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Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

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201–210 of 234 posts

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging. The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.…

> the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction. This actually happens. I know that the FBI once organized an all-expenses-paid trip to a "conference in Hawaii" for certain Chinese chemists it wanted to nab. The corollary is that if you have reason to expect you're wanted by American Feds, never travel outside China, Russia, and…

And never have an emergency (accidentally, FBI-forced landing, etc) causing you to accidentally inhabit those countries either.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes it is good in many scenarios. Imagine bad (incorrect and potentially harmful) information is public knowledge. Examples are "X cures cancer" or "Is Y dangerous to consume". A prediction market will be seeded by public knowledge (of course it cures cancer or its safe to consume), which you describe "suckers". History is filled with many examples of bad public knowledge that turned out to be false (e.g. DDT is safe…

Unless of course the evil DDT corp bets money on it being safe, skewing the market.

That is the beauty of the Resolution part of prediction markets. If evil DDT Corp bets money to skew the market, then they lose even more money on the Resolution (assuming the resolution is deterministic of harm and has not been manipulated).

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And why exactly are we "hoping for a global currency revolution" - hint, its all the bad stuff that's hard to do with current currency regulations.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#205
Wait what? What "bets"? Bets can happen only on the gambling sites, and Polymarket is definitely not one of those, right? Poly is a prediction market, rewarding the person with the best prediction. How can there be "insider trading" on a site rewarding best information? The USA corporate and regulatory hypocrisy is off the charts :)

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These markets are regulated by the CFTC, currently, so what exactly is novel here?

Poly market is not a us exchange. Kalshi is.

The argument goes that because Polymarket (.com) doesn't effectively block US users, it is in practice operating in the US even though it claims not to be. Similar to how the EU claims jurisdiction over foreign sites that process EU citizen data for GDPR.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#207
post #73

polymarket should be illegal, challenge me.

Prohibition just drives vices into a black market. In this case, probably just with VPNs to offshore betting markets where users would have less legal recourse. Nobody ever regulated insider trading in gambling _until_ the CFTC started authorising predictions markets.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t think they will mobilize 40 elite soldiers to invade Switzerland airspace just because of a small sum of a million dollars

They don't need to because he has already been arrested in New York. There should be some sort of basic literacy requirement for people to post of this forum.

Don’t so hard on yourself.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#209
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information. In other words, prediction markets require sucke…

yes it is good in many scenarios. Imagine bad (incorrect and potentially harmful) information is public knowledge. Examples are "X cures cancer" or "Is Y dangerous to consume". A prediction market will be seeded by public knowledge (of course it cures cancer or its safe to consume), which you describe "suckers". History is filled with many examples of bad public knowledge that turned out to be false (e.g. DDT is safe…

insider trading is bad because it drains liquidity from the markets which reduces its predictive power

if i am the uninformed, without insider trading laws what is the incentive for me to bet when I know there are insiders?

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, not following. The insider trade in this case was small enough to not change the lines meaningfully, no? D4vd's chances of being #1 went from 99% nearly overnight, was a huge upset. Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be su…

Because these markets aren't all that efficient yet (possibly because other potential market participants are scared off by insider trading charges). You don't have multiple people that all have insider information betting against each other, you have one person with insider information that cleans out everybody else. If this repeats enough, all the people without insider information will get cleaned out and exit the…

if the only people remaining are insiders, the market is effectively nonexistent because nobody is going to take the other side of the trade
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