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Presumably it's a negative expected value game - the company running it has to make money after all... so likely not.
Prediction markets don’t need a bookie. Each bet has another real person taking the other side. It’s more like the stock market brokerages. They just take a fee on each trade and don’t need to give you a spread over the stock price
I’m increasingly convinced that the single most important concept to understand in the 21st century is Chesterton’s Fence: "Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_... Gambling isn’t a new problem, but apparently we thought it would turn out differently this…
Maybe, like myself, you're just aging into being a bit of a conservative.
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At least in gambling they don't let the sports referees and players gamble. This is just another racket for those in power to continue making the world worse for just a little bit more gain for themselves. Edit: Throttled like always, you guys hate me (and reality/law in this instance) https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/sports-gambling/20-charged-ba...
>>At least in gambling they don't let the sports referees and players gamble. Oh c'mon now. This is completely impossible to police. Players and referees are not under constant supervision. They have families, friends, partners. Some of them got caught but you can be certain most weren't because it's just very difficult to catch. There are always multiple people who know about key players' injuries, illness, other fa…
As an example, there was a football player in England who had a friend that bet on a transfer market (a market that is extremely prone to inside information). It was detected immediately (despite being a relatively small bet of $10k, I have heard anecdotally that insiders have been detected in this market down to $500 bets), the player was banned, fined $500k, etc.
Btw, the reason these systems exist is because there are certain sports that are too lucrative not to make a market in but the economics/nature of the game mean that matches are easily fixed: 99.99% of this activity is low-ranked professional tennis, and surveillance has been very effective (all of this is funded, not by professional tennis, but by gambling companies). Generally, this isn't as prevalent with US sports because none of those preconditions exist for the major sports.
The writer obviously hasn’t done any deep study of prediction markets and why they often provide greater insight than other polling techniques. Are they perfect? No. They predicted Hillary would win in 2016.
You obviously missed the point of the article. The point is that validating and advertising Polymarket on national news outlets will have ugly consequences.
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It beats polls for elections ONLY until someone notices it is being used as the basis of news stories and figures out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to change the opinions. The very low stakes you point out make this even easier to put a thumb on the scales. Goodhar…
News already broadcast tons of nonsense. Political commentary is just brain rot. Economic commentary might be just as well generated by one of those Markov chain string generators - it would make as much sense. >>out it will be four orders of magnitude cheaper to manipulate that small market and make the news idiots broadcast that opinions have changed than to actually deploy all the adverts needed to change the opin…
This person does not realise that most people do not pay attention to the news, that people in power are not glued to the news waiting for journalists to tell them what to say, or that the news is generally not very important...except to people like them who play out these fantasies about wealthy people mind-controlling them through CNN.
If insiders trade, the market becomes more accurate, which is good for society. Like WikiLeaks. Thus the MSN panic, the legacy establishment wants Polymarket to follow Assange's path.
The problem discussed in the article was NOT insiders trading on secret information — it is the nearly opposite problem of manipulators trading and skewing the odds. Insider trading seeks to trade with secret information and minimally obvious trades to avoid moving the markets until their position is locked in, in order to profit when the previously secret information becomes public and the market finally moves to a…
What is the legality for US residents? Right now Polymarket is subject to a federal agreement that they don't let US people participate. Apparently this is just a checkbox for the user to attest to. They don't even do IP geolocation, never mind payment checks. So it's currently illegal for them to run this in the US. But is it illegal for users to participate?
It's okay, when the next administration enforces the laws we'll see all the VC ghouls attack and decry the government for having the audacity to protect citizens from abuse.
"Why prediction markets aren't popular" [0] gives some compelling arguments (to me) about why prediction markets haven't caught on and probably never will. As I understand it, the main argument is that for prediction markets that aim to incentivize the thing they're predicting, better to invest in the thing directly. Otherwise, "prediction markets" are successful precisely when they can't influence the outcome, like…
There's a level of irrational spending which only institutional investors can counterbalance, and they might not have the risk appetite to get into a single market on a relatively less regulated platform that could rug pull them.
Why is polymarket any more or less dangerous than NFTs or naked option trading? Fool and his money are quickly separated…
Example: I had a flutter on the US Election. The odds were well in favour of Trump winning and I figured that was never going to happen, so I thought I was putting 'smart money' on Kamala.
I stand by it being 'smart' money ;)
I underestimated 'dumb' (which, I guess, isn't 'smart').