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Only aristocrats can play that game. The soldier is being punished for doing something not allowed for his class status.

This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power.

At this point insider trading issue has run away so hard I don't see how it can be tamed without revolutionary frameworks. If we look at crypto then I'm not sure we want to live in a world where insider trading is normalized either so we ought to start working on these new frameworks as soon as possible but nobody seems to care.

Did congress do it with classified ops data, or with their voting stuff?

The main difference between the two is that betting on the date of a classified op indirectly reveals classified data that can tip off an adversary and cost lives.

Is there a specific case of someone in congress disclosing classified information by betting on it that we can link to?

I actually don’t know the details of the specific crimes. Eg if you’re a soldier and you post on Facebook that you’re about to go on a raid to depose a head of state, that’s presumably a secrecy violation you would be punished severely for. The insider trading can be like this too in that you’re improperly using the information you are privy to due to your being an insider. If you’re a congressperson and you tweet that the government is about to do such a raid, I don’t know what the legality of that is – perhaps you have some kind of privilege to reveal these things and any censure must happen politically (eg impeachment, losing elections, etc) rather than legally. I don’t know what the rules for insider trading would then be – legislators are not insiders in the way that soldiers are.

Ignoring the moral argument, it isn’t all that clear to me that this would actually be a crime for a legislator under US securities law. It may be that new laws would be required to be able to punish legislators for this kind of behaviour.

> senate and congress

Senate and congress are both elected. Their re-election is effectively jury nullification.

The people do not care about the crimes.

I like how when people talk about corruption they think about Nancy Pelosi or some other congressman/senator making couple million $ on the stock market over their entire careers due to insider trading. Just last week Trump made a bet of around $1B on the price of oil going down before doing a fake announcement.

Already known to the classic Roman people:

"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" [1]

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...

It's not legal for him, but it is for them.

Yes, the military have fewer rights than civilians. That's a feature.

Which specific senate and congress members made Polymarket bets on the Maduro raid? Oh, none of them? So it's not "the exact same", then, is it?

The only reason we know about the trades in Congress is because they're following the law and reporting them. I don't think there is any evidence that members of Congress: 1) have access to classified info like this, and 2) are betting on polymarket.

That's not to say the behavior isn't extremely slimey but they are acting within the law. Your comment doesn't mention the executive branch and the various crypto "ventures" going on, like the Whitehouse dinner for investors of $TRUMP coin of which we have no idea who invested or what they got from it.

Any evidence of that?

Think about it. He's stealing from the US military. The politicians are stealing from you. Who's laughing now?

Palpatine: I am the senate!

Some, and probably very few.

When the people feel everyone is corrupt without any evidence then the next step is getting actual corrupt leaders like Trump's government and soldiers like this that feel corruption is standard behavior

Its a big club and you ain't in it.

Yes. This is Trump signaling that insider trading is for actual insiders only.

> Count 5 - Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity

For a moment there I read this as the unlawful activity was Maduro's arrest, and someone made money on that fact.

Huh that’s interesting. The sycophants in DC seem to be able to do everything listed here with no repercussions.

Count 3, how is this a commodity?

Count 1, 4, and 5 are the crime of committing a crime. Crime 1 is commiting a crime for personal reasons. 4 is commiting a crime over the wire. 5 is commiting a crime using money.

The only real crime is Count 2: Theft of info.

> Count 4 - Wire Fraud

I almost always see this charge. Seems too strong as law

Why would this be civilian versus the business of a JAG?

It's interesting they don't think they can get him for leaking classified information. To me that seems like the biggest issue--I mean sure, it's bad he made money on it, but it would have been really bad if he'd gotten someone killed by blabbing to the internet.

I just couldn't, in good conscience, keep bombing childrens schools under such demoralising conditions.

On the flip side: who if not me and my precision guided munitions, will protect America (and freedom) from the clear and present danger of 8 year old iranian girls.

Imagine doing an easy tour in your air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office and then getting blown to bits by a ballistic missile because no one bothered to tell you about the war that was being initiated which would cause such missiles in retaliation. Yeah, that's demoralizing too.

> would be highly demoralizing

Those people should quit. Sour grapes isn’t an excuse for putting others’ lives at risk.

Or, your brigade’s master sergeant needs the invasion to hit on the 28th rather than Mar 1st.

> It seems like it would be highly demoralizing to US soldiers that they are prosecuted for betting on the outcomes of the battles they are risking their lives for but those insider trading commanding them aren't.

Why? The enlisted military has never had any issue with similar double standards in the past. George 'AWOL' Bush handily swept the military vote, as did Donald 'Bone Spurs' Trump.

Likewise, veterans routinely and overwhelmingly vote for people who cut veteran support and benefits, over people who don't.

If they think those people are fit to lead them, who are we to tell them they aren't?

Greed is always the undoing of such criminals.

If he'd stuck to $500 - $1000 bets, he could have stayed under the radar. And, over the period of his career, earned well north of $400k.

> They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information.

Representing only public information without agenda is useful in itself. Words are cheap, and which words you get to see and which words you don't get to see is according to some non-truth incentive. Prediction markets say "you get to make money if you know what the truth actually is". Media says "you get to make money if you entertain people".

It's unfortunate there's also significant negative side effects to financialized prediction markets. I'm more favorable to non-financial prediction markets like Manifold, which say "you get to have social status if you know what the truth is". Seems as though that's the right balance, although you could see how such non-financial prediction markets can be more easily defeated by dedicated non-truth actors if it became prominent in the public conversation.

In theory no, because it provides financial incentive to perform a comprehensive analysis of available data or conduct thorough investigations. In practice, yep.

The original point is to use crowd wisdom. Crowds seem better than single individuals to predict outcomes of certain types of events.

I think this is visible in sports betting markets. Unless all games are rigged, games outcomes are fairly random events, and betting markets are pretty good at assessing the probabilities of a team winning. Same thing happens in finance. Option markets are really good at assessing the probabilities of asset movements.

The thing though is that these markets are only good in predicting recurring events like game results or financial asset movements. They are good _overall_, as in, if you take 100,000 sport games, the bettings odds are going to be overall in line with what actually happens.

Hence some people deduced that crowds with skin in the game were wise in predicting random stuff. And what happened then is that some of them thought this kind of predictive power could apply to any kind of event, and then predictive markets were created, with the idea that crowds could magically come up with odds for anything, and that would be fairly correct. But what works for recurring events don't hold for single events like Maduro's capture or the end of the Iran war. So the odds in these market is only the result of influence and insider information.

The result is that the odds are generally completely off, unless there is insider information. That's kind of what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The bets there were on loans defaulting. These events are rare enough that it's impossible to assess their probability easily. And so banks relied on rating agencies (influence), to price the odds of these events happening. Rating agencies were wrong on a lot of these bets, meaning all the bets were placed at very very wrong prices, resulting in the crisis we saw.

The weird outcome of it all, is that those prediction markets have become insider information detectors. That's how they caught the guy. Whoever is winning big on these markets is necessarily cheating.

But I guess the main takeaway for me is that society is in such a state that a lot of people actually bet big on these things. Probably a combination of being fed dreams of fortune since childhood and the american dream not delivering. It's all very sad.

It would do nothing. You'd get an increase in derivatives volume with the same underlying effect.

From the article:

unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.

These two videos might be of some help

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A654vzQTGbQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4

Kalshi is regulated and trading in this way on Kalshi is explicitly illegal. PolyMarket does not operate under US laws and I don't know if the same insider trading rules are a separate violation on top of just participating.

All fungible markets are prediction markets. The idea that only some are is a mirage.

Which is also horrifying if you think about it for more than a second.

"Want something to happen? Bet a lot of money that it won't" goes both ways. "Want to make money and have power over missile systems? Bet, and then make something happen."

“Super markets trade money for food. An obvious outcome is that someone without money will shoot the employees to steal food. Therefore the purpose of supermarkets is to facilitate murder”

> nabbing the little guy

Politics aside, he isn't a "little guy". He apparently holds the rank of master sergeant. That's a senior battalion-level role and somewhat political.

This isn't some random E-4 getting dragged.

One soldier being arrested does not prevent others from being arrested. If anything, it sets a precedent.

Yesterday, people could justifiably say that betting on polymarket had essentially no consequences.

Today, we learned there can be consequences.

If in a year’s time this is the only person to ever be charged, that’s a different story.

As other comments said, this wasn’t exactly a “little guy” in rank.

He also made it all very obvious and traceable for them through the email addresses he used. From the report it doesn’t appear that he made any effort to conceal his identity or hide his tracks until afterward, by which time it was too late.

They don't call 'em cannon fodder for nothin'!

Per Goodfellas, "Paulie and the gang" ended up in jail while Henry Hill received witness protection. So, it wasn't just for show

When the history of this administration is written

I often think about how much we can trust history 20-30 years from now. It is hard to trust history from hundreds of years ago, either because it was written by victors or because there just isn't enough material in the first place. I suppose we have the opposite problem now (and in the future) - too much noise and junk, whole bunch of it generated by AI slop - where does one even start?

For everyone saying this isn't some little guy... compared to the administration which is engaging in the same thing, it's a little guy designed to be a distraction.

Oh, and let’s not forget the politicians like Pelosi, the Clintons and many other top Democratic Party politicians, repeatedly engaged in insider trading of stocks, often times using classified information, for multi million dollars profits. Almost never investigated. Practically never convicted.

Everything about this statement is completely wrong.

False, conspiratorial, dogmatic, juvenile.

The arrest and indictment of someone for betting on Polymarket - which has not yet been tested in court - is going to give huge attention and precedence to the likely illegal activities of some of Polymarket shenanigans coming out of the white house.

Edit: if this was political, it would be pushed in the other direction. This is the NY DOJ doing their jobs.

Wilholt's essay is a nice one. But it amounts to defining the opposition in a way that's easy to tear apart followed by tearing it apart. It's a cute trick but isn't much of a basis for serious discussion.

Watch: Wilholt's essay consists of exactly and only one indefensible, rhetorical sleight of hand. Consequently, no one can honestly defend it. Attempts to do so are undeserving of serious scrutiny.

After tearing down a strawman, he claims high ground:

> The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

But you'll get a fair bit of support for Wilholt's so-called anti-conservative principle from a fair number of prominent conservative thinkers.

I made a similar argument and was downvoted. Yeah, the well-connected pay a fine when caught. This guy's mistake was not knowing he did not belong to that club. He amounted to no more than a fall guy.

There seems to be a pattern that if someone who was not pre-selected by some elites ends up making their own money (I.e. real 'self-made') they are swiftly attacked by the system. On the other hand, look at Nancy Pelosi; she didn't get into any trouble.

Are people allowed to be self-made anymore?

For me personally, after years of planning and hard work, I once managed to secure myself about $40k of passive income from a blockchain in crypto; this lasted a few years but eventually the founders suspiciously abandoned the entire tech stack (for no reason) and switched to Ethereum; this destroyed the opportunity for me; literally lost that stream entirely. Now, recently, I was able to re-establish a passive income stream of about $10k per year from a non-crypto source; this is from an opportunity I took over 10 years ago... I'm worried about that being taken away somehow.

Authority-wise, a MSG in the army isn't exactly a little guy either. That's quite a senior role. In their battalion they likely head either operations, intelligence or supply.

This isn't joe schlub making side bets here. This is a senior late-career enlisted in an extremely sensitive position violating all of their trust and authority to cash out big.

Do we have any evidence of higher-ups making bets?

None, because Congress wasn't informed of the Maduro raid until afterwards?

People act like the pervasiveness of insider trading in Congress is an indisputable fact, when there have been only a few trades with suspicious timing, which is similar to what you would expect statistically from 535 wealthier people trading with no insider information. The only case where I feel like insider trading is likely was Richard Burr's sales before COVID.

It is legal and until we vote for people who will outlaw it we only have ourselves to blame.

“Any clearance holders thinking of cashing in their access and knowledge for personal gain will be held accountable”

Yeah right.

I think you misspelled “the White House”

> So wouldn't we want more military service members making bets

Who is the "we" in this sentence?

Yes, insider knowledge makes the prediction market more accurate (albeit at the cost of being less "fair"). However US government doesn't want prediction markets to accurately predict the timing of their secret military operations. Hence the arrest.

I think the problem is similar to insider sports betting, which is that once someone has made a bet, they will try to influence policy decisions in order to profit from that bet.

It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.

Although, it would be amusing to create a sports league where the athletes are expressly permitted to wager on the outcome of their games.

I think the problem is similar to insider sports betting, which is that once someone has made a bet, they will try to influence policy decisions in order to profit from that bet.

It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.

Maybe we just don’t want prediction markets.

This isn’t actually the case. Congress members and their employees have been banned from insider trading since the 2012 STOCK Act. That’s why they do it through family members now

The first group makes laws, the second group doesn't.

This is also illegal for any rich or powerful service members.

Who is the "thee" and "me" in this scenario?

Since citizens united it’s legal to pay unlimited amounts for political propaganda (lying to the public).

Obama called this out explicitly after the ruling and his analysis has been more or less accurate.

This doesn't seem like a simple white collar crime. If the military are betting on the operations they will carry it's virtually espionage.

Rules for thee not for me

> Goes to show how elites play by a different set of rules.

Epstein said the same, and yet nobody went out to protest.

> no SEC lawsuit or civil complaint

The suspect didn't trade securities. SEC doesn't have jurisdiction. The curiosity–to me as a layman–is that this is being prosecuted by the DoJ versus under the UCMJ.

Polymarket isn't doing anything about it. It's the US government because obviously while I suppose this info made a more accurate "prediction" it also yk, leaked confidential state military secrets which is something the government can prosecute. They're not being prosecuted for insider trading on Polymarket

Insider bets distort the probabilities, creating a conflict of interest and causing market manipulation. We don't let athletes bet on their own games, because some will deliberately lose. They will do this when the odds are good and they will make more money. So you don't get accurate predictions, because the more probable something is, the better the odds and the more money to be made by someone manipulating the odds.

End result is you place bets against things you want to happen. eg. USA invading Iran. If you win the bet, you make money. If you lose the bet, you still win because the USA invaded Iran. And maybe that happened because people in power took your bet and influenced the odds in their favor. A fully deniable market for bribes. Same reason you can't bet on unnatural death, because it crowdsources assassination.

Sure, but the purpose of the FBI is to go after people leaking classified military Intel.

Different people and organizations in this world have different goals. More news 10.

I thought so too. Giving people with insider info a chance to make a buck in ways they didn't have before.

Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote now applied.

From the indictment, he's being charged with the following:

* Unlawful Use of Confidential Government Information for Personal Gain

* Theft of Nonpublic Government Information

* Commodities Fraud

* Wire Fraud

* Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1437781/dl

It's rather obviously illegal to leak classified intel by taking public actions based off of it... that's practically the meaning of the word "classified".

Not true, they lobbied very hard to be regulated under the CFTC because of its more relaxed rules

Polymarket isn't being accused or charged with wrongdoing.