When I see people making money on Iran attacks, and murder of heads of state - it shows clearly something is deeply wrong with Polymarket. Its a level worse than Vegas or Indian casinos. A literal ticket to hell. I'm all for banning these evil sites.
Not sure if Polymarket does the same. Also not sure if I really trust these people to be the arbiter of morality and adhere to their own rules when it doesn't benefit them.
> A registered entity shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any of the following:
> (1) An agreement, contract, transaction, or swap based upon an excluded commodity, as defined in Section 1a(19)(iv) of the Act, that *involves*, relates to, or references terrorism, *assassination*, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.
Polymarket is now two separate entities. Last year they were banned from the US and stopped taking on new US customers and made their site withdrawal only for anyone based in the US. You could bypass it with a VPN, but they did enough to at least look like they were complying.
They've now created a separate company that I believe is called Polymarket US which has it's own version of the site/app which they are using to re-enter the US market. This switched from invite only beta to open sign ups a few months ago.
Polymarket US is mainly just sports betting with a small number of crypto, commodities, and political election based markets, although they have said they plan to expand their market options. Their US based site almost certainly doesn't violate those rules. The version that is used outside the US is the one that has markets that violate that, but since they're not in the US, there's not much that can be done.
So if you kidnap them, hold them in a bunker for a month, then release them, it will pay out. That's probably a positive thing for the world somehow, right?
Sounds like this could easily be worked around by placing a bet on something that will definitely happen as a result of a death, i.e. "bet $X on whether Iran will close the strait".
Publicly traded stocks‘ reactions to a war are harder to predict and have way less leverage than a bet like "US will launch 527 missiles against Iran between 3 and 5 pm"
well I see more problematic the people actually doing the Iran attacks and murder of heads of state. Betting on those is distasteful, but doing those things is where the damage lies.
the entire point of the argument is that they're the same people. Military bets appear to have significantly higher rates of insider trading than baseline[1], which implies two things, both catastrophic. One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone) but the even worse scenario is causality in the other direction, that a bet leads someone to take a military decision.
> One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone)
It's not at all obvious that leaks of classified information are per se detrimental to _actual_ national security.
It's not because specifically with these markets there is an amplification effect where the one doing the bet creates incentives for what it's betting in favor or against to materialize in the world.
In other words the money spent on bets that involve killing directly foments more killing.
That they are virtually always replaced with other mass-murdering dictators, usually after a period of even worse mass murder known as a civil war. All at the low low cost of some billions of dollars taken away from useful work.
Ali Khamenei was recently murdered, at a price tag of several tens of billions of dollars, so far. His more radical son now occupies his former position. As a result, is the world a better place?
During COVID, I was working on an esports startup site that was a mix of social media karma + betting. The idea was you had more karma and your posts got more reach the more right you were.
We experimented with extending this to non-esports topics during the election, which led to a bunch of Trump-based predicting. Then Jan 6 happen and the whole site went to hell. I pivoted the product because I just didn't want to deal with running a site like that.
Seeing what is happening with these sites makes me feel good about my choices. If I were in charge of a product that enabled this I wouldn't sleep at night.
The other side of that argument could be something like: "Dude, Khomeini better not be killed, it'd suck for me, an average iranian dude. I'd probably bet he dies so I can hedge my personal financial wellbeing for that case"
There are several things about the "these are good because people can hedge" argument which bother me and I struggle to disentangle them, but one facet is this: These betting-markets may be an inferior form of hedging, especially for non-trivial scenarios that are intended to evoke sympathy. (Civilizations have a lot of prior art in risk-management.)
For example, our statistical Iranian Dude may be much better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on useful imported durable goods that may become unavailable, ideally ones that would have resale value even if nothing bad happens.
The convenient online casino doesn't require any more than a vague sense of anxiety to bet, but that generality also limits how well you can use the money to protect yourself. If you're specifically worried about famine, better to arrange a future result of food, versus a payout of cash when nobody is selling food. If you're a factory that uses X as a manufacturing input and worried about a geopolitical blockade, you may be better off investing in alternate supplies or futures contracts for X.
The average iranian dude is not going to send money to a company that has donald trump junior on its board of directors to 'hedge their bets' around the Iran war situation.
> to ban something we must be able to construct an argument that does not hinge on morality. For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it bad to deprive you of your possessions?
And given that the house always wins, is it not depriving the gamblers of their possessions?
Gambling creates addicts, and addicts are more likely to act in desperation. They might steal, default on debt, or kill themselves and are less productive members of society. I bet societies with lots of addicts are much less likely to thrive because they carry a ton of dead weight. Thus we should ban or at least curb gambling because it hurts us all in general.
We legalized online gambling, the end result is more and earlier addiction and the added tax does not outweigh the societal cost due to loss of jobs, added crime and secondary effects of broken families on monetary, let alone ethical grounds. And they had to change the law to have more bite due to gambling sites mostly ignoring the required checks on addicted and heavy usage players, because profits have to be made. At least they got rid of the insane commercials since that's what most normal people complained about.
> For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
This assertion also hinges on morality. Why is being deprived of your possessions bad. You ultimately have to reach for an ethical framework to justify it.
Funny how people take journalists as some sort of most moral form of human being. Meanwhile they are most likely to take bribes for editorializing, silencing, ads or completely making up stories. All while they are most likely to get earliest information on markets ergo most likely to rig markets themselves.
You've been so busy straw manning with the ridiculous and unstated claim that journalists are the "most moral form of human being" that you have conspicuously failed to answer my question.
