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Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

timesofisrael.com

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Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#331

Post by kspacewalk2 »

xvector wrote: post #56
TheDong wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats? Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address. Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit. The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in different jurisdictions.

Polymarket's founder is Shayne Coplan, 27-year old "youngest self-made billionaire" (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?) A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.

A sane system doesn't "throw" human beings in jail for flippant and arbitrary reasons. Sociopaths exploit this, to be sure.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#332

Post by bagacrap »

phkahler wrote: post #253

The pull quote "The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings" misses something. If the reporter changes his story, then the people on the other side of the bet might start harassing him. OTOH individual betters anger will depend whi…

Also that journalists are paid for their work, often by someone with political interests, so they are already subject to pressure to modify their reporting. Hopefully not usually threats of violence though!

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#333

Post by frumplestlatz »

Retric wrote: post #326
chimeracoder wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed…

Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade. My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low.…

How is this not degenerate?

You know you’re going to lose.

You know the money is wasted.

You do it anyway — and knowingly just pretend those first two facts aren’t true.

Then you lose your money. Which you knew was going to happen.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#334

Post by twodave »

Ekaros wrote: post #175
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone sign up to be the fall guy? Perhaps because the payoff is worth the the punishment. So make the punishment algorithmically outweigh the payoff, for example by seizing everything they were paid to be the fall guy plus jail time. Doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve if politicians were actually interested in holding CEOs and corporations accountable, the problem is the politicians themselves are b…

I believe we should do away with limited liability as a concept. Companies would get lot less investments and lot more scrutiny if every stock holder was criminally held liable as a class for any crimes they commit. Lot of people would simply choose not to invest in such ventures or only select those where they can have sufficient oversight.

AFAIK limited liability is more about financial liability, not criminal. People are still responsible for actual crimes they commit, we just may need to classify more things as crimes.

I think discouraging investment is the opposite of what leads to a prosperous society. We'll just have a bunch of rich landlord sitting on piles of cash, afraid to give it to anyone because the risk of any jail time at all is probably too high for most.

And that doesn't even account for non-institutional investors. Can you imagine putting people in jail because of the meme stock they bought on Robin Hood?

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#335

Post by thrance »

Balgair wrote: post #212
Waterluvian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or…

Friend of a friend does announcing online. Like, you pay him a little ( So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul. Sounds like a strange thing to…

In my heart of hearts, all gambling is equally degenerate: from stock markets to assasination markets.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#336

Post by glitchc »

chimeracoder wrote: post #226
Balgair wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend of a friend does announcing online. Like, you pay him a little ( So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul. Sounds like a strange thing to…

> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed…

> At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).

Only fair until the manufacturer of said lootboxes gets in on the action. This is why gambling is so highly regulated in all jurisdictions.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#337

Post by thinkingtoilet »

cannonpr wrote: post #66
fzil wrote: post #3

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier…

Your comparison is not even close to what is happening here.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#338

Post by banannaise »

I would expect a dramatic rise in things like this, because they can be (1) monetized, and (2) scaled.

Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't think people have really noticed that profit is also available if you can influence other people's predictions to manipulate the price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do that at scale? Agentic AI can help.

We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#339

Post by thinkingtoilet »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #331
xvector wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polymarket's founder is Shayne Coplan, 27-year old "youngest self-made billionaire" (why do all billionaires seem devoid of ethics?) A sane system would just throw him in jail until his illegal betting market implements KYC.

A sane system doesn't "throw" human beings in jail for flippant and arbitrary reasons. Sociopaths exploit this, to be sure.

The reasons are neither flippant or arbitrary.

Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

#340

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

caminante wrote: post #100

Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines. Here's the actual headline: > Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

I’d suggest that you brush up on HN character limits before playing hall monitor.
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