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Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting, at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on. Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going into a free agency period.

This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge.

https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...

> But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10

I don't know how you extrapolated that from the parent's comment. It literally said nothing about the cause and effect of this particular event.

Knowing the odds in a prediction market IS a big part of the problem brought up in the linked article though (and the bets themselves). Knowing how much can be made from being right creates an upper-bound on what a financially-rational malicious actor will spend in trying to change the outcome.

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

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.

>Yeah, but how do you find the person making the threats?

Subpoena Meta for all of the IPs of the account. Subpoena the ISPs for data who was using the IP. Bring in the likely people who were sending the message for questioning.

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.

Especially since a lot of the quotes in the article sound like Google-translated Hebrew.

Honestly this behavior is pretty representative of the place, in my experience.

Thanks. I’m not trained as a lawyer so sometimes make these types of mistakes. I’m happy to learn.

> I agree. This involved should be investigated and prosecuted.

Cool! Since you know who the involved persons are (as you agreed with it being an "open and shut case"), why don't you let the rest of us know, too? And while you're at it, tell the police as well. I'm sure it will help their investigation!

I don't like that the internet can be used to harm you without any recourse.

This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..

Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though, arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).

[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.

There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.

Until they start trying the carrot instead of the stick. Then it becomes a bidding war to determine the "reality"

Avoiding threats is non-optional for most Israeli journalists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Censor

Quincy Institute is not tied to Russia and condemns the invasion

ISW confirmed unauthorised edits were made, and fired a staffer over it. Not sure why you feel the need to comment this. Classic lowbrow dismissal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248

(Ad-hominem is not a counter-example btw)

And ISW is tied to Victoria Nuland.

Not going to defend Polymarket, but that's usually the case for markets that should never existed that depend heavily on opinion and/or reporting.

For example, "Will Trump talk Macron before 31 of March?". Someone is going to get scammed no matter what: the market rules will set some basic resolution scenarios, but you'll find sources saying it was a letter, or sources several countries and in several languages saying that it was an exchange between their offices/assistants, or smoke signals, or god knows what, while a single US source will say they talked without any further detail, or it is simply reported 1 month after the fact when the money has long moved wallets, and then people vote based on the combination of factoids they've been exposed to. In principle the perverse incentive of voting wrong to earn money will make you lose money on the UMA itself (unless there's a coordinated effort, which has already happened, but IME it's rather rare).

Other markets are indisputable bar black swan events, like, "how many Oscars will X win", if it's 6 it's 6 and no source will say 5 or 7. That makes opening disputes 100% a money-losing option.

Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.

I think in most of those cases it would be the threat of violence from (A) somewhat predictable entities and (B) they would be somewhat curbed by their ability to operate with anonymity and deniability.

This is so much worse since:

1. Any number of arbitrary bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have anticipated.

2. The violence can simultaneously come from multiple sides! After all, one way to ensure an article isn't revised... is to put the journalist out of commission.

3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, by betting on sides of "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"

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.

Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.

If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?

Prediction markets also have very interesting ideas.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...

Polymarket already only accepts cryptocurrencies. :)

Kalshi is worse in a sense that it also accepts fiat payments.

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.

not easy because you d need a trusted central to settle the outcomes. So far, crypto has only solved the betting part

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.

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 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?

> 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...

Making them illegal is perfectly sufficient. Underground gambling has always existed, it’s just not accessible so few people do it. A couple high profile convictions for criminals like the polymarket guy should help to limit bad actors

People are getting death threats for writing news articles as part of their job. How is this comparable?

It's far worse than regular gambling

Source?

The marketing is what bothers me the most. These books market very aggressively in app: Take Daves 5 leg parlay; Share your picks! 30% profit boost if you do a 4 leg parlay that'll never hit. Its constant engagement. Contrast this to a real bookie: Open app. Place bet. Meet once a week in parking lot. Small chatter. Pass envelope.

I feel like this is worse then gambling even, because it's not only luck. You can actually influence an outcome without cheating, hence credible deaths threats

Online (foreign based, read: tax and regulation havens) gambling casinos are flooding the social media feeds of children with AI slop or memes that have their logo/branding slapped on it. They are posting thousands of videos per day, trying to get kids to gamble on their casinos. Who are behind? The owners of gaming communities/e-sport brands like FaZe Clan etc. Basically, if you were a large youtuber in the 2010's, the goto seems to be get in on some kind of online gambling site for kids.

Many people just think certain things in history were outlawed because of 'stupid religious people'. Most of the time there's genuine reasons for banning things even if they weren't perfect or brought other harms with them. Something like usury was banned in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and it wasn't because people prior to 1900 were imbeciles, these things can cause immense instability.

Still happens at all levels of professional sport. Even the top women get messages on their IG accounts all the time by degenerate gamblers pissed off after a loss.

Getting death threats from aggrieved gamblers, MLB players starting to fear for their safety

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/columnist/bob-nigh...

I do not know about daytrading, but trading in the long term works, if you have a (technical/IT) system.

Regarding meme stocks: I do not see how this should work compared to the "real market", as on the real market you have clear signals when it is useful to enter a position (e.g. institutional attention), but on the meme "stock" market lacking those features it is much much harder to make any money - unfortunately, a lot of young people are trying their fortuna

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.

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.

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.

There is no evidence that people betting on whether Iran will strike Israel on March 15th has any benefit. Who would be the beneficiary of that?

Are you gonna tell me residents in Tel Aviv will be able to hedge their chances of surviving tomorrow?

Nor there's evidence that providing information about the fact that US will strike Venezuela does it either.

What value any of that has? None, especially considering the perverse incentives on the other side of acting on the outcome probability for financial gain which has already happened. US executive insiders have definitely bet on US attacking Venezuela on Polymarket.

You see this as "information discovery", I see it as the fact that I can lobby for dangerous events to happen just for financial gain.

Future markets have some value in some scenarios where you can hedge the outcome.

E.g. a farmer hedging crop prices can de risk his operations.

There is a hedging and the hedge works as insurance.

What's exactly the value of betting on elections or military strikes? What's being hedged?

How can you not see the financial incentives?

We have a long history of regulating both futures, derivatives and betting for very specific reasons.

But now we've relabeled it all as information gathering and price discovery.

How can you not see how the financial incentives here are speedrunning terrible events to happen?

I'm gonna rephrase it like that: would you like for a contract to exist on whether you'll be sent to hospital tomorrow in a crash accident?

Are you gonna tell me: "well, it's information discovery and it's valuable that I can wake up knowing the odds have increased!" while ignoring that there are now people out there financially motivated to make this happen?

Are you talking about the same thing everyone else is?

Imagine the conversation went like this:

A: "Maybe we shouldn't sacrifice 500 virgins to the Aztec God to predict the harvest next hear?"

B "Why not? Killing virgins to predict the harvest are well calibrated (ie accurate).."

I wouldn't be able to say this with a straight face after reading this article.

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.

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?

What are the risks involved with the newspaper versus the risks involved with Polymarket?

Answer this and I think you'll discover that "no different" is actually quite different.

Regarding the stock market: nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future. People predict the stock market, not the other way around.

3) If I won't do it, someone even worse will.

You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.

>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.

The failure of the rationalist community is they mistook rationalization for rationality.

They didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would take place because sports betting was illegal almost everywhere in the US until 2018.

Friend of a friend does announcing online.

Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours.

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 have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say.

No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said.

That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially.

You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat.

It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.

My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades.

[0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.

Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination.

The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord...

The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(

The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.

Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports.

You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.

And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part.

It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.

if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals

I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right?

I had fun betting $5 here and there

Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?

You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.

It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.

>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.

Sure, it’s fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn’t shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.

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.

Already banned in several European countries, mostly because of the betting on political events.

Prediction markets are a separate concept from cryptocurrency. You can run one on cash within the typical KYC regime. If the arguments in favor of prediction markets sound rational, maybe they are rational?

I'd argue that prediction markets are more like stock markets. Very useful, but they also create opportunities for abuse which will need to be addressed. If they are eliminated later because the current administration refuses to regulate them, that would be a huge shame.

That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one among college students is that if your roommate dies you get straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their roommates.

I think that's horribly fatalistic perspective.

Yes, humans can be bad. But humans can change. Let's not start accepting bad stuff as not so bad, simply because it is "just human behavior".

Sounds like a urban legend.

>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior

Why "can look", "but", "just"?

So, because it's a human behavior, that means it's okay that there's a huge company out there amplifying that behavior and profiting off it?

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.

> people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

It's always a honeypot, no one besides local junkies and people with personal beefs will do a murder for hire that a working person can afford.

There are people who are dumb enough to go to prison after paying like $1k-$10k for a "murder", like after a flight and hotel how much are you expecting your would-be assassin to make?

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.

> and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet.

When this existed, it was quite literally done using the prediction market model. It was an early prototype for all this insanity.

Huh, I figured they were rumors.

But it's fairly close to a tontine. But those are banned in the USA. But in those cases, rewards are split regularly between survivors. People who die with a tontine lose their share.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine

I could see a movie about that, with living tontine holders sending out hitmen to remove other tontine holders, so they can get more money.

What do you mean outlawed? It will simply just happen in a jurisdiction that does not care about it.

If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.

> insurance markets started with people in coffee houses

Regardless of whether or not that anecdote is true, insurance is one of the oldest human institutions. We have records of Hammurabi's code from ancient Babylon that pertain to insurance (including ship insurance).

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.

One has nothing to do with the other and it's a poor argument to defend prediciton markets.

The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.

That existed before the internet.

you need to learn a little finance, i.e. that subset of economics dealing with financial markets. Markets "crowdsource" values in the face of changing needs, preferences, probability and volatility, and that's an incredibly useful thing.

yeah, you can treat investing in markets as a game (fallacy: stock markets are gambling casinos), but people who are serious don't do that, so don't lay the sins of insincerity on markets.

Or from the death of family and friends.

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.

They don't call themselves that, because online gambling is illegal. It's a bit like all the piracy websites being "an archive of Nintendo content to preserve it for future generations"

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/546/187/fb1...

On aggregate, 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 a social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.

You've got the problem of prediction gambling framed incorrectly. It's not a matter of people losing money on bad bets, it's all about incentivized corruption and causing bad events (even catastrophic) so that a few may profit from them. It creates a perverse incentive for bad things to happen.

As the odds shift and the potential payout grows, prediction markets can essentially fund crimes of all kinds and cause disasters. Simple example: Imagine if the payout for someone being assassinated goes really high. Eventually, people will be placing bets on that person being assassinated and make sure it happens.

But it can get much worse than that! Imagine bets on dam collapse, buildings burning down, school shootings, even traffic accidents!

Prediction markets are a bad idea all around and should be banned everywhere. It should be a no-brainer. In fact, we should all place bets that the world leaders of countries that allow prediction markets will be assassinated!

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.

> Why do you think that some rich person who bet, say, $1 million they can actually afford will not still seek to recoup their investment, especially if it only takes some bribes and threats?

Because "only bribes and threats" are crimes for which people go to jail, and most "rich people" in the west, even in our authoritarian corruption hellhole timeline, are unwilling to engage in that nonsense because the benefits don't outweigh the risks.

Do I get to demand you cite evidence here, too? Has a wealthy person ever been caught in criminal extortion trying to goose a losing position that they could cover? I don't think that's ever happened, honestly.

I mean, yeah, it's my opinion. My gut says that the "bro" markets are all overleveraged right now, there aren't any easy winning positions at the moment (even AI stock valuations seem to have topped), and now the loans are coming due. Something's going to pop, and we're all looking for proxy measurements. This is one.

Fair point.

I'd trim the bit about Polymarket to get under the cap.

> Gamblers [...] are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

You'll lose a little topical/karma sizzle (with no "Polymarket" keyword), but it's higher fidelity.

How'd you get to here and miss all of the discussion?

Excellent job criticizing the content of my comment.

I see you’ve decided to use the strategy of an ad hominem attack. This is a really great classic one! I applaud your efforts. Since it’s too hard to refute the substance of my comment you can just point out how I’m some crazy person.

If you’re open to it I invite you to pick just one point I made and see if you can find some kind of logical flaw in my reasoning.