Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.
Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#452Reminiscent 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.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing about GP's comment is ad-hominem; it's neutral, factual context. Unless you dispute the factual claims?
It's counterfactual. The think tank has nothing to do with Russia and official denounces the invasion and upholds Ukraine's territorial rights. They have simply written critically about the role NATO has played in making this conflict inevitable and the history of NATO sabotage of peace negotiations.
> The think tank has nothing to do with Russia and official denounces the invasion and upholds Ukraine's territorial rights.
GP did not claim it was associated with Russia or that it had made specific claims about the invasion.
> They have simply written critically about the role NATO has played in making this conflict inevitable and the history of NATO sabotage of peace negotiations.
That seems aligned with the original claims.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Polymarket doesn't operate in the US. https://docs.polymarket.com/api-reference/geoblock
Polymarket is headquartered in NYC; it's a US company; it has many US customers, and it knows that, even if it did a wink-wink dance "disallowing" that prior to 2024. Since then, it has explicitly expanded into the US market[1]. It is unambiguously subject to US regulations (if we had a regulator who chose to enforce those regulations).
[1]: "Following the end of the investigations, Polymarket announced the acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. The acquisition allowed Polymarket to legally operate within the United States under regulatory compliance. The company received an Amended Order of Designation from the CFTC in November 2025 and began actively expanding in the United States market."
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/21/prediction-market-polymarke...
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/polymarket-receives...
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed…
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ 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.…
> if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and player.
$50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you’ve broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just feeds an addiction. But there’s no skill here; the odds of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player does.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ 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.…
I have one friend who likes to gamble. I've tried the old math argument with him and he dismisses it out-of-hand. He says that, yes, he knows it's a negative sum game but sometimes he wins and that makes it worth it. Then he says, "You spend money on a symphony or an art museum or an expensive restaurant, right? Those are guaranteed to leave you a little bit poorer at the end of the night. Same thing as gambling, but…
Hear me out: Whenever people try the "math argument" on a gambler they are basically wrong and are misunderstanding how recreational gamblers actually think, which is not irrational (for the most part) or at least not irrational in the way people think on the surface.
Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will (on average) lose money.
Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely change the life of most people and therefore the marginal utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on the ticket.
It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling companies are arbitraging. And for people who become addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The companies are just exploiting people who have a disease and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
[1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
[2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by probability. This could be seen as how much of a difference the payoff would make to their life.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the Epstein files prove quite clearly that there exist rich people who perform blatantly illegal acts that can put them in jail for a looooong time, even when they don't stand to lose any money whatsoever by not committing said crimes. And they also show that said rich people generally don't face any legal consequences even when their crimes become public knowledge. So any argument that starts from the assumpti…
Sigh. I didn't say the wealthy don't commit crimes. I said the wealthy don't commit crimes to avoid paying routine investment losses. Actually what I really said is that no one does this, because it's insane. So I therefore infer that the people doing this are looking at losses that are not routine, they're faced with bets they can't cover.
You're claiming that the wealthy don't value their money enough to commit crimes for them, while knowing that they value their sex drives enough to do so. I don't see how this is a tenable position.
People routinely commit crimes for money, rich and poor alike, often for relatively irrelevant sums - and very often for money they don't even have yet. The incentive to commit crimes to prevent losses is even higher, given the well established loss aversion bias in all people.
And we don't even have to discuss losses. Many people commit crimes to get money quickly, from murder to insider trading to insurance fraud. If you agree that many people would be willing to kill for a few thousand or million dollars, you have to admit they'd be willing to threaten and blackmail a newspaper editor or production crew to try to fix a bet - especially when the internet brings them anonimity, and even if they bet a small sum that they wouldn't even care to lose.
If you don't believe this, try to go to a betting place in a poorer area and offer 1000:1 odds that no one punches you in the face hard enough to break your nose (a crime which could easily land whoever does this in prison). According to you, as long as you don't allow anyone to bet more than, say, $1 on this, it should be a very safe bet for you, surely no one would be insane to risk prison time for losing just $1, right?
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#458This 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.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#459I 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"
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Christie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would even look on something like this.