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Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

merkley.senate.gov

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Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#131

Post by gzread »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #125
ralph84 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug? If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.

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

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#132

Post by gzread »

rangestransform wrote: post #103
bee_rider wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

They usually divide into buckets

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#133

Post by gzread »

Retr0id wrote: post #108
yieldcrv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a tool for gambling they require liquidity from people that are not in the know for adequate price discovery and exit liquidity worthwhile for participation

You need liquidity but there is no requirement that it comes from gamblers

If only people with accurate information bet, they wouldn't make any money so they'd stop betting.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#134

Post by rangestransform »

chii wrote: post #112
rangestransform wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deputize prediction market providers to force people to self incriminate à la KYC/AML laws today

> self incriminate well, if they weren't doing something that would've otherwise been deemed illegal, then why would they consider it self-incriminating to have to follow KYC/AML rules?

The right to a fair trial fundamentally requires the government to do 100% of the job of proving you guilty, and it shouldn’t force you to generate evidence against yourself while going about perfectly legal things

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#135

Post by ministryofwarp »

chii wrote: post #121
ministryofwarp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't broken the law, why would you be willing to come down to the jail and breakfast in a cell each morning?

only if you equate following a set of rules to being in jail. Do you follow road rules? Why don't you apply that jail analogy to that?

You sound like a helpful world citizen. The other problem the US has is that it is illegal for a US Citizen to pay a bribe but there's no realistic enforcement. Luckily you can help solve this. Whenever and wherever you travel you can keep some forms with you and every time you are pulled over you can fill them out with the police in quadruplicate so that each of you can mail them to Washington. At some later point the US can try to cross reference and determine who didn't mail theirs and then whether anyone was actually under US jurisdiction during the incident.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#136

Post by toss1 »

chii wrote: post #113
jkubicek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing who is making the bets doesn’t prevent mildly corrupt officials from driving the outcome that’s going to win them some cash. Knowing that high-level DOD official were betting on us invading Iran does us no good if the only reason we invaded Iran was so they could win their long-odds bet. Sure, we can try and shame them, but now they're rich and we're fighting another middle-east war.

What is the current method that exists which stops CEO/executives from short selling their own company's stock, then driving that company's value down (which is easy to accomplish)? Why can't that same method be used to prevent or indict gov't insiders who tries to do the same?

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#137

Post by Esophagus4 »

gzread wrote: post #131
Esophagus4 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug? If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.

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

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

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

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#138

Post by Retr0id »

gzread wrote: post #133
Retr0id wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need liquidity but there is no requirement that it comes from gamblers

If only people with accurate information bet, they wouldn't make any money so they'd stop betting.

Betting on imperfect information is not the same thing as gambling

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#139

Post by literatepeople »

tomhow wrote: post #75
idle_zealot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the HN policy on LLM-generated comments and linked content? There's so much of it on the front page and in threads that I feel increasingly like I'm in a crowd of machines chasing karma points rather than seeing what people think or care about. Is the engagement also botted? Or can people just not tell? Or do they not care and reply to the obvious robot anyway?

Downvote it, flag it and if you want to be super-helpful, email us about it (hn@ycombinator.com). We want HN to be free of generated articles and comments, and will kill such submissions/comments and ban accounts that do it repeatedly. We also ask commenters not to make accusations in the discussion threads, because it's off topic. Please just flag generated content and email us if you really want to.

gotcha, apologies for my comment! will do in the future, appreciate the response

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#140

Post by ralph84 »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #125
ralph84 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug? If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.

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