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Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

timesofisrael.com

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

#591

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #333
Retric wrote: post #326

Earlier 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.…

How is this not degenerate? You know you’re going to lose. You know the money is wasted. You do it anyway — and knowingly just pretend those first two facts aren’t true. Then you lose your money. Which you knew was going to happen.

If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.

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

#592

Post by notepad0x90 »

waffletower wrote: post #552

[flagged]

On one hand, it isn't all that different than derivatives and other established securities. On the other, the extremes of gambling are deterimental.

You can either take the libertarian view that it should be allowed until someone is put in harms way, or take the prohibitionist view that it should all be illegal.

With the latter approach, you will be doing more harm than good potentially, because it will just become an underground betting market, fully unregulated and with the worst of people abusing it.

I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match, or who will become the next presidential race nominee. At least no more than options trading, or betting on the price of oil, or a poker match.

I agree that betting on someone else coming into harms way, be that violence or other types of harm (loss of property, livelihood, wellbeing,etc..) shouldn't be allowed. A sports team losing, or your preferred politician losing are not someone coming into harms way.

I've commented on these lines before, but reactionary extremist approaches will always do more harm than good.

also, politicians shouldn't be allowed to bet in even so much as a poker game!

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

#593

Post by [deleted] »

senderista wrote: post #580
TheDong wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case the threats all seemed to be delivered in Hebrew, so it's plausible that those involved resided in Israel.

[deleted]

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

#594

Post by Eufrat »

I mean, all of these behaviors:

- Blatant insider trading

- Angry people who were invested in an outcome

These are just a few of the reasons why such prediction markets were not permitted in the first place. It’s just incredibly toxic and creates vicious externalities. There is no way that it is healthy if you allow people to put gobs of money on any outcome because it just incentivizes toxic behavior in an endless positive feedback loop.

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

#596

Post by munk-a »

laurentiurad wrote: post #318
polytely wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unironically yes, I think with the huge payday they get for being responsible for Microsoft they should also carry an equivalent responsibility when they cause social harms. Billionaires have gotten way too comfortable.

I hate them too, but arresting them for something that they simply cannot prevent due to technical limitations, since they cannot scan in realtime all the conversations happening on their platform, is Russian-style government action, not rule of law.

Before they built the platform this danger did not exist. There is no law of nature that says massive social media platforms that are too large to moderate effectively need to exist.

If they have built a thing they can't maintain that isn't bully for them and we should feel sorry that their best efforts aren't working well enough - it's proof that that thing (or at least the way they built that thing) isn't feasible.

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

#599

Post by 12_throw_away »

thrance wrote: post #335
Balgair wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my heart of hearts, all gambling is equally degenerate: from stock markets to assasination markets.

Economics sort of works ok when money transfers are used to mediate, y'know, the exchange of goods and services. Nearly everything else turns out to be a pretty obvious moral hazard.

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

#600

Post by scoofy »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #590
scoofy wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, it's not the point your making, but Adam Smith was not a laissez-faire capitalist. If you want to do the "capitalism bad" thing, I would suggest learning a bit of history, or at least understand that the " laissez-faire " in laissez-faire capitalism is a political ideology, not an economic ideology. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-gu... More to your point... I don't think economic theo…

> generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned. I agree with you in theory, but remember that people frequently do illegal things, just illega…

>If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate.

I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.

It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.

The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.

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