Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story • Hacker News Board

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#121

Post by echoangle » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #102

echoangle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

How? If I get two phone numbers and send myself a message and make a screenshot, how are you going to debunk that? It’s a legit screenshot, you have no way of verifying anything.

And I can also just import self written emails into thunderbird and take a screenshot. There’s nothing to analyze.

I agree that he could have linked the Public stuff though.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#122

Post by zbentley » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:00 PM UTC

colesantiago wrote: post #29

epolanski wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Illegal or not, trying to ban it won't work. You'll just push it underground and it will get even worse. The cat is out of the bag.

I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the “it’ll just go underground” claim seems silly. The negative effects of driving a gambling market to the economic fringe are already happening in the mainstream market: fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.

What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#123

Post by zbentley » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

qsera wrote: post #119

mpalmer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the only way paying out these bets at scale is possible. "Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.

>"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing. But don't you think that will be the "good" majority? And the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?

> the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?

…which they already did before this market was made mainstream.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#124

Post by Ajedi32 » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #113

cannonpr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior Why "can look", "but", "just"?

I think GP is saying it's not the prediction market that's bad, but human nature itself. The prediction market just makes it more visible.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#125

Post by manphone » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

echoangle wrote: post #114

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am sorry for that and I can see that it’s bad, but the internet just has a lot of things that are even worse.

That’s not an explanation or an excuse at all.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#126

Post by cannonpr » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

happytoexplain wrote: post #113

cannonpr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior Why "can look", "but", "just"?

Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#127

Post by rich_sasha » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

fzil wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#128

Post by logicallee » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

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?

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#129

Post by manphone » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

azan_ wrote: post #44

fzil wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#130

Post by xvector » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

twodave wrote: post #112

xvector wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Putting aside this is sort of a knee-jerk reaction, if this was actually implemented you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy. People in those positions today would vacate them for quieter roles behind the scenes, and corporations would put greater effort forth to hide their decision making processes. I don’t think it would be a better system.

Sure, and we can deal with that problem when it comes to it. For now, there are people at these companies that are clearly responsible and can be held accountable.