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 the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.
Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls.
Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
How is it useful when what we are seeing is insiders place massive bets immediately before the event resolves. Does gaining this information a few hours early provide value to society that offsets the impact of normalizing gambling and attaching incentives to bad outcomes of war, politics, etc.
It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders.
Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible though is debatable.)
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 cut down their draft length.
Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.
If we ignore that people are literally profiting from running the prediction market that happens to make it visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.
Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.
It’s not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.
Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).
What do you mean? The claim was that prediction markets are the worst thing on the internet and I mentioned some things that are worse. What else is there to explain?
It is a valueable learning experience. Especially if you are naiv enough like me, to actually give police a call after someone threatened you with death. Pretty sobering when the guy on the other end of the line just flips you off with "And what do you think are we supposed to do about it now?" Thats when you learn that some of your problems are pretty much imagined :-) and that there is a difference beween TV and real life...
But I think we can all agree there are a lot of negative effects of the new world where online gaming is without limits and government intervention is needed to some extent.
Humans will engage in exactly as terrible and selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is use our collective power as social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.
I’d say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it’s not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful things related to internet in my opinion.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time, the government can regulate thousands or millions of different types of things at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it.
it's a hyperbole dude. It accelerates the moral decay of a society, and the barriers for entry are very low. The one you mentioned is straight illegal and punishable in any jurisdiction across the globe.
It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.
I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.
Putting aside this is sort of a knee-jerk reaction, if this was actually implemented you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy. People in those positions today would vacate them for quieter roles behind the scenes, and corporations would put greater effort forth to hide their decision making processes. I don’t think it would be a better system.
Sure, and we can deal with that problem when it comes to it. For now, there are people at these companies that are clearly responsible and can be held accountable.
There's probably a useful middle ground between tossing people in jail and rewarding with great wealth, power, and influence those people whose main drive appears to be accumulation of said things without regard for their fellow citizens.
It is not capricious to hold C-suite legally accountable for their choices. Lots of corporate scandals would simply not have happened if decisionmakers had skin in the game.
If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches, CEOs can have personal liability for intentionally creating an illegal platform.
Instead we reward these people with billions for degrading the fabric of society.
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 agree. This involved should be investigated and prosecuted.
Just a pedantic, nit pick: you said "should be removed from civil society" but I think you just mean "removed from society" as in prosecuted and imprisoned.
An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely to control the narrative:
This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in the near term, it could be obscured.
Years ago I was friend with a guy who played tennis at international levels (say top 1000 players). He regularly received death treats on social networks from people Gambling on him to win/lose (and the opposite happened)
Yeah, that claim was always ludicrous to me too. Wisdom-of-crowds isn’t an unbiased decision making strategy, it’s quite biased. Crowd-wisdom works best as a limiter on the bias of other decision making strategies—this is why democracies use representatives rather than direct votes for most decisions.
And polymarket isn’t even the wisdom of crowds lol. At its greatest possible adoption it’s still the wisdom of internet-connected (mostly) white men with time and money to spend on gambling.
I don't know, man, looks like we are now literally gambling on whether people die today or tomorrow. This is even worse than underground sports gambling.
echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story'| wc -c
107
HN also forces editorializing to less than 81 characters. I too sometimes struggle to editorialize the title to something that fits and ideally does not lose context.
That original headline is longer than what HN accepts. What editorialized message are you accusing the shorter "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story" of inserting?
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
Cryptocurrency itself was designed to enable crime. Why else would one want an end-run around governments and law-enforcement, unless one were a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free?
Not all governments are good, trustworthy or even exist at all. For people in an oppressed or even full out broken society, being this level of criminal is acceptable.
But yes, something used to work around bad governments, will also be used against good governments. Every legit tool can be also abused.
A statement made from either privilige, ignorance or both.
Just because you might agree with the actions and behaviour of your current government enough, that you don't mind them being able to have a hand in your currency, doesn't mean that can't change.
So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?
> So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?
That's not how I read GP; "Why would you want to do an end-run around the government when using currency?" is different to, well, whatever it is you are saying (I'm not sure I can decipher it well enough - seems to be "using currency is bad when it goes against laws", but I think that's fine too, so not really sure what your message is - maybe you can clarify?)
Using legal tender is not a problem. Using barter (which is what using crypocurrencies boils down to) is also not a problem. Lack of reporting your income to the tax authorities is a problem. Most bartering systems are too small to warrant the attention of tax authorities, but cryptocurrencies facilitate bartering at scale, which does warrant interest.
Many kinds of betting markets are or were banned all over the world. The sky didn’t fall, and what underground markets existed didn’t lead to huge gang wars or whatever.
Given that the article is discussing some of the bad behavior typically associated with dark markets (death threats, extortion, fixing) happening in the light, what makes you think that banning them would make things worse?
So, just to point it out: people don't get violent and criminal magically because they made a bet. They get violent and criminal to backstop a bet they can't cover. The story here isn't that horrible criminals are using Polymarket. It's that Polymarket bettors are overleveraged, and at the margin some of them turn to crime to avoid losing their shirts.
We've all been looking around for the trigger for the market-crash-we-all-know-is-coming. Seems like "too much betting on a stupid war of choice" is just dumb enough to fit the timeline we've been trapped in. Very on-brand.
In other news: I'm almost entirely out of volatiles in my own portfolio right now. Cash and bonds until this pops. Frankly the chances are that today will be the day[1] are about as high as they've ever been.
[1] Trump, sigh, basically went on camera and capitulated, telling the world that there is no plan, the US doesn't have the capability to ensure trade through Hormuz and that Iran will deny access until Iran decides otherwise. Markets don't like uncertainty, but they really, really hate losing wars.
So... no, it's not? You're saying everyone who makes a bet on anything is doing so compulsively? Literally everyone has bet on something. The absolutely overwhelming majority of "bets" placed (via whatever definition you want to give them) are basically benign and don't reflect mental illness.
But even so, you're missing my point: even compulsive gamblers don't as a general rule resort to criminal extortion to cover their losses. The interpretation here isn't about the psychology of the criminals, that's sort of speciously true.
It's that the fact that "regular bettors" become "criminals", and are doing so at scale, is a proxy measurement for the amount of leverage in the system.
As I read through the article it seemed more and more as I read like this issue has actually very little to do with gambling or the gamblers on polymarket.
The issue at hand is that Israel has made itself one of the most hated countries in its region and in the world.
In my opinion, they have largely made their own bed due to their own actions against their neighbors.
Can I really get mad if someone on the internet is upset with me as an American for my country’s sins? They may send me empty death threats but my country bombed an elementary school just this year, as a part of an illegal unauthorized war that my country’s leaders can’t even explain coherently.
Downvote if you are suited up to fight AIPAC’s war!
Prediction markets need to be banned globally ASAP, but it would've helped the article to bring proof of:
- the emails
- the whatsapp messages
- the discord messages
- the X messages
Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing, in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his direct threats, some of those public like X replies.
That is correct, but it's not to media's credit. Most journalists say basically, "Trust me, I'm the authority, I wouldn't be allowed to say this if it were simply lies. I could prove it to you but I won't, at worst I'll be forced to prove it to my peers. (And you aren't one, peasant)." They practically never link to the scientific paper they just reported on, certainly not to anything that could let us check politically controversial claims ourselves.
And how could it be otherwise? You aren't the customer. Ads, or worse, billionaire political patronage, is what pays the bills for media companies. Their authority - the blind trust people have in them - is what makes them valuable for their actual customers. They're not doing science, the last thing they want is to make it easy to check their work (although, maybe I'm too charitable to scientists too here, if they make it easier to check their work it's often the bare minimum, but I digress).
One of the original points of WikiLeaks was to make a kind of journalism where claims were easy to check from the sources. But you can see how controversial that was.
I'm assuming you've never read a news article before, because news articles routinely contain reported speech without having to provide extra evidence of that speech having taken place.
You're being dismissive and aggressive while dodging the questions.
I routinely read the news, and I've been taught in school that critical reading involves doubting and focusing on facts, sources and proofs. No sources and verifiable proofs? No facts.
Which is why the journalist put emphasis on his sources behind the missile attack: he knows how much sources and proofs are important.
If you can fake screenshots, why not fake them, which is something that can be at least analyzed for tampering?
Even more: the author mentions X public replies, where are the links?
Narrowly (skipping the question of whether this journalist should have included copies of evidence), GP is right: most journalists with verified source material quote it/assert what it contains, rather than linking or copying it verbatim. That’s how serious journalism has always worked. The reputation of a newsroom is understood to back up a reporter’s assertion about their source.
Whether or not it should work that way is a separate question. But claiming that raw sources not being included is cause for suspicion is incorrect.
1. Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and questioned and they are regularly debunked.
2. The author mentions X replies, those are public, where are they?
I'm gonna stand by my opinion: you deliver information, you provide all the evidence that is sensible to share. That's what journalism, especially investigative journalism does, and OSint can go a long way in helping.
> Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and questioned and they are regularly debunked.
How? If I get two phone numbers and send myself a message and make a screenshot, how are you going to debunk that? It’s a legit screenshot, you have no way of verifying anything.
And I can also just import self written emails into thunderbird and take a screenshot. There’s nothing to analyze.
I agree that he could have linked the Public stuff though.
Prediction markets on death are an assassination market. That's why they're against the rules even on Polymarket and Kalshi.
Prediction markets on terrorist attacks and wars are one step back from that, but similar negative side effects are possible. And, regardless of what people are betting on, the corruption incentive appears where it did not previously, resulting in things like this.
(I don't think there's literally an Iranian missile operator opening Polymarket, taking out a position for "missile lands on Israel", and then pressing the launch button, but ultimately that's what uncensored markets with uncensored movement of money would enable)
1. It's not something I don't like, it's something plain illegal in most of the world, including the US under the Dodd-Frank act, which the current executive has decided to not enforce.
2. The reason it is illegal it is beyond obvious: basic economics and game theory explain you how dangerous it is tying real world events with financial incentives.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the “it’ll just go underground” claim seems silly. The negative effects of driving a gambling market to the economic fringe are already happening in the mainstream market: fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.
What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?
If your argument is "people are going to bet and influence world events on the dark web", the argument ignores economics.
The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to access and liquidity is small.
E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to influence the events at the same time, let alone how complex would such a system be.
Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the only way paying out these bets at scale is possible.
"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
So you are saying that if business entity starts a pharma company that creates a drug for some kind of novel disease, but the disease does not currently exist, they will take steps to make an epidemic of it more likely?
But the Times of Israel reporter reported that a missile hit - and where. The censor tries to prevent reports like that, for (ostensibly) security reasons - telling the enemy where their missiles hit.
I don't understand what are you saying. The journalist published an article claiming that a missile struck without being intercepted (although with no damage). The gamblers wanted the journalist to retract and say that the missile was intercepted.
Are you saying that the gamblers were actually the censors or that the reality was that the missile was indeed intercepted and somehow the censors forced the journalist to say it wasn't?
The rules don't apply for reporters outside of Israel, and this was historically been the way that Israeli journos and other bypass the censorship completely.
The author is being pressured (IMO) because the degens feel like they can threaten him (physical proximity)
I think it's the opposite - the censorship has made the Israeli public believe they're safer than they really are. The US is lying about their stockpiles and frantically moving resources from East Asia to try and shore up missile defense in the Middle East.
These people believed that no Iranian missiles could possibly get through and instead of accepting they were misled they're shooting the messenger
I live in Israel. There is fake news being spread about Tel Aviv being destroyed and Israel being hit hard. This is absolutely false. The volume of rockets is way lower than the 12 Day War. In fact, I even do the irresponsible thing of not even going to the bomb shelter when the odd siren rings out.
There was a decision made by the security establishment not to allow reporting on Iranian missile hits in order to make it harder for the Iranians to do BDA.
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.
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 the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.
Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls.
Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders.
And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
How is it useful when what we are seeing is insiders place massive bets immediately before the event resolves. Does gaining this information a few hours early provide value to society that offsets the impact of normalizing gambling and attaching incentives to bad outcomes of war, politics, etc.
> insider trading is the point
Says who?
It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders.
Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible though is debatable.)
If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
>And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys?"
I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.
Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
Conan hosted the Oscars.
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 cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.
Sounds like a urban legend.
>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior
Why "can look", "but", "just"?
I think GP is saying it's not the prediction market that's bad, but human nature itself. The prediction market just makes it more visible.
If we ignore that people are literally profiting from running the prediction market that happens to make it visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.
Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.
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.
It’s not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.
Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).
As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.
I am sorry for that and I can see that it’s bad, but the internet just has a lot of things that are even worse.
That’s not an explanation or an excuse at all.
What do you mean? The claim was that prediction markets are the worst thing on the internet and I mentioned some things that are worse. What else is there to explain?
It is a valueable learning experience. Especially if you are naiv enough like me, to actually give police a call after someone threatened you with death. Pretty sobering when the guy on the other end of the line just flips you off with "And what do you think are we supposed to do about it now?" Thats when you learn that some of your problems are pretty much imagined :-) and that there is a difference beween TV and real life...
Yeah CSAM is worse.
But I think we can all agree there are a lot of negative effects of the new world where online gaming is without limits and government intervention is needed to some extent.
Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter.
So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.
Humans will engage in exactly as terrible and selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is use our collective power as social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.
By far?!
There's a very long list.
I’d say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it’s not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful things related to internet in my opinion.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time, the government can regulate thousands or millions of different types of things at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it.
Or from the death of family and friends.
Easily the worst thing and it’s not even close? Really?
Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days
I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.
it's a hyperbole dude. It accelerates the moral decay of a society, and the barriers for entry are very low. The one you mentioned is straight illegal and punishable in any jurisdiction across the globe.
That existed before the internet.
It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.
I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.
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.
Putting aside this is sort of a knee-jerk reaction, if this was actually implemented you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy. People in those positions today would vacate them for quieter roles behind the scenes, and corporations would put greater effort forth to hide their decision making processes. I don’t think it would be a better system.
>you’d just see the role of the CEO change to basically be a highly-paid fall-guy.
That seems to be assuming a world where CEOs actually face meaningful consequences and that feels like a good start.
Sure, and we can deal with that problem when it comes to it. For now, there are people at these companies that are clearly responsible and can be held accountable.
>A sane system would just throw him in jail.
<facepalm>
A capricious system that interprets based on whim, politics and influence is a large part of how we got here.
There's probably a useful middle ground between tossing people in jail and rewarding with great wealth, power, and influence those people whose main drive appears to be accumulation of said things without regard for their fellow citizens.
It is not capricious to hold C-suite legally accountable for their choices. Lots of corporate scandals would simply not have happened if decisionmakers had skin in the game.
If CISOs can have personal liability for data breaches, CEOs can have personal liability for intentionally creating an illegal platform.
Instead we reward these people with billions for degrading the fabric of society.
yea just throw the CEO of microsoft in jail too because illegal transactions are set via Xbox live.
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.
Betting markets are legally required to have KYC. If you or I operated a casino illegally we would ABSOLUTELY be thrown in jail.
Do you seriously think fraudulent Xbox live transactions are on the same level of the heinous insider trading going on in betting markets?
Or do you just think C-suite should be legally immune from accountability overall?
Polymarket's decentralized and anonymous nature was an intentional choice by its creator precisely because it enables illegal, anonymous transactions.
I agree. This involved should be investigated and prosecuted.
Just a pedantic, nit pick: you said "should be removed from civil society" but I think you just mean "removed from society" as in prosecuted and imprisoned.
"Civil society" has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society
If the gamblers are outwith Israel, there's not a lot the Israeli police can do. They're not going to go full Operation 'Wrath of God' for this guy.
It’s probably an open and shut case regarding being illegal but prosecution could be hard. How are you going to find the person?
I don't like that the internet can be used to harm you without any recourse.
An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely to control the narrative:
https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in the near term, it could be obscured.
FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...
(as reported by Quincy Institute, a thoroughly pro-Russian think tank)
The gambling market is really bringing out the worst of us.
Years ago I was friend with a guy who played tennis at international levels (say top 1000 players). He regularly received death treats on social networks from people Gambling on him to win/lose (and the opposite happened)
B-b-but futarchy and unbiased decisionmaking means well-calibrated markets could be a net good for society!! /hj
Yeah, that claim was always ludicrous to me too. Wisdom-of-crowds isn’t an unbiased decision making strategy, it’s quite biased. Crowd-wisdom works best as a limiter on the bias of other decision making strategies—this is why democracies use representatives rather than direct votes for most decisions.
And polymarket isn’t even the wisdom of crowds lol. At its greatest possible adoption it’s still the wisdom of internet-connected (mostly) white men with time and money to spend on gambling.
Ugh, the sophistry (or at least self-deceiving arguments) people throw around to defend these markets makes my stomach churn.
I don't know, man, looks like we are now literally gambling on whether people die today or tomorrow. This is even worse than underground sports gambling.
Reply of the year. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry.
Anything that requires a ton of criminal law, regulation, and enforcement around it should have to meet some kind of standard of societal benefit.
The entertainment value of betting does not meet that standard, in my opinion.
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
That original headline is longer than what HN accepts. What editorialized message are you accusing the shorter "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story" of inserting?
Man, something like this is going to be a plot point in a movie/tv series soon.
Could work in some crime procedural.
This is an old plot, done already in dozens of different variations.
One has to wonder if the people placing these bets didn’t have some plans of their own.
A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.
This part of the story stood out for me:
>More emails arrived in my inbox.
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
What do you think, could this help this issue?
Yep, far worse than cryptocurrency
At least cryptocurrencies had some nice ideas behind them. Just sad they almost immediately got co-opted by swindlers and criminals.
Cryptocurrency itself was designed to enable crime. Why else would one want an end-run around governments and law-enforcement, unless one were a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free?
Not all governments are good, trustworthy or even exist at all. For people in an oppressed or even full out broken society, being this level of criminal is acceptable.
But yes, something used to work around bad governments, will also be used against good governments. Every legit tool can be also abused.
A statement made from either privilige, ignorance or both.
Just because you might agree with the actions and behaviour of your current government enough, that you don't mind them being able to have a hand in your currency, doesn't mean that can't change.
> a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free
E.g. a Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks?
So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?
> So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?
That's not how I read GP; "Why would you want to do an end-run around the government when using currency?" is different to, well, whatever it is you are saying (I'm not sure I can decipher it well enough - seems to be "using currency is bad when it goes against laws", but I think that's fine too, so not really sure what your message is - maybe you can clarify?)
Using legal tender is not a problem. Using barter (which is what using crypocurrencies boils down to) is also not a problem. Lack of reporting your income to the tax authorities is a problem. Most bartering systems are too small to warrant the attention of tax authorities, but cryptocurrencies facilitate bartering at scale, which does warrant interest.
Wait until they ban prediction markets, then they will re-appear, and you will have to use cryptocurrency :)
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t already a huge crypto-only dark market where lots of rich criminals bet huge sums.
If you’re in that telegram channel, though, I imagine the threats on your life are a lot more credible than the ones discussed in TFA.
Polymarket already only accepts cryptocurrencies. :)
Kalshi is worse in a sense that it also accepts fiat payments.
AI is 1000%+ far worse to be fair.
Cryptocurrency (although I hate it) you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
With AI, you're participating whether you like it or not. Layoffs, Job displacement, etc. There is no opt out here.
Once you're replaced with AI, that is it.
At least with cryptocurrency and prediction markets you can make money but it's obviously risky.
Ultimately with AI it would just push people to cryptocurrencies and prediction markets.
> Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
What if there's a prediction market on your life? Would you say you're still "not participating, so no harm done" ?
> Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
Did you read the article? It is about a journalist getting death threats from members of a prediction market.
Dude, stop.
Do you have a positive defense of betting markets? You're spraying defensive whataboutism all over this thread and lowering the discourse.
> Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
Harm: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
Harm: https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...
Harm: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/prediction-markets-merkley-b...
Why did you send in an article that was completely irrelevant that has nothing to do with prediction markets?
Betting markets of all kinds have existed for a long time and haven't been banned.
Banning on particular betting market prediction markets altogether and pushing it underground would make things far worse.
Many kinds of betting markets are or were banned all over the world. The sky didn’t fall, and what underground markets existed didn’t lead to huge gang wars or whatever.
Given that the article is discussing some of the bad behavior typically associated with dark markets (death threats, extortion, fixing) happening in the light, what makes you think that banning them would make things worse?
I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.
Psychopaths don't care about ethics, much less if money is involved. At best they feel indifference, at worst enjoyment.
Athletes are also receiving death threats from gamblers.
* https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
... and many, many other stories.
Does the "Continue without disabling" button on the adblock popup just not do anything for anyone else?
The site is completely unusable. Even with reader mode it somehow aggressively refreshed. Gave up in disgust.
So, just to point it out: people don't get violent and criminal magically because they made a bet. They get violent and criminal to backstop a bet they can't cover. The story here isn't that horrible criminals are using Polymarket. It's that Polymarket bettors are overleveraged, and at the margin some of them turn to crime to avoid losing their shirts.
We've all been looking around for the trigger for the market-crash-we-all-know-is-coming. Seems like "too much betting on a stupid war of choice" is just dumb enough to fit the timeline we've been trapped in. Very on-brand.
In other news: I'm almost entirely out of volatiles in my own portfolio right now. Cash and bonds until this pops. Frankly the chances are that today will be the day[1] are about as high as they've ever been.
[1] Trump, sigh, basically went on camera and capitulated, telling the world that there is no plan, the US doesn't have the capability to ensure trade through Hormuz and that Iran will deny access until Iran decides otherwise. Markets don't like uncertainty, but they really, really hate losing wars.
This argument is sophistry, the nature of gambling is that gamblers over-leverage themselves compulsively.
So... no, it's not? You're saying everyone who makes a bet on anything is doing so compulsively? Literally everyone has bet on something. The absolutely overwhelming majority of "bets" placed (via whatever definition you want to give them) are basically benign and don't reflect mental illness.
But even so, you're missing my point: even compulsive gamblers don't as a general rule resort to criminal extortion to cover their losses. The interpretation here isn't about the psychology of the criminals, that's sort of speciously true.
It's that the fact that "regular bettors" become "criminals", and are doing so at scale, is a proxy measurement for the amount of leverage in the system.
As I read through the article it seemed more and more as I read like this issue has actually very little to do with gambling or the gamblers on polymarket.
The issue at hand is that Israel has made itself one of the most hated countries in its region and in the world.
In my opinion, they have largely made their own bed due to their own actions against their neighbors.
Can I really get mad if someone on the internet is upset with me as an American for my country’s sins? They may send me empty death threats but my country bombed an elementary school just this year, as a part of an illegal unauthorized war that my country’s leaders can’t even explain coherently.
Downvote if you are suited up to fight AIPAC’s war!
Prediction markets need to be banned globally ASAP, but it would've helped the article to bring proof of:
- the emails
- the whatsapp messages
- the discord messages
- the X messages
Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing, in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his direct threats, some of those public like X replies.
Journalists do not normally work like that. That might be how beefs are fought on social media, but of course screenshots are easy to fake anyway.
That is correct, but it's not to media's credit. Most journalists say basically, "Trust me, I'm the authority, I wouldn't be allowed to say this if it were simply lies. I could prove it to you but I won't, at worst I'll be forced to prove it to my peers. (And you aren't one, peasant)." They practically never link to the scientific paper they just reported on, certainly not to anything that could let us check politically controversial claims ourselves.
And how could it be otherwise? You aren't the customer. Ads, or worse, billionaire political patronage, is what pays the bills for media companies. Their authority - the blind trust people have in them - is what makes them valuable for their actual customers. They're not doing science, the last thing they want is to make it easy to check their work (although, maybe I'm too charitable to scientists too here, if they make it easier to check their work it's often the bare minimum, but I digress).
One of the original points of WikiLeaks was to make a kind of journalism where claims were easy to check from the sources. But you can see how controversial that was.
I don't understand what your point is.
What is the reader assumed to do about an article that does not bring any proof?
The video of the missile exploding is also easy to fake, but it's an important element behind the reporting.
I'm assuming you've never read a news article before, because news articles routinely contain reported speech without having to provide extra evidence of that speech having taken place.
You're being dismissive and aggressive while dodging the questions.
I routinely read the news, and I've been taught in school that critical reading involves doubting and focusing on facts, sources and proofs. No sources and verifiable proofs? No facts.
Which is why the journalist put emphasis on his sources behind the missile attack: he knows how much sources and proofs are important.
If you can fake screenshots, why not fake them, which is something that can be at least analyzed for tampering?
Even more: the author mentions X public replies, where are the links?
Narrowly (skipping the question of whether this journalist should have included copies of evidence), GP is right: most journalists with verified source material quote it/assert what it contains, rather than linking or copying it verbatim. That’s how serious journalism has always worked. The reputation of a newsroom is understood to back up a reporter’s assertion about their source.
Whether or not it should work that way is a separate question. But claiming that raw sources not being included is cause for suspicion is incorrect.
Quoting vs providing screenshots makes exactly 0 difference regarding level of proof. Faking an email or WhatsApp message is about 2 minutes of work.
1. Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and questioned and they are regularly debunked.
2. The author mentions X replies, those are public, where are they?
I'm gonna stand by my opinion: you deliver information, you provide all the evidence that is sensible to share. That's what journalism, especially investigative journalism does, and OSint can go a long way in helping.
> Fake emails or screenshots can still be analyzed and questioned and they are regularly debunked.
How? If I get two phone numbers and send myself a message and make a screenshot, how are you going to debunk that? It’s a legit screenshot, you have no way of verifying anything.
And I can also just import self written emails into thunderbird and take a screenshot. There’s nothing to analyze.
I agree that he could have linked the Public stuff though.
Why does everything you don't like need to be banned?
Downvoters:
I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned anything in the history of technology.
Prediction markets on death are an assassination market. That's why they're against the rules even on Polymarket and Kalshi.
Prediction markets on terrorist attacks and wars are one step back from that, but similar negative side effects are possible. And, regardless of what people are betting on, the corruption incentive appears where it did not previously, resulting in things like this.
(I don't think there's literally an Iranian missile operator opening Polymarket, taking out a position for "missile lands on Israel", and then pressing the launch button, but ultimately that's what uncensored markets with uncensored movement of money would enable)
1. It's not something I don't like, it's something plain illegal in most of the world, including the US under the Dodd-Frank act, which the current executive has decided to not enforce.
2. The reason it is illegal it is beyond obvious: basic economics and game theory explain you how dangerous it is tying real world events with financial incentives.
Illegal or not, trying to ban it won't work.
You'll just push it underground and it will get even worse.
The cat is out of the bag.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the “it’ll just go underground” claim seems silly. The negative effects of driving a gambling market to the economic fringe are already happening in the mainstream market: fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.
What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?
You don't need to "try to ban it", you ban it.
If your argument is "people are going to bet and influence world events on the dark web", the argument ignores economics.
The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to access and liquidity is small.
E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to influence the events at the same time, let alone how complex would such a system be.
Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the only way paying out these bets at scale is possible.
"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
>"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
But don't you think that will be the "good" majority? And the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?
> the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?
…which they already did before this market was made mainstream.
Why is everything you like protected from being banned?
This is an argument against all laws, which probably deserves more than a couple sentences.
Why do you apparently like a system that lets people bet on atrocities and then take steps to make said atrocities more likely?
So you are saying that if business entity starts a pharma company that creates a drug for some kind of novel disease, but the disease does not currently exist, they will take steps to make an epidemic of it more likely?
And you think banning it would 100% work?
and where did I say I liked it?
I'm not responding to your gish gallop BS.
Why do you (obviously) think betting markets are good?
The level of censorship in Israel right now is off the charts: https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.
But the Times of Israel reporter reported that a missile hit - and where. The censor tries to prevent reports like that, for (ostensibly) security reasons - telling the enemy where their missiles hit.
I don't understand what are you saying. The journalist published an article claiming that a missile struck without being intercepted (although with no damage). The gamblers wanted the journalist to retract and say that the missile was intercepted.
Are you saying that the gamblers were actually the censors or that the reality was that the missile was indeed intercepted and somehow the censors forced the journalist to say it wasn't?
The rules don't apply for reporters outside of Israel, and this was historically been the way that Israeli journos and other bypass the censorship completely.
The author is being pressured (IMO) because the degens feel like they can threaten him (physical proximity)
I think it's the opposite - the censorship has made the Israeli public believe they're safer than they really are. The US is lying about their stockpiles and frantically moving resources from East Asia to try and shore up missile defense in the Middle East.
These people believed that no Iranian missiles could possibly get through and instead of accepting they were misled they're shooting the messenger
There is a clip embedded within the article that corroborates what the journalist wrote.
I live in Israel. There is fake news being spread about Tel Aviv being destroyed and Israel being hit hard. This is absolutely false. The volume of rockets is way lower than the 12 Day War. In fact, I even do the irresponsible thing of not even going to the bomb shelter when the odd siren rings out.
There was a decision made by the security establishment not to allow reporting on Iranian missile hits in order to make it harder for the Iranians to do BDA.