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Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war
- BobbyTables2 5mo agoReminds me of the part in National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation when Clark Griswold goes to the 3rd rate casino and starts betting on weird things.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cyanydeez 5mo ago'Capitalism': the inevitable reduction of all humanity to fungible currency
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoBetting with one another predates any notion of capitalism, or economy.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 5mo agoTrue, but capitalism eventually makes gambling the whole economy.
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoI don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff. People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
- ModernMech 5mo agoLook around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy. The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction. This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.
- pigpop 5mo agoThose are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions. Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.
- bdangubic 5mo agothere a lot of things that may be immoral but it is the system that promotes it or prevents it. our system promotes it (there are ads for kashi and fanduel on nickelodeon) so it is the capitalism
- ModernMech 5mo agoYou and I probably have very different ideas about what is moral and what is not. For me, the highest moral crime is greed. A lot of people seem fine with it today. So for you to claim that the fire happened because of the poor moral character of the person who lit the fire, I can just as easily say this happened because of the poor moral character of the people who didn't pay him a fair wage, which leaves us nowhere. That's why I focus on purely systemic arguments. The humans in the system are abstract. It doesn't matter if they are moral or not, they respond to systemic incentives. So if they're acting immorally according to you, why is the system incentivizing degenerate behavior instead of moral behavior?
- azan_ 5mo agoHow?
- ModernMech 5mo agoOnce the capitalists get enough control of the government they rig everything for themselves. In a capitalist system money is paramount and they have the most of it, so their opinion is regarded higher than everyone else's. Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections. Sine not everyone can be connected, luck is all that's left for most people, so it becomes a huge part of economic activity along with whoring and warring. See Also: OnlyFans, and the Department of War.
- eru 5mo agoWhen Bill Gates was the richest guy in the world, he still had to battle the authorities for ten years to import his sports car from Europe. I'd hardly call that controlling the government.
- ModernMech 5mo agoAgain, like I said, the capitalism you knew and loved is dead. When Bill Gates became the richest man in the world he had like $10 billion dollars. Today we are talking about trillionares now. As today's elites aspire to be able to own 1995 Bill Gates 100 times over, so yeah apparently he didn't have enough power back then. Can you entertain the idea that someone several orders of magnitude more powerful than 1995 Bill Gates might have more effective control over the government?
- eru 5mo agoAren't you begging the question? You are saying that today's richest have more money (though you should probably adjust for gdp growth), and I agree. However, you are automatically concluding that they have more power?
- azan_ 5mo ago
- kingleopold 5mo ago[flagged]
- kodegod69 5mo agoSure keep saying that to yourself. All of you sound so damn sure when speaking about socialism. Like the first nation to pierce the firmament of human fabric wasn't a socialist one. And that the union wasn't making great strides in technology.
- logicchains 5mo agoSuch great strides in technology, their standard of living was so high that their president was literally shocked just by the abundance of food in a normal western grocery story.
- deadbabe 5mo agoWhether you like it or not, socialism is the key.
- 948382828528 5mo ago[dead]
- pocksuppet 5mo agoAgree, shareholder. 1400 million dead are a small price to pay for our capitalist utopia. We just need one more chance.
- croes 5mo agoCapitalism neither prevents gulags nor famines. And you can bet (pun intended) someone will create them on purpose if they can make profit from it
- logicchains 5mo agoPlease do share what capitalist country had a famine in the past century.
- airstrike 5mo agoCapitalism is just a projection of our natural competition for scarce resources onto an economic system.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- testing22321 5mo agoResources would not be scarce if some people were not hoarding.
- pigpop 5mo agoThe supply is greatest at the source.
- eru 5mo agoAre you going to work for free?
- NeutralCrane 5mo agoEven in non-capitalist systems people aren’t working for free
- eru 5mo agoAnd those systems also have scarcity. And it's not just because you are hoarding your labour.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agohoarding what? you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
- NeutralCrane 5mo ago
- gib444 5mo agoThe price of everything and the value of nothing.
- jancsika 5mo agoIs that necessarily true? E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine. Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber. Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money. Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
- miki123211 5mo agoThe truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics. People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine. Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
- cyanydeez 5mo agoYou know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
- chollida1 5mo agoThat may be true, but capitalism has nothing to do wit betting or prediction markets. You can have those with any government or market style.
- NeutralCrane 5mo agoWith an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.
- srameshc 5mo ago> There is now more than $500,000 (£371,000) staked on whether Russia will capture Kostyantynivka this year . Now everyone has a chance to profit from war ! Thank you Polymarket
- paulnpace 5mo agoWar profiteering for the people!
- ks2048 5mo agoLots of publicly traded war profiteering companies. The president even highlighted one a couple of days ago.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoAre users able to bet specifically on whether prisoners of war in Kostyantynivka will be killed? Or whether women and children will be raped? That kind of fine-grained war market could be groundbreaking
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo agoI know you're just being snarky, but FYI, oldtimey rape and pillage requires the civilian population to be present at the time of the assault, and that only happened during the first month or so of this war. since summer 2022, the Russian advance has been so slow that women and children had months to safely evacuate. besides, each settlement is reduced to rubble by artillery and gliding bombs before assaults begin.
- Tade0 5mo agoFirst result when I put in "polymarket assassination" reads: "Explore 102 live Assassin prediction markets as of April 6, 2026. Track real-time odds and trade on The World's Largest Prediction Market™"
- falcor84 5mo agoYou make it sound bad, but I personally am very much in favor of regular people having access to the same bad things that the people in charge have.
- Chrisszz 5mo agoThis is becoming the kind of "VC platform for online war investments". You: 1. Plan 2. Bet 3. Invest money upfront 4. Execute 5. Redeem your profits
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoNow, can you find enough liquidity in the market to turn a profit? Can you find it before it becomes aparent something is off in the bet?
- daveguy 5mo agoIt's a 0-1 bet that resolves one way or the other. If you were able to place the bet, the liquidity is there. But, yeah, if you can't make the bet in the first place without significantly pushing the market then you won't make as much. Prediction markets should not be legal.
- azan_ 5mo agoCould you explain what do you mean? What's the plan and execution here? Planning and executing invasion? If so, there are much better markets than polymarket for making such bets.
- ffsm8 5mo agoI understood the argument like this: If there is a bet going that a war doesn't start, and you're able to start said war... Then everyone betting on the war not starting is effectively providing venture capital funds for you to start that war. So if eg. 20 mil is bet on it not starting, the actor holding the proverbial trigger only needs to "invest" sufficient funds to drain the bet and then capitalize on it by pulling the trigger, everyone being against it would've effectively invested into the war The analogy breaks apart at VC, because they're expecting payout after successful funding, which this doesn't provide. I think it's more like Kickstarter/crowdfunding for wars. Just as fucked up though (The "start a war" setting I'm using here is just to illustrate the point. There are a lot more granular bets going on like (place) will be contested etc, effectively creating money pools for offensives)
- Jerrrrrrrry 5mo ago[dead]
- arter45 5mo agoSo... >“It used to be the news channels were the callers,” said Kane. “They used to be the final say in big events. Like this officially happened because CNN and Fox News said so. But thanks to Polymarket, there’s a new signal.” This is interesting because of this: >At the moment, when there is a dispute, markets on Polymarket are settled by an anonymous group of people who hold a crypto token called UMA. [...] >It isn’t known who the largest UMA holders are, or what might affect how they vote. It is entirely possible that the people who finally settle a bet on UMA have large amounts of money staked on it. So basically instead of trusting CNN and Fox News you trust an anonymous group of people who may or may not profit themselves from their own decisions. I can't see how this is any better.
- zarzavat 5mo agoNo. These resolvers only deal with rules disputes, i.e. disputes over the fine print. This is only applicable if you are gambling on polymarket. The probabilities while the market is open are set by market forces. Of course you have to read the fine print very carefully to understand what a particular market is about. The more deceptive thing is the potential disparity between the title and the rules. Most market participants read the rules closely (although some do not), and so the title + headline probabilities may be not as they seem.
- _alternator_ 5mo agoI think GP is saying that, in principle, the UMA token holders can resolve a dispute any way they see fit, even if in practice it's resolved according to the rules. At the end of the day there is someone who has to arbitrate 'truth' for the purposes of payout.
- janoelze 5mo agoit's an imperfect system, but UMA decisions can also be disputed again, up to two times iirc, which moves the dispute/decision to a different group of UMA whales. tbh, i think this is as good as it gets – unless you stay out of this completely.
- nunez 5mo agoNot a new phenomenon! It happened during the War on Iraq. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/weekinreview/you-can-bet-on-it-playing-the-odds-on-war.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/weekinreview/you-can-bet-... People will bet on absolutely anything; gambling is as old as time itself. > Wagering was generally legal under British common law, so long as it did not to lead to immortality or impolity.13 Bets about the outcome of events in war, over the death of political leaders, over court cases, or between voters over election results were illegal on these grounds.14 In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the British government increasingly attempted to limit gambling, especially among the working classes. The Gaming Act of 1845 made gambling contracts and debts unenforceable in court (but otherwise liberalized what amounts could be wagered); the Betting Houses Act of 1853 outlawed the operation of betting establishments other than private clubs; the Betting Houses Act of 1874 cracked down of the advertisement of wagering; and the Street Betting Act of 1906 made acceptance of wagers in streets and public places illegal.15 Despite the legal uncertainty in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Fleet Street press reported on election wagering at the London Stock Exchange and at Lloyd’s in markets for Parliamentary “majorities.” [^0] [^0] Rhode, Paul W. “The Long History of Political Betting Markets.” KU School of Business, 2012 March. https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/Int_Election_Betting_Formatted_FINAL_NoComments.pdf https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/Int_Election_Betting_F...
- elicash 5mo agoYour comment is a great addition to the conversation. I do just want to add the scale point, though. That source is less than a million was bet, and now there are hundreds of millions bet on the ceasefire, and millions more on other Iran bets, and then even more bet on Russia/Ukraine. So I think it's a bit overstated to frame it as nothing is new. But your historical context is helpful.
- rayiner 5mo ago> That source is less than a million was bet, and now there are hundreds of millions bet on the ceasefire, and millions more on other Iran bets, and then even more bet on Russia/Ukraine. I'd imagine those numbers are typical for any transaction facilitated by the Internet comparing 2003 to 2026.
- api 5mo agoAny time the headline is gamblers making millions the reality is 90% of gamblers losing, maybe 9% breaking even or making small wins, and a few making millions.
- KellyCriterion 5mo agoWell, for sure thats the classic casino stat :-))
- CrzyLngPwd 5mo agoDo they allow for bets like how many civilians killed by Israel during April? Or how many schools are bombed by the USA? Or how many times will it take the USA to declare victory before the end of the conflict?
- hank2000 5mo agoImagine a bunch of people are tortured, removed from their homes, are killed… and you get paid? Are you cheering for it because you’re getting paid? I can’t imagine wanting to be cheering on death and destruction.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- eru 5mo agoYou better never buy any life insurance.
- wutwutwat 5mo ago> Imagine a bunch of people are tortured, removed from their homes, are killed… and you get paid? This is what every military supplier does. What every soldier. What every person holding stock in the military supplier's company, every person shorting oil shares, etc. Gambling on war and death is disgusting. Sadly, people profiting from those things is nothing new. That does not make it ok though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NruZ3AR3Kvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NruZ3AR3Kvo
- PaulRobinson 5mo agoEvery shareholder of an arms company (or holder of an index tracker), is betting on war too. This mechanism is stupid, corrupt and driving extreme behaviour. But betting on war is not new, and I find it abhorrent that people will hand wave away the military-industrial complex as an essential component to modern civilisation while calling individuals making bets on war horrible names. It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye.
- datsci_est_2015 5mo ago> It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye. Is this meant to be an excuse that justifies this gambling behavior? Children’s hospitals also gain a profit from the suffering and death of children, yet we would find it pretty abhorrent if people started betting on how many children died at the Mayo Clinic. Yet, it’s only scale and semantics.
- daft_pink 5mo agoJust want to reiterate that prediction markets are beneficial, because they are the most accurate way to provide us with a dynamic mechanism to predict future outcomes from complicated systems. As was put forth in James Suroweicki’s the Wisdom of Crowds, prediction markets provide predictions that tend to be more accurate than any expert, team of experts, etc. That doesn’t mean it’s 100% accurate, but it tends to be more accurate than any other mechanism that we have. The benefit is not that gamblers have a place to gamble, but that society has a way to gauge the risks of different outcomes and plan accordingly.
- Planktonne 5mo agoI'm not sure 'have a benefit' maps directly to 'are beneficial'. You also have to consider the downsides, such as people with influence deliberately causing X event to happen (e.g. a war) so that they can profit. I'm not sure the increased predictability is worth the increased instability.
- daft_pink 5mo agoI think this is a sensible argument. I don't agree with the other commenters about the "insider" trading. I think since the point is to get information more quickly, I don't really care whether it's insider or not, but I do think it's a bad idea for someone to cause certain improbable events by betting on them.
- hebleb 5mo agoIt certainly benefits insiders that can bet on outcomes they directly control
- scoofy 5mo ago>Just want to reiterate that prediction markets are beneficial, because they are the most accurate way to provide us with a dynamic mechanism to predict future outcomes from complicated systems. I'm sorry, but no, this is just absolutely wrong. If everyone was making these predictions, in good-faith, then yes it would "provide us with a dynamic mechanism to predict future outcomes from complicated systems." However, when truckloads of money is involved, then insiders actually want to have the markets be weighted incorrectly to maximize gain at exactly the point where vega and theta are minimized... at the very last second possible. Market reflexivity exists and undermines this entire thesis. People need to stop pretending everyone out there is a nice man like Nate Siver just doing this for fun. As long as insiders exist and are allowed to trade, then they have every incentive to induce misinformation until the very last moment when they can trade against it.
- edge_trader_41 5mo ago[dead]