big part of the problem brought up in the linked article though (and the bets themselves). Knowing how much can be made from being right creates an upper-bound on what a financially-rational malicious actor will spend in trying to change the outcome.

asdff3• 4 months ago

Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting, at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on. Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going into a free agency period.

This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge.

https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...

LeifCarrotson• 4 months ago

I was confused as well: After further consideration, I realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and credibly reports on those events and their resolution criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg. national militaries.

"Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel’s military correspondent or other credible sources reports that Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money.

In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully, your worst crime is publishing a fictional news article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened.

Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks", where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the Internet through another financial instrument.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rul...

malfist• 4 months ago

Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or payout?

TimTheTinker2• 4 months ago

A lot of people habitually make bets out of addiction without thinking carefully about the expected payoff.

mathgeek• 4 months ago

Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing them don’t know or care about the odds.

gcr5• 4 months ago

One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This only works if your intuition is better than the market's current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any particular knowledge.

bandrami• 4 months ago

That's how pari mutuel betting works; the odds are set by the bettors betting and unknown until the book closes.

That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.

Legend24402• 4 months ago

but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes

This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets, where you can get information about the probability of an event based on how much people are betting on it.

sam0x1711• 4 months ago

I mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.

andai2• 4 months ago

outcome shaping markets

I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations.

When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the bet by default.

Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to wonder about the model itself.

I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it. (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get divided between them for prototypes.)

For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your wallet.

Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope they will launch something you're interested in. But what if you could push?

I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people actually do know what they want.

And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in government as well.

jacquesm8• 4 months ago

You are describing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

bluGill• 4 months ago

Kickstarter exists. The real problem is most things cost more than the average person should dare risk. Some widget today is worth more than the same tommorow. Most people should not back your eink laptop even though if it existed they would pay more for it.

masklinn2• 4 months ago

Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors.

polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran https://www.npr.org/2026/03/01/nx-s1-5731568/polymarket-trad...

ciaranmca• 4 months ago

I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market of validated ideas and could submit a ‘bid’ before a set deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best product.

hcs• 4 months ago

But what if you could push?

There are a number of so-called "bounty" programs like this for software, I don't know how well any of them work.

bpp• 4 months ago

If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?

sporkland• 4 months ago

I assume a lot of people don't know the fundamental odds of something happening but have a vague sense on if Mr. Market has gone bananas or not.

janalsncm• 4 months ago

That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.

arduanika8• 4 months ago

Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true:

Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems.

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.

necovek• 4 months ago

Problem intrinsic to gambling is that people appropriate expected winnings instead of what they really put in, thus making the feeling of loss even greater than what it objectively is.

sam0x1711• 4 months ago

The problem in the article is sort of boring, this is nothing new, centralized authorities who run prediction markets have been doing a terrible job at wording the predictions and then people get pissed when those poorly written words are put through a forcing function. Incompetence is boring.

dlenski7• 4 months ago

This doesn't make any sense…

If you want to bet on a binary outcome without knowing how much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes, that's a bookie, not a prediction market.

The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and credible way.

(And that's even before we get to the fact that any kind of betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize outcomes like the death threats reported here.)

sam0x1711• 4 months ago

You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome

I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad

Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough

ActorNightly• 4 months ago

Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should exist on websites that are publicly accessible.

If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of the type of people who make death threats to journalists.

patcon• 4 months ago

Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community.

I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there

bethekidyouwant• 4 months ago

“who decides” whether a fact is true or not - Apparently, this is an unsolved problem. Also, I’m curious, who actually decides in this case? Someone who works at Polly market, who is immune to propaganda no doubt?

Legend24402• 4 months ago

No, they have a decentralized crypto-based system where people propose a resolution to the bet, then token holders vote.

https://docs.polymarket.com/concepts/resolution

waffletower8• 4 months ago

[flagged]

slashdev• 4 months ago

There are lots of bets on Polymarket about when certain politicians cease to be the leader of the country. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Mojtaba Khamenei, Zelensky, etc. If they die, those markets are resolved in a predictable way. Death pools already exist, and it's a matter of time before we see an assassination attempt motivated by it.

waffletower8• 4 months ago

It is a lot simpler and fairer to tax payers, due to high litigation costs, to simply make adhoc SaaS betting, as Polymarket provides, illegal. Why should tax payers have to pay for the regulation costs and, more broadly, society pay for the obvious disruption vectors arising from arbitrary speculation?

littlestymaar• 4 months ago

We're already seeing “insider gambling” from the current administration so I'm pretty convinced we'll see assassinations motivated by polymarket gains alone soon enough.

jacquesm8• 4 months ago

We could gamble on when Polymarket's operators die.

blurbleblurble3• 4 months ago

This comment is art

kqr5• 4 months ago

If I propose odds based on US insurance life tables for people of their age and gender, which side of the bet would you like to take?

Terr_11• 4 months ago

Or whether the company will fail or have a bad IPO.

SamBam• 4 months ago

How about something that they would see more as a genuine threat?

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%.

scoofy15• 4 months ago

Look, it's not the point your making, but Adam Smith was not a laissez-faire capitalist. If you want to do the "capitalism bad" thing, I would suggest learning a bit of history, or at least understand that the "laissez-faire" in laissez-faire capitalism is a political ideology, not an economic ideology.

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.

waffletower8• 4 months ago

Pendantry -- unhelpful and qualitative particularly when we largely agree -- as you clearly reveal in your 2nd paragraph.

jkaplowitz• 4 months ago

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.

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.

crystal_revenge2• 4 months ago

And "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", does not mean "you can do anything you want", it's much, much closer in meaning to the famous quote from the Upanishads (Crowley largely felt that much of esoterism was basically, as Dion Fortune put it "Yoga of the West"):

“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.

nickburns2• 4 months ago

Excuse my ignorance if otherwise obvious—but how does legalized but untaxed gambling raise any public revenue? Bookie licensing?

casey23• 4 months ago

Name one (1) human activity in your opinion that isn't bad for society

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

beepbooptheory2• 4 months ago

Small nit but you probably don't mean to say that you are a "capitalist" here, even if you maybe own some significant capital. Not because its wrong, but it's not what your trying to appeal to (ideological commitment). A "capitalist" can believe in anything really, they are such by virtue of their relation to the overall economy. Its kinda like saying "I'm a digestor of food" instead of "a patron of restaurants."

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.

db48x• 4 months ago

… libertine …

Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.

notepad0x903• 4 months ago

On one hand, it isn't all that different than derivatives and other established securities. On the other, the extremes of gambling are deterimental.

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!

swid• 4 months ago

I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match...

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.

rescripting• 4 months ago

Athletes (both college and professional) frequently receive threats from sports betters. Since the betting apps let you make specific wagers such as whether a specific player will make more than 6 three pointers in a game the harassment can become quite targeted.

blacksmith_tb3• 4 months ago

Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce things many people might benefit from (how well that works is another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely positive to them. Imagine if your next door neighbor dropped a cash-filled envelope that you found - lucky you? And if that was your neighbor's rent money? Like a lot of scams, the 'value' is only accrued by fleecing rubes, and it also creates a new class of super-bookies, which also not positive.

mr_toad2• 4 months ago

libertine

I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.

rectang2• 4 months ago

Dollars to donuts that "libertine" was just as deliberate as the "satanic" that followed it.

unmole2• 4 months ago

Adam Smith's libertine

What on earth does this even mean?!

gac23• 4 months ago

For some reason people tend to forget the most important part of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", I guess it because the words "Love is the law, love under will" doesn't sound satanic enough. If you take the time to actually read some of his material you'll be surprised how much he (the 'satanist' Crowley) talks about God and angels (as positive forces).

westk01• 4 months ago

They won't understand friend.

Imustaskforhelp3• 4 months ago

Adam Smith's libertine didn't allow the concept of rent-seeking entities. It sure as well wouldn't allow polymarket gamblers

"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...

Dylan1680710• 4 months ago

I can understand how you would call inside traders rent seekers. I don't understand the connection for some guy betting a hundred bucks. What's "parasitic" about the median person on the site?

(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?)

zeckalpha• 4 months ago

Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets misrepresented.

waffletower8• 4 months ago

It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalism instead of invoking his name.

casey23• 4 months ago

Yes famous libertine Adam Smith, up there with Marquis de Sade and Ami Perrin

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?

jakelazaroff• 4 months ago

I don't think "regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans" is the logical conclusion of "prediction markets incentivize antisocial behavior".

WillPostForFood2• 4 months ago

Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and criticized state run gambling.

"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."

aerhardt2• 4 months ago

Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral philosopher first and an accidental economist second.

zymhan• 4 months ago

There are far better examples they could use.

waffletower8• 4 months ago

I do take Adam Smith out of context, that is the precise point -- the invisible hand of self-interest is the salient idea that has endured and shaped modern Hypercapitalism. It doesn't matter if he is rolling in his grave at audio frequencies due to my and, more importantly, society's alleged misappropriation of his work and misunderstanding of his many moral considerations. He was effectively soundbited centuries ago and we are still struggling to manage the implications. Saying he was a good guy makes it more difficult to fix the problem.

frereubu• 4 months ago

There's a great podcast about Adam Smith here, debunking some of those oversimplifications: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-with-...

braiamp• 4 months ago

It's funny as a economist people thinking that the free market is some kind of god, that the invisible hand is infallible. He never argued markets work without institutions. He believed governments must enforce justice, prevent monopolies, and provide public goods for markets to function properly.

_doctor_love• 4 months ago

I don't know you, but I do know that you haven't studied Adam Smith.

edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.

noname123• 4 months ago

My apologist response would be that Polymarket isn’t the root cause—it’s more of a mirror. It simply makes the incentives and speculation already present in late-stage capitalism more transparent and accessible for anyone to participate in.

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?

lokar3• 4 months ago

I don't think it is a mirror, quite the opposite. I think most Americans (and probably europeans?) think a lot of this is in fact very bad, and should be stopped.

The problem is that our lawmakers are not mirroring what the voters want.

kortilla• 4 months ago

I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments.

This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.

Manuel_D2• 4 months ago

People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting on the outcome of the war, but in practice they are.

eek21212• 4 months ago

Hard disagree. In most countries, you can not anonymously trade stocks, for starters, where you can anonymously bet on Polymarket.

thephyber• 4 months ago

Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.

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).

TZubiri2• 4 months ago

Pretty sure that discussion was had in the 20s. What emerged was a securities regulation system with rules and prohibitions built on the mission of productive companies and positive-sum games.

Polymarket also bets on sports games and wars which makes it a categorically different market from a regulatory perspective.

arduanika8• 4 months ago

This is a serious news story that should be concerning to all sides, including people who are generally pro-markets. Thus, I wish that we had produced a top comment that was critical of Polymarket without being deranged. (Libertine? Adam Smith for totally unfettered markets? Satanic?)

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.

sam0x1711• 4 months ago

Polymarket being an incompetent cabal that doesn't deserve to have a license is so passe, so ingrained in the standard recurring narrative that comes up whenever prediction markets are mentioned, and so universally agreed upon at this point that it frankly isn't that interesting to a lot of people. We all agree with it already, there is no one left to convince, certainly not on this site, better to talk about more interesting things that are nevertheless related. It's, well, boring, and this is exactly why a comment like this wasn't the top comment. I'm not saying a comment like this wouldn't be true, it would, it just isn't going to be a top comment, and that fact is unsurprising. I do share your sentiment though, that it would have been nice if human attention worked slightly differently here, but it does not.

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.

throwaway27448• 4 months ago

Calling Adam Smith a libertine is beyond insane

triceratops3• 4 months ago

Yeah I wonder if they meant libertarian.

triceratops3• 4 months ago

Did you actually mean libertine or libertarian? I'm extremely confused.

singleshot_• 4 months ago

Inventing Assassination Markets in 2026, not bad.

obirunda• 4 months ago

The problem is that you are identifying a symptom of an ongoing societal moral decline with an economic system. Spend some time on Dostoevsky or Kant. When morality is solely based on our current nationalism/hedonism hybrid in the West you end up at these extreme morally dubious exploits whether in a free or autocratic society. I don't claim to know what can help society become more ethical. What do you propose will improve society's ethical foundations? It's often the case that staunch critics of a system or another don't usually have much to offer in terms of ethics, they pontificate in favor or counter a given system without exploring whether society's ethics dwell on shaky foundations, they spend a lot of time talking about the technicalities, the merits of this or that implementations when in reality all societies whose ethical foundations crater, do not recover their ethics through policy reform alone.

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.

bluegatty• 4 months ago

"ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"),

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.

insane_dreamer• 4 months ago

Polymarkets should be banned altogether or as highly regulated as casinos.

asdff3• 4 months ago

Wait until you find out the most profitable casinos are on reservation land not subject to state gaming regulation. Polymarket might consider a similar play.

Daves• 4 months ago

A reminder that Donald Trump Jr is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket (with his firm also investing in Polymarket).

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.

masklinn2• 4 months ago

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.

Eufrat• 4 months ago

I mean, all of these behaviors:

- 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.

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.

The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.

My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.

The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.

Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.

derf_• 4 months ago

Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this.

There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/40.11

[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9183-26

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

Yeah, regulations are only as strong as the consequences given those who break them.

If people can threaten journalists for money and get away with it, they will. If people who threaten journalists over money are sent to prison, then after a brief transition period it will mostly stop.

thayne3• 4 months ago

Seems like bets on missile strikes would violate that...

gepiti• 4 months ago

What happens if someone bets on a terrorist attack in an unlikely place and then puts the bomb himself? This can turn ugly very easily.

rtkwe3• 4 months ago

At least with sports betting it's limited in scope. Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or players are altering their play to make or break bets but ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited. And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly impossible to enforce.

Barbing• 4 months ago

Was I a sucker for believing that Kalshi was going to [e.g.] help farmers hedge against drought years or is the problem just morally bankrupt selection of events?

gettingoverit2• 4 months ago

The word "Polymarket" can be replaced by "market" there.

Global market is just the largest gambling venue. Always has been. No amount of "monitoring" and "leagues" will keep people from going Boeing whistleblower way.

bnlxbnlx• 4 months ago

there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.

not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating each others' humanity.

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

I honestly don't know what your point is. The best I can come up with is:

"The whole point of sports (in my opinion) is X good thing therefore betting on sports is more acceptable"

Making bets on good things doesn't make the betting better. Just because Polymarket would allow you to bet money that the infant homicide rate goes down next year, doesn't mean it's a good thing to allow betting on.

alephnerd• 4 months ago

I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
Strong regulation and legal consequences...

Functionally, you are correct.

But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.

Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.

It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/little-tech-startup...

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

Which is of course a blatant abuse of our legal system, since they are doing nothing different than a casino's roulette or blackjack tables.

"Red futures pay out at 2:1!"

"Get your future here on whether the dealer's cards are higher than your own!"

lordnacho4• 4 months ago

Banning it sends it underground into the hands of organised crime, which will still have access to modern technology.

There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.

Eisenstein• 4 months ago

We should definitely ban advertising it.

joks• 4 months ago

It was only a few years ago that sports betting was significantly more heavily regulated and limited, and stuff like Polymarket didn't exist (just non-monetary forecasting sites like Metaculus.) Even if there was more demand for "underground gambling" before these changes, the net negative to society was still significantly less.

tyg13• 4 months ago

This is only true if people's want for it exceeds their want to not break the law.

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.

afthonos• 4 months ago

As someone who at first embraced the idea of prediction markets and is now ambivalent, sending them underground vastly reduces their harm. First, because discoverability is an issue. Second, there will be much less liquidity. Third, any gains will have to be laundered or hidden, making it even more difficult.

Maybe prediction markets are net positives, or maybe regulating them will make them so, but banning them does resolve most of their negative effects.

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

Maybe we dedicate specific buildings to gambling, so it's legal, regulated, and localized. Call it a "casino".

triceratops3• 4 months ago

We can ban online betting and betting advertising though. If you want to bet on ponies go to a racetrack. No apps, no phones.

mikkupikku3• 4 months ago

Underground is where it belongs. The less visible it is to the general public, the fewer people will be drawn into it. And it being taken over by organized crime is just another way of saying that law enforcement will be able to make arrests and throw them in prison, which they can't effectively do if it's being run legally.

holmesworcester• 4 months ago

If it becomes commonplace for existing prediction markets to get undermined by this kind of manipulation, won't that just be an opportunity for people to create better prediction markets that are less vulnerable to manipulation?

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?

gzread14• 4 months ago

If those prediction markets are patronised by people who want to manipulate it, what drives customers to the new ones?

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.

ashtonshears• 4 months ago

Perhaps, we overestimate the capabilities of capital markets

basilikum• 4 months ago

Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

I wouldn't say one in the last decade is "tons of people"

asddubs• 4 months ago

Yeah, sports betting is also bad. I guess polymarket casts a wider net, and the fact that everything is fair game means you cannot avoid hearing about it

onion2k2• 4 months ago

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.

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.

b112• 4 months ago

Things are not black and white, clear cut, absolutes.

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.

quantified2• 4 months ago

Ah, the old "let's not have gun control, criminals can always find a gun" again. Except that when there are fewer guns around it is manifestly harder for more criminals to find.

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.

plomme• 4 months ago

The existence of incentives can encourage crime. Why would anyone throw a game if there wasn't an upside? Nobody does anything for "free", and by creating a market you are providing liquidity leading to more "labor". A market for whether or not someone will die within x date sets up a financial incentive to kill that person. That is encouragement.

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.

kbrkbr3• 4 months ago

Ban it on which grounds?

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

surgical_fire2• 4 months ago

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.

derbOac• 4 months ago

I generally share the same perspective but the article provides a good rationale for doing otherwise.

throwawayffffas• 4 months ago

As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.

They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.

animal531• 4 months ago

Yeah, but unfortunately its probably going to keep going until people actually die before they will be stopped.

esalman• 4 months ago

The Good Work channel on YouTube did a really good video on this topic recently- https://youtu.be/mOptJl8Xkx0?si=4jyNnXweXp7V9VkM

In a nutshell, these platforms operate by classifying their bets as 'futures contracts' with 'meaningful real world economic consequences' rather than traditional gambling, allowing them to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than stricter state gambling laws.

It's going to take strong push from lawmakers to close the loophole, and even stronger push from the platforms to stop anything meaningful being done.

croes• 4 months ago

I think there is a fundamental difference between betting on a sports event and on a war.

margalabargala13• 4 months ago

What would that difference be?

blurbleblurble3• 4 months ago

Polymarket heads think they're so smart as they simultaneously reveal a total lack of awareness about feedback loops.

kqr5• 4 months ago

Many of the comments in this discussion remind me of that Rothchild analysis in the second half of the 1800s when France had problems with a revolution.

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.

bhickey• 4 months ago

This has nothing to do with opposing gambling. It has everything to do with, say, opposing gamblers poisoning horses to win bets.

cbluth• 4 months ago

You applied the razor very well here.

There will always be a market.

arduanika8• 4 months ago

Surely you can see the difference between dealing in a legitimate asset like a government bond, which requires a market of buyers and sellers, versus this new extraneous layer of prediction contracts, where the only defensible economic purpose is some weak information signal.

mikkupikku3• 4 months ago

Gambling is degenerate and inclined to cause crime and criminal behavior. Ban this shit already, decriminalization of gambling is a failed experiment.

elicash3• 4 months ago

Here's what a spokesperson for Polymarket said:

"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/polymarket-bett...

(I'd prefer if it said they were evaluating whether to limit the types of bets accepted to make the possibility of harassing journalists less likely.)

JumpCrisscross3• 4 months ago

whether to limit the types of bets accepted

Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats concentrating around certain bet genres?

elicash3• 4 months ago

Yes in sports. NCAA is trying to specifically get player prop bets banned in part because they are more likely not just to be corrupt, but also they specifically mention player safety.

https://www.ncaa.org/news/2026/1/15/media-center-ncaa-urges-...

I linked this elsewhere, but I found Nate Silver's take interesting here. He specifically takes on the problem of player prop bets and says they produce abusive behavior toward players.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...

I think it's reasonable to research if there's some equivalent to player prop bets in other contexts, like anything that might hinge on what a reporter writes. There's the safety angle and there's also just the "more likely to be corrupted" angle. Like I said in my original comment, I'd just like them to evaluate this.

mayneack2• 4 months ago

"this violates our TOS" is a classic Accountability Sink. "Polymarket has a rule against harassment, so we obviously did all we could!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

abixb• 4 months ago

Looks like a fantastic book at the outset. Thanks for the suggestion.

foobarish• 4 months ago

Polymarket should do the right thing. Unfortunately that means shut down entirely.

Thoreandan• 4 months ago

This reminds me of the 9/11-era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".

ryoshu• 4 months ago

I have a theory that prediction markets will becomes hyperstition engines. This is a rather... violent example.

aussiegreenie• 4 months ago

Australians gamble more than anyone on Earth but the idea that people "invest" huge money, whether or not missiles explode in a country at war is crazy.

It was said Australians would bet on two flies climbing up a wall. But this is madness.

kkfx• 4 months ago

That's the limit of smart-contracts: they can't know the real world, so they depend on "Oracles"/external sources who can be corrupted or coerced, and so even if the foundation is guaranteed in the code, what the code uses as a reference is not...

coppsilgold• 4 months ago

At the time of the threats the odds were likely very skewed, as in over 99% to one side.

For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.

Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value>

mvdtnz• 4 months ago

Most people on Polymarket are gamblers

Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.

LoganDark• 4 months ago

Some people are insiders though.

November_Echo• 4 months ago

I think they mean "most people are gamblers _who_ have no idea what they're doing"

Dylan1680710• 4 months ago

If a casino sets up a normal roulette wheel but pays out red at 1.5x and black at 2.5x, betting 5% of your bankroll on black over and over is "gambling" but it's not "gambling", if you get what I'm saying.

QuantumNoodle• 4 months ago

Still no idea how a polymarket is legal with all the insider trading opportunities.

Etheryte2• 4 months ago

Insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft. If you insider trade on the stock market then, in a crude simplification, you steal profits from the company you have a fiduciary duty to, or some extension of that. It has nothing to do with a level playing ground, every trading company out there is trying to find information others can't and then trade on it.

LadyCailin• 4 months ago

What? How do you figure that? If I happen to know that my company is about to report very bad quarterly numbers, so I sell all my stock, then it tanks, I’ve just screwed whoever bought the stock, that in the most cases, will be some random people. The company does not benefit or hurt from stock prices unless they are buying back or issuing more stock.

Uptrenda• 4 months ago

It seems strange to me that a single source would be used to resolve a bet any way. You have all this crap to make a platform "decentralized" and then it all collapses down to: "bruh, it happened, I swear." It really makes me realize how often blockchain / decentralization / "cryptography" projects are nothing more than pseudo-technical theater. Peak hype-driven development.

Analemma_2• 4 months ago

That would require tons of infrastructure and investment on Polymarket's side (more expense) and also reduce the number of permitted wagers (less revenue). i.e, never gonna fucking happen, it's way easier and more lucrative to have a hands-off approach, and only intervene for the occasional high-profile misfire.

Pay0812• 4 months ago

Apparently resolving bets requires at least 3 sources. At the same time, ToI is the largest news outlet in Israel (that reports in English), so I imagine it'd get a lot of the focus.

jedberg2• 4 months ago

It seems like the easy solution is for polymarket to just unwind the transaction and give everyone their money back, no harm no foul.

travisjungroth2• 4 months ago

That would mean the people who did the death threats get their money back.

jedberg2• 4 months ago

Yes. And then they won't want to kill the journalist anymore. Because otherwise they are going to lose all their money.

marysminefnuf• 4 months ago

At some point betting markets are going to become a form of market where people are effectively posting bounties. You bet 1,000,000 for someone to murder a public official then someone gets in on the action and hires a hitman to do the job.

gzread14• 4 months ago

Why does this block VPNs?

coolguysailer• 4 months ago

For some reason this reminds me of the Byzantine Generals problem. The fact is that unless you were there we don't really know how accurate any of these statements are. The video evidence is fine but I can whip something up in veo3 in 2 minutes. So while it's not a timing issue exactly (the truth might come out eventually), like the og byzantine generals problem, it is one of incentives toward deception. The real goal here isn't the payout, it's visibility into an active war. Polymarket is gambling at it's core, but the information it surfaces is used as justification for massive financial (and military) deals. I suspect this is likely what is happening here. Whereas before you might report on something and perhaps that's it, because news is always unreliable, now you report on something that has a measurable effect on some deal pipeline. Good on you for reporting on this. Difficult problem to solve tbh.

nektro• 4 months ago

nightmare fuel

ergocoder• 4 months ago

That's the issue with allowing people to bet on public events.

It's odd that we allow this to happen.

firebot• 4 months ago

That's when you just gotta kill yourself. Can't kill what's already dead.

throwaway85825• 4 months ago

Sounds like polymarket needs to add "will bettors kill this man" as something you can bet on.

termwatch• 4 months ago

Run away from Polymarket

ArtificeAccount• 4 months ago

I am not surprised that this happened. This is the logical conclusion of betting. Like in Muay Thai competitions, some efficient attacks are underutilized because they give the performer fewer points, which can be bad for the people betting on them. And their funding comes from the betting, so they change the sport to match what the gamblers want.

You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.

leftytak• 4 months ago

Regardless of which side you are on, you are going to have enemies when it comes to the Middle East politics.

If you are a journalist, it comes with the territory, I'm sure you know.

arclegger• 4 months ago

I don't know who needs to hear it but, you can't predict the future. You can get close, but its never a guarantee unless you have insider info, and even that can change at the last moment.

Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

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