211–220 of 234 posts
Forbes 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.
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I believe Polymarket wants it to fall under the regulations of cftc as it is implemented like an option/event contract. And cftc says that they don't care about which technology is used. But as far as I now this is the first case it will be tested for real and the views of cftc and a judge may not be the same. I fail to see how it can be classified as insider trading. But, it is till fraud so I'm not sure how much it…
How is it fraud? Wouldnt it just be a tos violation? In my view, anyone participating in these markets does so knowing that the outcomes are within the control of other participants. I can't think of any other reason individual account activity is public.
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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…
Sure, but let’s consider the bet the accused took: who is the most searched person in 2025. What benefit is there in knowing this ahead of time? Who is making decisions based on this?
I understand betting on something as a hedge - for example a farmer betting there will be no rain as a way to hedge the failure of his crops.
But nobodies life depends which singer is most searched (apart from maybe the singers themselves trying to have a more stable income). Surely that doesn't equate to millions of dollars though.
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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).
Does the resolution use the scientific paper that says "DDT is safe" or the one that says "DDT is unsafe"? There's no objective resolution of scientific facts.
"Prediction markets provide better information" in the exact same way that "Markets are efficient". You need to interrogate what "Better information"/"efficient" actually means even if you take the claim at face value, and also it's just not a model that maps to reality well.
> He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond I'm not familiar with the US system of bond. Is this payment a kind of fine that you don't get back, or a temporary payment? And what does it give you? I mean if prosecuted you get prison anyway, right?
In the US, unless you have that much cash lying around, you have to borrow the money from a bail bondsman. They typically charge 10% for loaning you the money, and they're out the dough if you skip bail.
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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.
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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?
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The unfortunate thing is that, while their academic position sounds plausible on paper, just like with most crypto things it's just a money grab. How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX. Letting people…
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.
Because one wants to look like the other for very obvious reasons.
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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?
The whole Epstein thing (the money, I mean) just shows that money has always wanted to be moved around, and a certain class of people don't care how it gets done- I mean the arms dealers, but also the billionaires hiding money in their charities. A libertarian would say that crypto democratizes that for everyone. I don't think it can last forever though.
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People with insider information often aren't necessarily aware they even have it. "Superforecasters" are often just "good at predicting" moves within a given vertical, because they have expertise and exposure to the trends of that vertical, and are good at making deductions and extrapolating trends. Those people make money from prediction markets just as often as people with true insider info do. And the people they'…
> And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with. This seems like a complicated way to say "suckers". Of course they don…
By the conventional use of the term, a "sucker" is always a sucker; suckers suck constitutionally.
But a professional gambler in a skill-based game (e.g. poker), is only going to lose money on net, if they happen to be playing against people with "higher ELO" than them.
And in the case of a prediction market, the "ELO" isn't absolute; people's expertise "rankings" are relative to each particular question. There's no "general factor of expertise" that makes someone able to beat the odds on every question. Each question forms its own market "niche", where only people with expertise will be interested in participating; and so each such niche is to some degree illiquid, with not enough trades to make an efficient market (i.e. the kind you wouldn't expect to find a $20 bill on the ground in.)
To be more concrete: while there are "specialists" (insiders, but also ordinary experts in hyper-specialized verticals) who might clean up by betting on the things they know a lot about, they'll generally be miscalibrated as overconfident on the things outside their specialty (see: any scientist who got famous for their research and now writes pop-science books about topics they know very little about, often making incorrect statements), and so will lose out vs "generalists" who can't successfully make the in-domain bets the specialists make, but who are better-calibrated on multiple topics (or on particular odd intersections of topics) because they spend less time hyperfocused on one niche, and more time flitting between various niches.
Which is to say: there's no "house edge" here to lose against. In a prediction market, everyone's going to be the "shark" for some questions and the "sucker" for other questions. Every question is its own game, and every game has an edge, but with that edge going to a different party. If you actually know what you know, then you can identify which questions you have the edge for (probably a finite number), answer only those, and make some (very small) amount of money. You may lose sometimes because someone knew even better than you (esp. for questions that go beyond yes-or-no, where there are 3+ mutually-exclusive prediction-categories you can buy into, such that others might "hit the bullseye" while you just "hit the ring"); but on average, if you stick to your "field of pre-eminent expertise" (presuming you have such), you would make a small positive gain over time.
That being said, anyone without a "field of pre-eminent expertise", who thinks they can place correct bets purely by being rational + doing the level of research one can accomplish using public Internet sources, is 100% a sucker, yes.