471–480 of 517 posts
Wouldn't these markets be the perfect "crime crowdsourcing" platform? Let's say a bad actor wants XYZ to happen so they organise a bet on XYZ not happening. Then make sure as many different accounts that they control directly or indirectly bet a lot of money in the same way. Now anyone willing to win the prize can decide to make sure it does happen and get the money (at least a high multiplicator of what they bet the…
> These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election, generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two researchers who examined the trades. “More plausibly, this trader could have been attempting to manipulate…
This is just implausible. Nobody with a brain is going to throw away 4 million on the speculative hope that a prediction market price is going to magically manipulate media coverage on the election.
Given the immense sums of money, little to no accountability on how it's spent, and a finite list of traditional spending targets I expect campaigns have dabbled in all sorts of unusual approaches.
I find predication markets the most accurate form of 'news'. For example, if I want to understand if a claim (e.g. a news headline) has merit, I check the prediction market and easily dismiss/confirm it. Recently it has been useful to understand the situation in Iran. It has also informed my travel decisions to other countries based on geopolitical dangers. Are prediction markets perfect? Of course not. But the diffe…
i don't know much about prediction markets aside from just a very high level view but i bumped into a thread on twitter that talks about how game-able they are as well if you have a decent chunk of money. e.g i throw 100k into "yes" and now bots/people think some insider has real info, and more shares get thrown into "yes" and then last minute the bot undoes the trade and throws a bunch of money into "no" and no reso…
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Those things should really be illegal too, I think, even as someone who enjoys alcohol. The costs to society due to alcohol and the like are massive for essentially no real benefit. Yes, I know what happened during prohibition. That still doesn’t mean alcohol is good for society.
Regulation and education are where the sane middle ground is. You don't outright ban the stuff (which is expensive and doesn't work anyway) but you keep the worst of the harms it causes from getting too out of control. Sadly, gambling is under-regulated and we'll probably all be suffering for a while as a result before regulations are tightened back up.
Not just America, everything is. With stock market, at least we can somehow stop the bad actors, insider traders, corporate manipulation, pumps and dumps - with prediction markets, there is no way. With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track, jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between bureaucracy. And proving somethi…
There are some distinctions between gambling and prediction markets. For example, in prediction markets, some forms of insider trading are considered somewhat desirable - essentially, it monetizes insiders leaking inside information. Other forms of insider trading can be problematic: What if someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not doing X, in the hopes of yo…
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The gambling industry itself is a net drain on society. What is the societal benefit provided by it?
>What is the societal benefit provided by it? Same as beer or any other drug - just a way to have some fun and not destructive provided you can control yourself. Though, the one time I opened a CSGO gun case and felt the dopamine rush, it was way stronger than any drug I've done. Not that I'm a "highly-experienced individual", but alcohol, weed or adderall don't come close to a CSGO case. Gambling feels much riskier.
Not just America, everything is. With stock market, at least we can somehow stop the bad actors, insider traders, corporate manipulation, pumps and dumps - with prediction markets, there is no way. With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track, jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between bureaucracy. And proving somethi…
There are some distinctions between gambling and prediction markets. For example, in prediction markets, some forms of insider trading are considered somewhat desirable - essentially, it monetizes insiders leaking inside information. Other forms of insider trading can be problematic: What if someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not doing X, in the hopes of yo…
But surely the answer is just that governments can and should ban prediction markets that are deemed to directly incentivize a crime. Where exactly to draw the line is challenging, sure, but no more challenging than all the other stuff that legal systems have to deal with. After all, pretty much any existing market (like stock markets) could be influenced by murdering certain people.
You may say "oh, but assassination markets are unique in that they're hard to ban those markets because they use cryptocurrencies and other decentralized/anonymous/censorship-resistant communication technologies." Well, okay, but if those technologies are so effective than people can already just run normal murder-for-pay markets.
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I can give you a concrete example In chess, it's part of the rules that you cannot use a chess engine, a tournament may have a prize money, to enter into a tournament you agree to some clauses like following the rules of chess and not using an engine. It's a contract. If someone were to use an engine, they would be cheating, and in this context it would be breach of contract, and possibly fraud. It would be wrong to…
Ok but what difference between, say, sport bets and “prediction market” is significant enough to allow people who can directly influence the result bet on it, but only in “prediction markets”?
I think you are right in that often (but not always), it's fraud (which isn't the same as being ilegal, it could be a breach of contract or fiduciary duty) for someone who is working for a purpose, to sabotage it for another purpose for some additional gain. But the rule being broken is contract law, not criminal law, in this case.
Sometimes other laws would have to be broken to manipulate the events, like in the case of democratic elections, or wars. It's just that these are higher order laws and not contracts between parties.
It's entirely possible for an event to be manipulated where a party doesn't really break a rule or law or contract to win at it, like elon musk tweeting more than 500 times.
Furthermore it's worth noting that this doesn't have much bearing on the legality of the market itself, one thing is for manipulation to be illegal or fraud or somehow penalized, the other is the market itself being illegal.
I hope I have helped a little bit, I'm not sure what your legal training is, I'm not a lawyer, but since you are talking about 'allowing people' I analyzed this from a legal perspective based on the knowledge I have.
Prediction markets to me are a natural consequence of the post-truth world we live in. For one, it creates insanely imbalanced systems where two sides of a 50/50 market have completely opposite world views that when the market resolves may have access to sources, whether completely fake or misinfo'd, that lead them to believe the market should be settled in their favor. This then puts the prediction market in a place…
The only one I know of is the bet on whether Venezuela would be invaded, which PolyMarket didn't resolve as yes arguing that it technically wasn't an invasion. So it isn't that there's two realities really, it's just a very inconsequential word play on how we describe reality, and the only ones concerned with it are those who made the bet.