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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

#781

Post by ihaveajob »

aerhardt wrote: post #702
WillPostForFood wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild misunderstanding of Smith. He considered it a moral defect, wrote several pieces criticizing gambling, and criticized state run gambling. "The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."

Par for the course for many who mention Adam Smith. Another classic libel is bringing up his name in cases of gross misconduct by a business or a businessman, but he was very critical of the excesses of merchants. Smith was a moral philosopher first and an accidental economist second.

Yes! As a beginner-level, amateur armchair economist who hated philosophy class in high school, I have to admit I was surprised to learn about this when reading https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/economix by Michael Goodwin. The book overall seems to lean liberal whenever there's a political choice to be made, and yet it paints Adam Smith in a much more positive light that one would imagine, if all you've learned about him is the criticism of today's political left.

A really fun book, also!

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

#782

Post by Uptrenda »

It seems strange to me that a single source would be used to resolve a bet any way. You have all this crap to make a platform "decentralized" and then it all collapses down to: "bruh, it happened, I swear." It really makes me realize how often blockchain / decentralization / "cryptography" projects are nothing more than pseudo-technical theater. Peak hype-driven development.

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

#783

Post by waffletower »

cortesoft wrote: post #762
waffletower wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do take Adam Smith out of context, that is the precise point -- the invisible hand of self-interest is the salient idea that has endured and shaped modern Hypercapitalism. It doesn't matter if he is rolling in his grave at audio frequencies due to my and, more importantly, society's alleged misappropriation of his work and misunderstanding of his many moral considerations. He was effectively soundbited centuries ag…

It's not about whether he is a good guy or not, it is about what we can learn from his writings. I know he is always associated with the 'invisible hand of the market' idea, but a lot of his writings were about the PROBLEMS that arise because of this invisible hand. He had a lot of good insights into what we have to be careful of when the free market does what it does. We should actually take some of those lessons to…

Noam Chomsky explains (I won't say 'apologizes for') Adam Smith frequently, but I think it is more important to allow modern, living thinkers space and consideration to reflect upon what is happening in our time, rather than relying excessively on canonical figures who didn't have our contemporary context available in their writings. Sadly there is plenty of timelessness, problems recognized in 1776 that still remain unsolved, but too many use the weight and respect for Adam Smith disingenuously to advocate for insane market policies.

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

#784

Post by dragonwriter »

waffletower wrote: post #638
zeckalpha wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Smith actually would be against stuff like this. He gets misrepresented.

It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences. He shouldn't be personally faulted for it, he was just one man sharing his thinking a long time ago. Living people are to blame for not correcting for these shortcomings enough. I learned that it would have been best to have just said laissez-faire capitalis…

> It really doesn't matter here, in specific, if he is misrepresented. He came up with the "invisible hand" concept and he didn't consider its shadow/consequences.

The "invisible hand" was something of a minor metaphor that other people glommed on to later, and its clear that they, and not his actual work, are where your idea of Smith comes from if you can say "He didn't consider its shadow/consequences" with a straight face.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is almost entirely about the consequences of the (then-still-somewhat-emergent) capitalist economy system and its interactions with the political space. A very large part of it was warning about its dangers, and advising of how to manage and mitigate them.

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

#785

Post by TZubiri »

Manuel_D wrote: post #731
waffletower wrote: post #552

[flagged]

People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting…

Pretty sure that discussion was had in the 20s. What emerged was a securities regulation system with rules and prohibitions built on the mission of productive companies and positive-sum games.

Polymarket also bets on sports games and wars which makes it a categorically different market from a regulatory perspective.

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

#786

Post by TurdF3rguson »

TheDong wrote: post #48
bitmasher9 wrote: post #32

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 has KYC for US users now. Can you get around it with a VPN though? I think so.

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

#787

Post by Manuel_D »

thephyber wrote: post #752
Manuel_D wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been threatened with murder (and I wouldn't be surprised if some people have actually been murdered) over shorting stocks. Yet no one is talking about "stock market apologists". I don't think Polymarket is actually introducing any novel risks or failure modes here. Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. People trading on oil futures may not be explicitly betting…

> Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction. But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company? The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event. This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump…

> But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?

You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.

I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.

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

#788

Post by fwipsy »

masklinn wrote: post #581
andai wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>outcome shaping markets I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations. When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the…

> Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. polymarket has an @died tag, which I assume is for betting on people's deaths (I never used the site, and it's currently inaccessible) given apparently someone recently made half a mil betting on Khamenei's death, and a cool billion was traded on bets on the timing of the bombing of iran https://www.npr.org/2…

nit: The article you linked says half a billion, not a billion.

Death markets are banned in the US. Personally, I tend to think of this as a crypto problem, not a prediction market problem.

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

#789

Post by Etheryte »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #778

Still no idea how a polymarket is legal with all the insider trading opportunities.

Insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft. If you insider trade on the stock market then, in a crude simplification, you steal profits from the company you have a fiduciary duty to, or some extension of that. It has nothing to do with a level playing ground, every trading company out there is trying to find information others can't and then trade on it.

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

#790

Post by blacksmith_tb »

BurningFrog wrote: post #716
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me make an obvious opposing argument: what is the social benefit in allowing people to gamble on the outcome of a sports match, or any other event? We encourage investment in the market in theory to allow companies to grow and produce things many people might benefit from (how well that works is another thing...). Gambling as far as I can see is net negative to everyone but the winners, and not entirely positive…

One major utility of prediction markets is to get good estimates of probabilities of future events.

That's an interesting idea, though of course while we've done that with crop or livestock futures, we seem to have coped pretty well without betting on absolutely everything until now.
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