Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The problem with prediction markets that has been talked about for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines the outcome not the other way around
Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the outcome of an event?
Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
unironically yes, I think with the huge payday they get for being responsible for Microsoft they should also carry an equivalent responsibility when they cause social harms. Billionaires have gotten way too comfortable.
I hate them too, but arresting them for something that they simply cannot prevent due to technical limitations, since they cannot scan in realtime all the conversations happening on their platform, is Russian-style government action, not rule of law.
If you can't do a thing safely and without harm, perhaps you should not be doing the thing? It blows my mind the number of tech people who just say "it's too hard to do it safely and without harm so we'll just do it anyway and externalize the damage to other people." Lazy, greedy, amoral douche bags.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#493I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.
Delphi markets feature prominently in Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It's an important book, and Brunner is amazing if you've never read him before. He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.
I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in before getting distracted by something else. I should give Brunner another shot.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#494Man 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.
They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community. Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
>once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community.
It's important to remember that for a brief time, people argued that gatekeeping was generally and usually a bad thing.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think they should implement KYC pretty darn quick, and perhaps there’s more they can do. But he didn’t make the death threats.
And what do you think KYC would help with? The threats were made on WhatsApp, not Polymarket. It would make more sense to campaign for better background checks on WhatsApp. A case can be made that a chat system with discoverable identities should have better safeguards. If the incentive to make a threat is financial gain rather than a pure desire to kill, restricting the means in which a threat can even be made (or i…
Polymarket is a set of blockchain smart contracts. It's banned in most countries but you can still use it by interacting with the blockchain directly.
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#496Per 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.
How'd you get to here and miss all of the discussion?
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#497Earlier 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 runs on Polygon, which, like most blockchains, has public history. If the user wasn't very careful about how they got their money into the system, it traces back to a public cryptocurrency exchange with KYC records.
...so then trace the transfer to each identity? How does knowing the first person in the chain help identify the 2nd and 3rd, etc? What if there are 50 identities and the coin has a dozen origins?
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely horrifying. Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb. Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb. This needs to be banned.
Make a bet for "$PUBLIC_FIGURE will be dead by $DATE" and see how quickly people realize that this is just a distributed assassination contract.
“Markets related to death are technically not supposed to be allowed at regulated prediction markets in the US.”
https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-khamene...
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#499Why is everyone assuming at face value that the threats are actually coming from gamblers, and not from the Israeli government trying to downplay the domestic impact of the war?
Because it's in the Israeli government's interest to make the threat from Iran look bigger, rather than smaller?
Re: Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think they should implement KYC pretty darn quick, and perhaps there’s more they can do. But he didn’t make the death threats.
And what do you think KYC would help with? The threats were made on WhatsApp, not Polymarket. It would make more sense to campaign for better background checks on WhatsApp. A case can be made that a chat system with discoverable identities should have better safeguards. If the incentive to make a threat is financial gain rather than a pure desire to kill, restricting the means in which a threat can even be made (or i…
WhatsApp would be more direct, but if they're uncooperative then knowing who is betting might provide some clues.