5 ms·
Unfortunately, it's not just elected officials that are problematic for prediction markets. The Secretary of War, for instance is not an elected official nor ar
by staplung 7mo ago
Unfortunately, it's not just elected officials that are problematic for prediction markets. The Secretary of War, for instance is not an elected official nor are leaders of the armed forces and there is definitely a prediction market for war. Multiply this by every powerful appointee and every career bureaucrat and see what kind of picture that paints.
- treetalker 7mo agoDon't forget relatives, useful idiots, and billionaire special envoys!
- 9dev 7mo agoThe latter two groups often overlap, even
- lukev 7mo agoIf we're not going to ban prediction markets, we could at least make it a requirement that all bets are public and associated with a real identity. That'd go a long way towards curbing the corruption of these things, while preserving (or even greatly enhancing) their "predictive power."
- SteveNuts 7mo agoSeems like you’d get a secondary proxy market popping up overnight. Like domain privacy for degenerates.
- gruez 7mo agoThat's why you make the regulations like AML regulations, where it's a crime to obfuscate the source of the wager too.
- salawat 7mo ago[flagged]
- MadnessASAP 7mo agoIts not transparent to me? What are they trying to do?
- rangestransform 7mo agoDeputize prediction market providers to force people to self incriminate à la KYC/AML laws today
- chii 7mo ago> self incriminate well, if they weren't doing something that would've otherwise been deemed illegal, then why would they consider it self-incriminating to have to follow KYC/AML rules?
- ministryofwarp 7mo agoIf you haven't broken the law, why would you be willing to come down to the jail and breakfast in a cell each morning?
- chii 7mo agoonly if you equate following a set of rules to being in jail. Do you follow road rules? Why don't you apply that jail analogy to that?
- ministryofwarp 7mo agoYou sound like a helpful world citizen. The other problem the US has is that it is illegal for a US Citizen to pay a bribe but there's no realistic enforcement. Luckily you can help solve this. Whenever and wherever you travel you can keep some forms with you and every time you are pulled over you can fill them out with the police in quadruplicate so that each of you can mail them to Washington. At some later point the US can try to cross reference and determine who didn't mail theirs and then whether anyone was actually under US jurisdiction during the incident.
- hephaes7us 7mo agoDomain privacy isn't for degenerates.
- reverius42 7mo agoThey didn't say it was?
- toss1 7mo agoTHIS — make it transparent, not try to ban it. And the transparency must be real-time and MUST include the full dox on beneficial owner of the contract/bet, with steep jailtime for falsification/fronting, etc.. They can even say it is for tax purposes — they win that bet, they should pay income tax (and be able to deduct the costs of their losing bets against that specific income type). I want to know if a bunch of senators or DOD personnel bet on event X, and I want journalists and OSINT watchers to know it in realtime. That gives everyone information while naturally eliminating most of the advantage of insider trading, since nearly everyone will pile into the same trade and the odds/payoff will come closer to the reality.
- jkubicek 7mo agoKnowing who is making the bets doesn’t prevent mildly corrupt officials from driving the outcome that’s going to win them some cash. Knowing that high-level DOD official were betting on us invading Iran does us no good if the only reason we invaded Iran was so they could win their long-odds bet. Sure, we can try and shame them, but now they're rich and we're fighting another middle-east war.
- malfist 7mo agoI guess we shouldn't do this then. If it doesn't completely solve to problem.
- jmye 7mo ago> Knowing that high-level DOD official were betting on us invading Iran does us no good if the only reason we invaded Iran was so they could win their long-odds bet. Of course it does, if we’re willing to do ever-so-slightly more than jerk off on TikTok about it.
- chii 7mo agoWhat is the current method that exists which stops CEO/executives from short selling their own company's stock, then driving that company's value down (which is easy to accomplish)? Why can't that same method be used to prevent or indict gov't insiders who tries to do the same?
- samlinnfer 7mo agoAnd maybe you can start by mandating age verification?
- CrossVR 7mo agoIt's always a good idea to disguise your identity collection as "age verification".
- noosphr 7mo agoSounds like a lot of second cousins are going to make amazing predictions.
- mr_00ff00 7mo agoWe already do this with Congress, and there’s still insider trading
- wwweston 7mo agoThere’s no one in the world that creating an alternate “real” identity would be easier for than someone who can influence or even determine military or covert actions. It’s probably even legal for them to do so.
- __MatrixMan__ 7mo agoAnother step would be to find ways to discourage bets on outcomes that the bettors participate in.
- thrance 7mo agoI doubt that would change anything, in this era of shamelessness. Being corrupt has become a virtue, and winning lots of money is cool, doesn't matter if it was from gambling on war with insider trading. I believe prediction markets and sports betting apps are societal failures that only serve to alienate the masses and further extract wealth to the top. Let's ban them all, we're not losing anything.
- Esophagus4 7mo agoI’m not sure I agree - look at the crypto crime that happens as hackers breach databases and are able to link crypto holdings with human identities to target them. Public trades will make people targets and that will create weird incentives. https://apnews.com/article/crypto-bitcoin-kidnapping-wrench-attack-ddc7263c25ba590f85648e1682576971 https://apnews.com/article/crypto-bitcoin-kidnapping-wrench-...
- andai 7mo agoIt's also low-ranking members of the armed forces that have a lot more information than you'd expect. If you just banned the high ranking members from prediction markets, I actually don't think very much would change. (There would just be slightly more delay.)
- hunter-gatherer 7mo agoVery few armed forces members have enough information to make actual meaningful trades. The low ranking ones do not have enough money to make meaningful trades even if they did.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago> if you just banned the high ranking members from prediction markets, I actually don't think very much would change Good behavior starts at the top. It becomes a lot easier to crack down on low-level corruption if the guys at the top aren't doing it.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoI mean, North Korea has some very deadly incentives if this whole "buy your prediction" market is brought online.
- Animats 7mo agoCongress was not even notified in advance of the wars on Iraq or Venezuela. Any leaks came from the executive branch.
- ralph84 7mo agoIf I was a NOAA meteorologist I'd be making bank insider trading temperature prediction markets.
- bee_rider 7mo agoMaybe this could be an alternative funding source for weather prediction, haha.
- rangestransform 7mo agoHow can prediction markets be priced with continuous instead of discrete predictions?
- gzread 7mo agoThey usually divide into buckets
- chromic04850 7mo ago[dead]
- Esophagus4 7mo agoBut wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug? If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.
- gzread 7mo agoThat's always been a just-so story invented to justify insider trading. If weather predictors always bet on a weather prediction market, why would anyone else? They'd be guaranteed to lose money.
- Esophagus4 7mo ago1) Not all expert weather predictors agree. They can bet against each other. 2) retail traders lose money and know far less than institutional investors, but do retail traders participate in the stock market? Of course they do.
- magpi3 7mo agoThe bill also prevents senior government officials from betting on prediction markets if they are participating personally in the event on which they are betting. https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/End-Prediction-Market-Corruption-Act.pdf https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/End-Predic...
- jghn 7mo ago> The Secretary of War There's no such position. You may be referring to the Secretary of Defense.
- tclancy 7mo agoThey do what they can. It won’t matter. But the point at this point is to call out the grift. To make plain for at least the rest of you outside our borders that America died of grifters squeezing dollars out of some weird machine that we couldn’t or wouldn’t shut off. This machine kills hope.