Pretty ironic find:
Extracting knowledge from cryptocurrencies - Michele Spagnuolo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P04hm7tmgs
Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
151–160 of 234 posts
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you ever consider that the crypto scammers might not be the same people as the crypto freedom folks? It wasn't one grand trick by a collective of genius con artists... Much like the cashier at the store isn't to blame for that guy calling your grandma and trying to trick her into sending money from her bank account.
Crypto is a speculative investment vehicle, its basically a lottery machine - why would people who are so invested in a lottery machine that you can avoid taxes or buy drugs with be surprised they are considered part of the con artists doing the pump and dumps?
Crypto is... a currency?
The people yoloing into crypto in the hopes it will go up are not the same people advocating for a global currency revolution.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#153Wow. WTF does this say about Google algorithmic manipulation if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent... Down to a specific artist. Google is rigged.
> if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent
It's not a prediction, it's a query in a tool/database that's supposed to hold counts.
There's no rigging here - it's just a summary of historical data being accessed and used before being public, in violation of confidentiality agreements. If he had just sourced the data without acting on it, the system would have still logged somewhere, but likely nobody would have looked at it. My understanding is that the last couple weeks before being released won't dramatically change counts unless an extraordinary event happens that drowns the last 11 months of data.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#154I’m curious how he got caught. Polymarket accounts should be untraceable
> Polymarket accounts should be untraceable
The funding/retrieval chain normally isn't if you want to spend the money in real world goods and services.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#155Interesting the federal government can't seem to find the resources to investigate their own internal insider trading related to war and foreign policy.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#156Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.
That's sort of the point of prediction markets: they surface insider information by allowing people to profit off of it. The benefit is to people watching the prices , who can then use that information to make better decisions ahead of the answer being revealed to the public. It's not necessarily to market participants, who need to be aware of who else is trading the market and have a credible reason to believe they…
This was also previously known as witch hunts.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
In most modern societies, we regulate all sorts of things that people would otherwise willingly do to their own detriment. We ban drugs; we have labor laws; we have usury laws; we require seatbelts; we have securities regulations; etc. (Notably, until very recently, this included most forms of gambling.) So the mere fact that losers are voluntary does not, IMO, make the situation good.
all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent. And tbh, my opinion is that the banning of drugs have done more harm than not banning it (but instead, allow it to be sold safely and cheaply). Gambling to me, is like that. Banning it doesn't stop it, and it has barely any harm other than to the person who over-indulge. Regulating it is a good idea - where regulating…
Nope, nope, nope.
Gambling addiction has impacts beyond the person gambling, because we live in a society. They might gamble away their kid's college fund, lose their house, or resort to stealing money from family members. When they take out loans that they default on, it impacts the balls and raises costs for everyone else.
All of these are very similar to secondary and societal effects of hard drug addiction. It should at the very least be regulated. And most being is worthless from an information standpoint, so isn't providing any societal upside - a man doesn't hurt us. The world was strictly better before we had rampant gambling everywhere.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#158Forbes flagged this account back in December and it still took prosecutors months to charge him.
It does take a while for all warrants to be in place, run the investigation and tie up all loose ends.. 6 months is fast by bureaucracy standards.
The fact that he happened to be in NY is a lucky shot for the prosecutors.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#159What would happen if some regular Joe, completely unrelated to any other user, watched for bets that could signal insider information and made significant profit themselves, too?
That's called "copy trading", which has been around for decades.
If there's no connection between you and the trade you're copying, there's nothing you can be charged with. Normally there's a natural latency between the "signal" trade (i.e. the trade to copy), and the copy trade, which obviously can alter the profitability. This latency can range from sub-seconds if there's some public ledger, to days/weeks/months if the info is due to disclosure. Obviously when it comes to crypto and public ledgers, we're on the former.
But as soon as you place such trades based on insider trading, that's insider trading.
Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
#160So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.
You're making a bold assumption that this is the first time they're making money off of these bets.
It's possible he had multiple accounts but seems unlikely, one reason he was caught was because he made a whole bunch of trades on markets related to "year in search", all on one account, and all the trades were perfect. If he was thinking about creating new accounts to obscure himself then he should have at least made each bet he placed on a seperate account.
People (particularly those committing crimes) do frequently overlook things in inconsistent ways, so it's possible. But seems unlikely to me.