81–90 of 202 posts
> The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild. Ben Yorke is the only expert I see mentioned in the article, so it'd be a lot more accurate (and a lot less sensational) if The Guardian changed its title to "... says one expert" (but it wouldn't sound as interesting then, woul…
If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this? Now me, as someone who doesn’t have access to insider knowledge, can know that there’s a noticeably increased chance of what’s going to happen. I do think maybe there should be some sort of feature to prevent last minute bets that utilizes insider knowledge, and I do admit there are considerable negative externalities to this system but it’s not clear…
No. It’s an unintended side effect that risks breaking trust in the system by (the majority of) players who don’t have insider knowledge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really up to the US and Israel when this war of choice ends anymore. It's up to Iran. And Iran, justifiably, is going to demand their pound of flesh. That could require some combination of ending the (criminal) sanctions, de-militarizing the Gulf and reining in Israel. The problem is all of these things are politically untenable. This is the only reason why I think this war could continue long term because T…
Still nowhere near as bad as the Vietnam war. Arguably not even as big a mistake as the CIA coup against Mossadegh, which is the poisoned tree from which the present situation grows. I wonder how the coup in Cuba will turn out. That has to happen before the midterms, and he's unlikely to wait for Iran to resolve.
The US simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Iran. It's surrounded by mountains so there's no land staging area like we had for Iraq in 1991. Am ambphibious landing would have to be on the scale of D-Day. Personnel-wise, the military is a lot smaller than it was in 1991 too.
This is why I laugh when people panic "they're going to invade" when 5000 Marines and 2-3 amphibious landing ships are moved to the Gulf. Those are so incredibly irrelevant and wholly insufficient for any kind of ground invasion that the worse they can do is be the Bay of Pigs 2.0.
The Iranian national project has been to resist American imperialism for the past almost 50 years. The military is distributed. Lots of it is under mountains or otherwise reinforced from air bombardment and missiles. Drones are incredibly cheap to produce and there's no viable path to stop the production and launch of ballistic missiles and drones.
That's how bad a decision this is. There is no viable military path to "victory" (whatever that means here). There is no way to invade, no way to hold the country militarily and no way to manufacture regime change.
Other countries in the region are way more vulnerable to loss of infrastructure (eg desalination plants). Iran has desalination plants too but it also gets a lot of drinking water from snowmelt. Many Americans are surprised by that. Iran has ski resorts. That's how mountainous it is.
Israel has been begging the US to topple Iran for 40+ years and every president has refused. Because it's completely unviable. Until this one.
There are really three wars being fought here and the objectives are different in every case. Israel wants to turn Iran into Somalia, which is to say a fail-state. The US wanted regime change. Iran simply wants to survive. And it will.
So this is why you see Israel escalate to drag the US into a war it doesn't really want. And if Israel succeeds and somehow the regime does topple it will create a massive refugee crisis that will likely topple the governments of most of Iran's neighbours. Israel is completely fine with that. The US isn't.
Every country in the Gulf had essentially been converted into a US client state other than Iran. We went so far as to put a former al-Qaeda lieutennant in charge of Syria. A likely consequence of this move is US influence in the region is going to massively decrease because the myth of the American security guarantee has been broken.
While the war is still poular with Trump's base we'll see how long that lasts when gas hits $8/gallon and food inflation hits 20%.
Couldn't insiders just trade Brent Crude futures and do the same thing? There's more than enough liquidity in Brent that an insider can make great money.
A market with regulations, vs. no regulations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of money to be made on these markets is in the tens of millions at best. This administration doesn’t care about that. I understand why you feel that way, the numbers are just too inconsequential to even move the needle. Bit players with knowledge that have been perennially underpaid by the us govt. however, mortgage-saving money. I don’t blame them. Do you? “I’m aware of a big decision and I can make 23k o…
This is just one market. The other bets are all across the stock market.
Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this? Now me, as someone who doesn’t have access to insider knowledge, can know that there’s a noticeably increased chance of what’s going to happen. I do think maybe there should be some sort of feature to prevent last minute bets that utilizes insider knowledge, and I do admit there are considerable negative externalities to this system but it’s not clear…
> Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this? No. It’s an unintended side effect that risks breaking trust in the system by (the majority of) players who don’t have insider knowledge.
The only way you get more wisdom from “the crowd” is if it teases folks who hold non-public (or at least less public) information into the market to refine the odds towards what they should be.
Without insider information the entire concept is dead on arrival.
Yes randos are gonna gamble because they either don’t understand the game they are playing or are simple degenerate gamblers who want something else to gamble on. Others are going to think they know better or have limited insider information that isn’t worth as much as they think, or is not as accurate as they believe. And the delusional who simply think they know better for no logical reason but have convinced themselves otherwise.