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Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

timesofisrael.com

461–470 of 1001 posts

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

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Friend of a friend does announcing online. Like, you pay him a little ( 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…

> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there.

I don't think so. At least you have a 50% chance of winning. Unlike say a lottery or a slot machine.

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

#462
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It was kind of close to that betting on Trump to not win the last election - $3.2bn was bet on Trump vs Kamala and there was of course an assassination attempt although not related to the betting.

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

#463
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.

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

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"

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from roulette?

Roulette uses a physical process and is not compromised.

But if that physical process were somehow complicated, why, you could break the bank at Monte Carlo!

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

#465
post #48

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.

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.

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.

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

#466

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…

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…

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

#467
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> most of them are eugenicists. [citation needed]

Covered in detail here: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/human-biod...

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

#468

Earlier 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.

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.

They were right about Bitcoin getting big (though I'm not aware of anyone putting their money where their mouth was), and they were a decent source of information leading up to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic (which probably saved a handful of lives). Just because they're almost always aggressively wrong, that doesn't mean they're aggressively wrong about everything.

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

#469
post #466

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…

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…

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

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

#470
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.

Yes, I think they should implement KYC pretty darn quick, and perhaps there’s more they can do. But he didn’t make the death threats.

And what do you think KYC would help with? The threats were made on WhatsApp, not Polymarket.

It would make more sense to campaign for better background checks on WhatsApp. A case can be made that a chat system with discoverable identities should have better safeguards. If the incentive to make a threat is financial gain rather than a pure desire to kill, restricting the means in which a threat can even be made (or identifying the participants) would help silence the noise and give actionable insights to law enforcment.

I’m generally opposed to KYC and similar measures, but if a platform is already collecting massive amounts of user data, it should at least use that data to help protect the people who become vulnerable because of it.

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