391–400 of 1001 posts
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> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed…
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade. My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low.…
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 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…
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?
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'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 t…
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Betting markets are legally required to have KYC. If you or I operated a casino illegally we would ABSOLUTELY be thrown in jail. Do you seriously think fraudulent Xbox live transactions are on the same level of the heinous insider trading going on in betting markets? Or do you just think C-suite should be legally immune from accountability overall? Polymarket's decentralized and anonymous nature was an intentional ch…
From where has it entered your mind that they don't do KYC? Anybody can send anonymous threats, that has nothing to do with any betting company, unless they are sent through that platform.
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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.
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 administra…
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.
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.
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.
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 he…
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.
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How is that different from roulette?
Roulette uses a physical process and is not compromised.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
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Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders. And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
> insider trading is the point Says who?