6 ms·

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmle

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways. Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls. Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)

lotsofpulp 8mo ago
>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.
- KeplerBoy 8mo ago
  Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
- Waterluvian 8mo ago
  I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
  - croon 8mo ago
    By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
  - relaxing 8mo ago
    Conan hosted the Oscars.
- iso1631 8mo ago
  I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
- relaxing 8mo ago
  Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
- KPGv2 8mo ago
  > Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys? Does the lamentations of women count as a musical number?
ipaddr 8mo ago
The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
  If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
- kasey_junk 8mo ago
  Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders. And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
  - hrimfaxi 8mo ago
    > insider trading is the point Says who?
    - Ajedi32 8mo ago
      It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders. Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
      - hrimfaxi 8mo ago
        Who cares what they call themselves? They're not prediction markets, they are just gambling on events. The "point" of prediction markets is not an accurate prediction in the same sense that the "point" of sports betting isn't that your bet means the team will win.
yyyk 8mo ago
>I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting... >But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.
Balgair 8mo ago
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.
- chimeracoder 8mo ago
  > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player. The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
  - nemomarx 8mo ago
    One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.
walthamstow 8mo ago
You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.
RIMR 8mo ago
Yeah, but even "harmless" bets like the one you describe are too easy to rig. Who is to say that someone who works on Conan's show won't have some influence over the programming and intentionally steer the show so that they win their bet? We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.
dfxm12 8mo ago
I think it is naive to assume that under capitalism, with no guardrails in place, that the people involved with these markets will leave money on the table purely by self restraint/acting in good faith. If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.
skywhopper 8mo ago
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.
watwut 8mo ago
> And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" What about calling it "gambling" rather then "prediction market"? And then applying the gambling regulation on what is gambling. People betting on stuff is not exactly a novel idea, the novel thing is how they are avoiding the regulations.
mapt 8mo ago
It's a matter of market size and the inherent goal of the market; The factors are implicitly at odds. A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy. A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit. Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.
btilly 8mo ago
Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market 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-Order-Temporarily-Pauses-DOJ%27s-FCPA-Enforcement-and-Orders-a-Review-of-Guidelines-and-Policies.pdf 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. :-(
- Terr_ 8mo ago
  Or bribery: "I didn't pay anybody to dismiss the case against me. I just innocently hedged my personal risks by betting I'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk just happened to be betting I'd go free, so that my million dollars is coincidentally in their pockets... well, that's just how things work out sometimes in prediction markets."
  - btilly 8mo ago
    The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into Justin Sun that got stopped. See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet. As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open... (To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)
EGreg 8mo ago
Here is a much more moral and useful prediction market: https://unblockers.org https://unblockers.org
brightball 8mo ago
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.
- bilbo0s 8mo ago
  Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer being able 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.." we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..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.." story. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past. These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
  - brightball 8mo ago
    Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too. https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level. Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show. We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
akudha 8mo ago
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?
- Terr_ 8mo ago
  You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in front of an insider so that they reveal (or cause) a strong outcome through greed? Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."
uoaei 8mo ago
It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.

lotsofpulp 8mo ago

>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.

KeplerBoy 8mo ago
Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
Waterluvian 8mo ago
I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
- croon 8mo ago
  By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
- relaxing 8mo ago
  Conan hosted the Oscars.
iso1631 8mo ago
I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
relaxing 8mo ago
Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
KPGv2 8mo ago
> Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys? Does the lamentations of women count as a musical number?

ipaddr 8mo ago

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

aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
kasey_junk 8mo ago
Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders. And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
- hrimfaxi 8mo ago
  > insider trading is the point Says who?
  - Ajedi32 8mo ago
    It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders. Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
    - hrimfaxi 8mo ago
      Who cares what they call themselves? They're not prediction markets, they are just gambling on events. The "point" of prediction markets is not an accurate prediction in the same sense that the "point" of sports betting isn't that your bet means the team will win.

yyyk 8mo ago

>I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting... >But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.

Balgair 8mo ago

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.

chimeracoder 8mo ago
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player. The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
- nemomarx 8mo ago
  One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.

walthamstow 8mo ago

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

RIMR 8mo ago

Yeah, but even "harmless" bets like the one you describe are too easy to rig. Who is to say that someone who works on Conan's show won't have some influence over the programming and intentionally steer the show so that they win their bet? We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.

dfxm12 8mo ago

I think it is naive to assume that under capitalism, with no guardrails in place, that the people involved with these markets will leave money on the table purely by self restraint/acting in good faith. If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.

skywhopper 8mo ago

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.

watwut 8mo ago

> And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" What about calling it "gambling" rather then "prediction market"? And then applying the gambling regulation on what is gambling. People betting on stuff is not exactly a novel idea, the novel thing is how they are avoiding the regulations.

mapt 8mo ago

It's a matter of market size and the inherent goal of the market; The factors are implicitly at odds. A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy. A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit. Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.

btilly 8mo ago

Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market 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-Order-Temporarily-Pauses-DOJ%27s-FCPA-Enforcement-and-Orders-a-Review-of-Guidelines-and-Policies.pdf 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. :-(

Terr_ 8mo ago
Or bribery: "I didn't pay anybody to dismiss the case against me. I just innocently hedged my personal risks by betting I'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk just happened to be betting I'd go free, so that my million dollars is coincidentally in their pockets... well, that's just how things work out sometimes in prediction markets."
- btilly 8mo ago
  The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into Justin Sun that got stopped. See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet. As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open... (To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)

EGreg 8mo ago

Here is a much more moral and useful prediction market: https://unblockers.org https://unblockers.org

brightball 8mo ago

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.

bilbo0s 8mo ago
Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer being able 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.." we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..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.." story. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past. These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
- brightball 8mo ago
  Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too. https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level. Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show. We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.

akudha 8mo ago

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?

Terr_ 8mo ago
You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in front of an insider so that they reveal (or cause) a strong outcome through greed? Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."

uoaei 8mo ago

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