471–480 of 1001 posts
Polymarket and similar platforms are a cancer and need to be shut down. This is an early symptom of something that will become much, much worse in an increasing manner. Stories like these make more people aware of the platform, adding users and further degrading humanity.
It's gambling which has been a bane forever. It poisoned the NBA even before the internet.
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I feel like America is re-learning why gambling was so widely outlawed. It just ruins everything it touches. At least casinos are mostly contained. I'm tired of seeing gambling ads on every sport and hearing the news talk about prediction markets. Not to mention, they all prey on people. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and people would come in regularly and drop everything they had on scratch-offs. And…
The marketing is what bothers me the most. These books market very aggressively in app: Take Daves 5 leg parlay; Share your picks! 30% profit boost if you do a 4 leg parlay that'll never hit. Its constant engagement. Contrast this to a real bookie: Open app. Place bet. Meet once a week in parking lot. Small chatter. Pass envelope.
Basically, a fake "Cricket league" was setup up in rural India, complete with online streaming, play by play commentary, etc. just to fool gamblers in Russia. Worth the read.
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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
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there was no safe course of action for the journalist because there was money on both sides of this outcome. No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
Perhaps because he is a journalist whose job is to report reality, not avoid threats?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
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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…
Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination. The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed…
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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.
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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
Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the outcome of an event?
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.
Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.
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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.
The failure of the rationalist community is they mistook rationalization for rationality.
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I ⤻ predict ⤺ that prediction markets will be more tightly regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. i.e. CFTC loses jurisdiction. - More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction. - Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.
What do you mean outlawed? It will simply just happen in a jurisdiction that does not care about it. If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.
Which countries would be best for them to operate out of if they were outlawed? What percentage of their user-base would use the Tor Browser?
Odd, I just noticed both Polymarket and Kalshi are hosted on the same IP address in San Fransisco. The IP belongs to Amazon but is not part of their cloud. That CIDR used to belong to Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and then Aptum Technologies and now Amazon in SF. Kalshi used to be based out of SF but moved to NY.