Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

merkley.senate.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#21

Post by wizzwizz4 »

schnebbau wrote: post #18

The answer is simple - you price in the chance that an insider could have an edge on you when making your prediction. It's all part of the game.

We also care about the world outside the prediction markets. If decision-makers have an incentive to "throw the match" by making surprising decisions, that will impair the decision-making, which will affect the rest of us. Likewise, sufficiently-wealthy actors will be able to manipulate the behaviour of officials by betting against the behaviour they want to see, much like an assassination market.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#22

Post by Salgat »

ferfumarma wrote: post #20
Steinmark wrote: post #12

[flagged]

Is there anything we can do to make it better?

Strict regulations around prediction markets for everyone. Incentives around politics, war/killing, etc need to be tightly restricted.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#23

Post by idle_zealot »

schnebbau wrote: post #18

The answer is simple - you price in the chance that an insider could have an edge on you when making your prediction. It's all part of the game.

Or, and I beg you to consider this radical position: we arrest people who break the law (insider trading is illegal) and those who knowingly help them to do so (the operators of the prediction markets).

How quickly we accept the death of even the ideal of rule of law in favor of embracing a return to an explicit rule by might, fuck-you-got-mine mentality.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#25

Post by idle_zealot »

literatepeople wrote: post #16
Steinmark wrote: post #12

[flagged]

This is a bot account

What's the HN policy on LLM-generated comments and linked content? There's so much of it on the front page and in threads that I feel increasingly like I'm in a crowd of machines chasing karma points rather than seeing what people think or care about. Is the engagement also botted? Or can people just not tell? Or do they not care and reply to the obvious robot anyway?

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#26

Post by GaryBluto »

idle_zealot wrote: post #23
schnebbau wrote: post #18

The answer is simple - you price in the chance that an insider could have an edge on you when making your prediction. It's all part of the game.

Or, and I beg you to consider this radical position: we arrest people who break the law (insider trading is illegal) and those who knowingly help them to do so (the operators of the prediction markets). How quickly we accept the death of even the ideal of rule of law in favor of embracing a return to an explicit rule by might, fuck-you-got-mine mentality.

It doesn't break the law.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#27

Post by andai »

staplung wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, it's not just elected officials that are problematic for prediction markets. The Secretary of War, for instance is not an elected official nor are leaders of the armed forces and there is definitely a prediction market for war. Multiply this by every powerful appointee and every career bureaucrat and see what kind of picture that paints.

It's also low-ranking members of the armed forces that have a lot more information than you'd expect. If you just banned the high ranking members from prediction markets, I actually don't think very much would change. (There would just be slightly more delay.)

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#28

Post by soared »

romaaeterna wrote: post #14

> A Mystery Trader Made $400,000 Betting on Maduro’s Downfall > Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader

You can review that user’s trade history. It’s a bit weird for sure, but they didn’t just stop in to bet on those. They’ve bet huge sums on every prediction relating to Iran, Israel, sp500, recessions, etc.

They’ve been betting for 2 years but only recently starting profiting a lot.

https://polymarket.com/profile/%40Magamyman

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#29

Post by gruez »

SteveNuts wrote: post #17
lukev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're not going to ban prediction markets, we could at least make it a requirement that all bets are public and associated with a real identity. That'd go a long way towards curbing the corruption of these things, while preserving (or even greatly enhancing) their "predictive power."

Seems like you’d get a secondary proxy market popping up overnight. Like domain privacy for degenerates.

That's why you make the regulations like AML regulations, where it's a crime to obfuscate the source of the wager too.

Re: Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

#30

Post by matthewfcarlson »

pear01 wrote: post #7
ronsor wrote: post #6

If we can't ban them from trading stocks, good luck with this.

Don't be needlessly cynical. This is a good effort. So is the ban on stock trading. This administration is such that it is bringing corruption to the fore in a way not seen in generations. Things are always hard to pass at the start. Keep pushing and this administration will create a massive opportunity to swing the pendulum if we can (as hard as it is now) retain some optimism.

To the people downvoting you, you just said the administration is bringing corruption into the public view. Some people believe they are exposing and some believe they are currently doing it. Either way, corruption and profiting off of a political position is certainly top of mind for many Americans atm.
Post reply on HN