171–180 of 202 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an either-or question; they're very transparently both nefarious and incompetent.
So what does that say about their opposition who lost all three branches of government to them?
If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
The bet amounts are small relative to the political scandal that would follow top administration officials who have decision making power. If there is insider trading it's most likely low-level staffers or friends of officials who speak too freely. If a high ranking official wanted to make a lot of money on these moves in an untraceable way, there are numerous financial market opportunities. The amount they could mak…
https://www.9news.com.au/world/donald-trump-iran-updates-oil...
Discussion on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1s1x5jq/minutes_b...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unironically yes. Someone bet a mid sized amount and now we all share in that potential insider knowledge. A small scale example is my spouse said that the election odds from her home country were not realistic because all the westerners were betting a candidate would win but weren’t accounting for corruption that she felt was guaranteed to happen. Turns out she was right.
Ah good. The NBA/NFL/MLB/etc should let players bet on whether they win or lose. Letting those with the influence on events being able to make money on them has never degraded a system before. Someone must have just mistakenly put in regulations against insider trading before, for no good reason. Luckily this isn’t anything like the normal tech play of figuring out a loophole or flat out ignoring the law and hoping y…
You cannot have an open-ended prediction market with the same protections. It's just impossible from a practical standpoint, much less theoretical one.
I don't think these should be legal since it's just enabling more random gambling, fraud, etc. or even worse for no clear societal gain. But if they do exist, the only purpose for them is to lure out insider information into the open. Pretending they are just folks gambling on 'random' outcomes like a fair coin flip is naive at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same logic can be used the opposite way, you can, with large amounts of money, manipulate events or people's responses to them. * you can place large bets on events you have influence on the outcome for and make large amounts of money * you can place large bets on events and then threaten people who have influence with a big stick * you can place large bets expecting to lose money in order to change the outcome o…
There was recently a story about a reporter who faced threats because their reporting contained a detail that while not significantly impactful (although about a literal impact) in it's own right changed the win conditions on a prediction bet. I think prediction markets worked as an idea to provide a wisdom of the crowd view when they were being used in good faith, but rewards cause people to prioritise winning and g…
You either allow a free for all, or they should be simply outright banned. I mean, they should probably be banned either way - but without the prediction part this is not a single redeeming factor for them to exist.
The consequences for someone betting on classified information would need to come from the agency/government/etc. that finds out their staff is engaging in betting on privileged information. The market itself is simply taking bets and doing what it's designed to do. The bettor gets to decide if the risk is worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you really going to suggest trump cares about an $820k bet? He doesn't even care to collect his presidential salary. I'm sure he exaggerates his wealth, but we know he's at least a billionaire.
He's made billions in just crypto schemes. Then the bribes to pardon people. It just gles on and on. He never provided evidence that he didn't accept the salary, just said he donated it to federal agencies, which you cannot even do.
https://www.pay.gov/public/search/global?formSearchCategory=...
Note that in addition to specific programs that accept donations, this list includes "Gifts to the U.S. Government" with no strings attached and "Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt".
If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
You think polymarket is where this game is being played? For a couple hundred thousand dollars? Since when do profoundly stupid people use this site?
They would absolutely (have their secretary) commit legal inside trader for a few hundred thousand on every occasion they could.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, no offense here, but if you're this unaware of how oil markets work, and it seems like markets in general work, I suggest doing at least some initial googling before digesting this story. I realize for some the whole appeal of this kind of story is "look Trump bad" and then to get into the comments about how bad he is to play political sportsball, but insider trading is sadly a bipartisan phenomenon. No questio…
My understanding is that an individual works through a brokerage to buy/sell securities on an exchange. The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading. In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be f…
Remember that even if you make USDC on Polymarket, at some point you need to turn that into spendable fiat. Even if you move USDC over to Coinbase, if you move over $800k+, there is no way your new gains will not be met with scrutiny. Once you have that much USDC and no good explanation on how you made it you essentially need to launder the money. There's low hanging fruit to spend crypto on like VPNs and compute, but there's very few ways to launder that much money easily and most importantly cheaply.
> What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).
Yeah if you search around you'll find that this is covered by the STOCK Act [1]. Pretty simple, cursory search.
> The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading.
Borkerages don't build knowledge graphs of their users and the things these users can and cannot trade even if they know who they are. If you've ever held RSUs, there are companies that put trading restrictions on your RSUs but this is a brokerage platform concept, and isn't even universal across brokerages. For the most part brokerages don't care what you make money on. This only becomes a problem if the SEC chooses enforcement action.
One of the simplest ways that insiders come under scrutiny is taking large positions that make the news or move markets (or otherwise soak up lots of liquidity.) Oil is traded in futures, which means each contract is for 1000 barrels. CBK26 right now is priced at $103.73, which means a single contract is worth $103,730. A position of $800k is a pretty standard amount in Brent (though this is a future, so you'll need to post margin which makes this more expensive.) From there it's a game of how likely it is to be caught trading and then prosecuted. If you tell nobody and come under no scrutiny you're golden; sell your position when the time comes and make $$$. Plenty of government positions, like contractors, are not required to disclose under the STOCK Act and so there's almost no likelihood those insiders will come under any scrutiny.
And unlike a Polymarket bet you don't end up making the news when you trade $800k of contracts nor will you run the risk of mistiming your bet and losing your entire bet and then go through the headache of laundering your money out.
> I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out.
No offense but this is a low bar to have. It's all a few web searches away. I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to teach you this in a few turns of conversation. What is the "appropriate" amount of knowledge we should expect an internet commenter to have? I mean posting on HN has to mean something right? Or maybe those days are gone on here.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard this assassination thing said, but I don’t see it. Someone still has to kill said person and somehow profit from the unlikelihood of this outcome. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m just saying that it’s never happened and maybe never will.
There is no assassination market to test it against. If there was, I think you'd see quite a few public figures on the list. And I think it _would_ cause folks to die. Which is why it's banned or regulated. (I'm actually not sure what the legal status is, just that Polymarket and US prediction markets disallow it.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an either-or question; they're very transparently both nefarious and incompetent.
So what does that say about their opposition who lost all three branches of government to them?