5 ms·

I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called pr

by sam0x17 7mo ago

I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"

geor9e 7mo ago
Surely I am misreading what you mean here. But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10. I'll search the space of other interpretations in the mean time, but if you could help me out here and clarify…
- sam0x17 7mo ago
  I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The problem with prediction markets that has been talked about for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines the outcome not the other way around
  - geor9e 7mo ago
    Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the outcome of an event?
    - sam0x17 7mo ago
      many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw something at X basketball game" and then someone kept doing it, etc
    - mitthrowaway2 7mo ago
      Here's one: https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/coinbase-ceos-bizarre-final-words-q3-call-just-paid-lucky-few https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/coinbase-ceos-bizarre-final...
      - anonym29 7mo ago
        I'm not parent commenter, but any example of an event that actually matters? Elections, wars, the economy, healthcare systems, laws, court cases? The example you provided does look like some insider trading type of stuff, just like how 1v1 professional sports players will sometimes intentionally lose after receiving a bribe to do so, but both your example and sports don't really seem to have any kind of meaningful impact on anything or anyone who isn't gambling, no?
        mitthrowaway2 7mo ago
        I don't know. I imagine if someone was going to adjust the timing or targets of strikes in a war in response to a prediction market bet, or the decisions of a high-profile court case etc, they wouldn't say so in public the way the CEO of Coinbase did on that earnings call. It's pretty rare that someone would actually claim they're taking an action specifically with the purpose of altering the outcome of the prediction market bet, rather than giving some other reason. So even if it were happening, the only evidence I might expect to find would be suspicious prediction-market trades around low-probability events. In situations like this, where you wouldn't expect to see evidence of something even if it were happening, you're basically left to make a judgement based on prior probability. So here that would come down to: is the financial incentive provided by the prediction market high enough relative to the decisionmaker's perceived risk and penalty of being caught? IMO, the answer is currently 'no' for most high-profile cases, but in a future where more money is riding on the bets, or where decisionmakers are insulated from consequences, that could swing to 'yes'.
        anonym29 7mo ago
        The decision-makers don't need change their decision whatsoever to corruptly profit from it, though, they can just place bets on the timeframe or outcome of whatever decision they originally intended to make. Why risk operational disruptions and a greater chance of getting caught when you can still profit exorbitantly from insider trading on your knowledge without incurring those unnecessary risks?
    - venusenvy47 7mo ago
      How can we possibly find an example, if the names of the betters aren't public? There are public bets on activities from the IS government that can easily be used by people that control the outcome. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn93292do https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn93292do
    - lordnacho 7mo ago
      Not Polymatket, but there's a humorous case of the Sutton FC goalkeeper eating a pork pie on TV, thus resolving a bet on whether he would do so.
- derangedHorse 7mo ago
  > But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10 I don't know how you extrapolated that from the parent's comment. It literally said nothing about the cause and effect of this particular event. Knowing the odds in a prediction market IS a big part of the problem brought up in the linked article though (and the bets themselves). Knowing how much can be made from being right creates an upper-bound on what a financially-rational malicious actor will spend in trying to change the outcome.
  - adrianmonk 7mo ago
    Their comment proposed something that would "be the answer here". What does "here" mean? It's logical to expect "here" to refer to a scenario that includes cases like the one in the article. If it's some scenario that excludes cases like the one in the article, then it's not actually relevant to the discussion. (Tangents are OK. It's just confusing if they're introduced with phrasing that makes them sound like they're not tangents.)
    - Mogzol 7mo ago
      "here" in that comment is not referring to any specific scenario. It is referring to the problem discussed in the sentence immediately following it, that public prediction markets can shape the outcome of the events they are predicting.
  - geor9e 7mo ago
    >how you extrapolated that I wasn't extrapolating - it was the literal meaning of the words. The context was that someone commented "shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called outcome-shaping markets" in direct reply to "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over…[the prediction market "Iran strikes Israel on March 10"]. I interpret that as polymarket gamblers outcome-shaped Iran striking Israel. It was at 25% odds when they struck. I don't think the commenter actually meant that literally, which is why I asked them to clarify. I'm just doing my best here.
- asdff 7mo ago
  Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting, at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on. Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going into a free agency period. This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge. https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspicious-polymarket-trade-preceding-maduro-operation-rep-ritchie-torres-introduces-legislation-to-crack-down-on-insider-trading-on-prediction-markets https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...
- LeifCarrotson 7mo ago
  I was confused as well: After further consideration, I realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and credibly reports on those events and their resolution criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg. national militaries. "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel’s military correspondent or other credible sources reports that Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money. In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully, your worst crime is publishing a fictional news article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened. Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks", where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the Internet through another financial instrument. [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rulescucks https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rul...
  - lordnacho 7mo ago
    I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business. "Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"
malfist 7mo ago
Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or payout?
- TimTheTinker 7mo ago
  A lot of people habitually make bets out of addiction without thinking carefully about the expected payoff.
- mathgeek 7mo ago
  Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing them don’t know or care about the odds.
- gcr 7mo ago
  One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This only works if your intuition is better than the market's current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any particular knowledge.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  That's how pari mutuel betting works; the odds are set by the bettors betting and unknown until the book closes. That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.
Legend2440 7mo ago
> but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets, where you can get information about the probability of an event based on how much people are betting on it.
- sam0x17 7mo ago
  I mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.
andai 7mo ago
>outcome shaping markets I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations. When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the bet by default. Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to wonder about the model itself. I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it. (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get divided between them for prototypes.) For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your wallet. Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope they will launch something you're interested in. But what if you could push? I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people actually do know what they want. And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in government as well.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  You are describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
  - casey2 7mo ago
    Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away. Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that increases the amount of money behind assassinations. Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and death, but seriously, grow up. [0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount
sporkland 7mo ago
I assume a lot of people don't know the fundamental odds of something happening but have a vague sense on if Mr. Market has gone bananas or not.
janalsncm 7mo ago
That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.
- arduanika 7mo ago
  Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true: Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems. or Case 2. sam0x17 goes through his life wielding a giant hammer called "privacy", which he swings about wildly without ever feeling the need to look very closely at any given nail. In fact, he'll even shout "privacy" in the face of a situation where privacy *is the problem*. Goons are hiding behind privacy to threaten a reporter and his family? Let's give them more privacy, that'll fix it! HN can be very predictable sometimes, but hey, at least nobody ITT has suggested Rust yet.
  - sam0x17 7mo ago
    You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - arduanika 7mo ago
      Yes, I read your message. > At no point do I say the oracle target should be private Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment. Instead, your original said stuff like: > they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity > no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side > where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade" These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation. In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance: "The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor." Did you read... his comment? My comment? TFA?
dlenski 7mo ago
This doesn't make any sense… If you want to bet on a binary outcome without knowing how much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes, that's a bookie, not a prediction market. The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and credible way. (And that's even before we get to the fact that any kind of betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize outcomes like the death threats reported here.)
- sam0x17 7mo ago
  You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough
ActorNightly 7mo ago
Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should exist on websites that are publicly accessible. If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of the type of people who make death threats to journalists.
patcon 7mo ago
Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community. I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there

by sam0x17 7mo ago

geor9e 7mo ago

Surely I am misreading what you mean here. But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10. I'll search the space of other interpretations in the mean time, but if you could help me out here and clarify…

sam0x17 7mo ago
I'm not even talking about the specific situation. The problem with prediction markets that has been talked about for months is the predictions themselves are being used as an indicator that "thing will happen" and eventually there is so much liquidity on certain markets that the market determines the outcome not the other way around
- geor9e 7mo ago
  Do you have an example of polymarket betters changing the outcome of an event?
  - sam0x17 7mo ago
    many many, like that stuff with the "will someone throw something at X basketball game" and then someone kept doing it, etc
  - mitthrowaway2 7mo ago
    Here's one: https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/coinbase-ceos-bizarre-final-words-q3-call-just-paid-lucky-few https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/coinbase-ceos-bizarre-final...
    - anonym29 7mo ago
      I'm not parent commenter, but any example of an event that actually matters? Elections, wars, the economy, healthcare systems, laws, court cases? The example you provided does look like some insider trading type of stuff, just like how 1v1 professional sports players will sometimes intentionally lose after receiving a bribe to do so, but both your example and sports don't really seem to have any kind of meaningful impact on anything or anyone who isn't gambling, no?
      - mitthrowaway2 7mo ago
        I don't know. I imagine if someone was going to adjust the timing or targets of strikes in a war in response to a prediction market bet, or the decisions of a high-profile court case etc, they wouldn't say so in public the way the CEO of Coinbase did on that earnings call. It's pretty rare that someone would actually claim they're taking an action specifically with the purpose of altering the outcome of the prediction market bet, rather than giving some other reason. So even if it were happening, the only evidence I might expect to find would be suspicious prediction-market trades around low-probability events. In situations like this, where you wouldn't expect to see evidence of something even if it were happening, you're basically left to make a judgement based on prior probability. So here that would come down to: is the financial incentive provided by the prediction market high enough relative to the decisionmaker's perceived risk and penalty of being caught? IMO, the answer is currently 'no' for most high-profile cases, but in a future where more money is riding on the bets, or where decisionmakers are insulated from consequences, that could swing to 'yes'.
        anonym29 7mo ago
        The decision-makers don't need change their decision whatsoever to corruptly profit from it, though, they can just place bets on the timeframe or outcome of whatever decision they originally intended to make. Why risk operational disruptions and a greater chance of getting caught when you can still profit exorbitantly from insider trading on your knowledge without incurring those unnecessary risks?
  - venusenvy47 7mo ago
    How can we possibly find an example, if the names of the betters aren't public? There are public bets on activities from the IS government that can easily be used by people that control the outcome. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn93292do https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn93292do
  - lordnacho 7mo ago
    Not Polymatket, but there's a humorous case of the Sutton FC goalkeeper eating a pork pie on TV, thus resolving a bet on whether he would do so.
derangedHorse 7mo ago
> But your comment very much reads like you think "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" at 25% odds is what in fact caused Iran to strike Israel on March 10 I don't know how you extrapolated that from the parent's comment. It literally said nothing about the cause and effect of this particular event. Knowing the odds in a prediction market IS a big part of the problem brought up in the linked article though (and the bets themselves). Knowing how much can be made from being right creates an upper-bound on what a financially-rational malicious actor will spend in trying to change the outcome.
- adrianmonk 7mo ago
  Their comment proposed something that would "be the answer here". What does "here" mean? It's logical to expect "here" to refer to a scenario that includes cases like the one in the article. If it's some scenario that excludes cases like the one in the article, then it's not actually relevant to the discussion. (Tangents are OK. It's just confusing if they're introduced with phrasing that makes them sound like they're not tangents.)
  - Mogzol 7mo ago
    "here" in that comment is not referring to any specific scenario. It is referring to the problem discussed in the sentence immediately following it, that public prediction markets can shape the outcome of the events they are predicting.
- geor9e 7mo ago
  >how you extrapolated that I wasn't extrapolating - it was the literal meaning of the words. The context was that someone commented "shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called outcome-shaping markets" in direct reply to "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over…[the prediction market "Iran strikes Israel on March 10"]. I interpret that as polymarket gamblers outcome-shaped Iran striking Israel. It was at 25% odds when they struck. I don't think the commenter actually meant that literally, which is why I asked them to clarify. I'm just doing my best here.
asdff 7mo ago
Maybe not directly so clearly, but there is some influence factor for sure. For example we see this with sports betting, at the far end of the spectrum it is literally players or coaches fixing games to satisfy bets. But somewhere in between that overt fraud, there is influence making going on. Submarine stories on ESPN or sports blogs highlighting a players bad shoulder, hurting their perceived value going into a free agency period. This applies to governance as well. Note how there was a bet placed on polymarket on maduros capture mere hours before the raid were conducted, and this has lead to legislation moving forward in effort to combat suspicious prediction market activity based on whitehouse insider knowledge. https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspicious-polymarket-trade-preceding-maduro-operation-rep-ritchie-torres-introduces-legislation-to-crack-down-on-insider-trading-on-prediction-markets https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...
LeifCarrotson 7mo ago
I was confused as well: After further consideration, I realized that Polymarket only resolves on actual event outcomes insofar as mainstream journalism accurately and credibly reports on those events and their resolution criteria rely on those reports. When it's easier or more reliable to influence reporting around outcomes than the outcomes themselves, bettors will seek to influence the behavior of reporters rather than the behavior of eg. national militaries. "Iran strikes Israel on March 10" is a difficult outcome to force one way or the other. But "The Times of Israel’s military correspondent or other credible sources reports that Iran strikes Israel on March 10" merely requires intimidating or bribing one journalist. The existence of the bet didn't cause the missile strike or the failed interception. But it did cause a significant, heavily motivated dis-information campaign from people who stood to lose a lot of money. In a similar way, people fear that prediction markets estimating times of death are equivalent to assassination markets. But murder is an aggressively prosecuted serious crime. It seems that it would be far easier and lower risk to bribe, coerce, pretend to be, or literally be a reporter who got a false obituary published - wait until the "victim" is going to be offline for a few days and can't be contacted to prove they're not dead, trick some tropical country's coast guard into confirming that the victim's yacht exploded offshore, point Polymarket at the obituaries, grab all the crypto, and disappear. If you fail to disappear successfully, your worst crime is publishing a fictional news article/bribing/threatening a journalist. You don't have to risk being in the legal jurisdiction of the victim and getting your hands bloody, you don't even have to be in the same hemisphere: you only need convince the prediction market resolution criteria that something happened. Scott Alexander wrote about a related issue last month in the colorfully named section [1] "Annals of the Rulescucks", where he described a half dozen scenarios where the outcome may or may not have diverged from the actual event. A bet isn't resolved by eyewitnesses, it's resolved over the Internet through another financial instrument. [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rulescucks https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184065379/annals-of-the-rul...
- lordnacho 7mo ago
  I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business. "Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"

malfist 7mo ago

Why would anybody make a bet if they don't know the odds or payout?

TimTheTinker 7mo ago
A lot of people habitually make bets out of addiction without thinking carefully about the expected payoff.
mathgeek 7mo ago
Slot machines are popular for a reason. Most folks playing them don’t know or care about the odds.
gcr 7mo ago
One reason could be to correct uncalibrated markets. This only works if your intuition is better than the market's current intuition. If a big whale with a big idea makes a big splash, you can profit off of the instability by gently betting against them. This doesn't require you to have any particular knowledge.
bandrami 7mo ago
That's how pari mutuel betting works; the odds are set by the bettors betting and unknown until the book closes. That's in fact the entire argument behind Kalshi: the betting is the means of odds discovery.

Legend2440 7mo ago

> but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes This would remove the supposed purpose of prediction markets, where you can get information about the probability of an event based on how much people are betting on it.

sam0x17 7mo ago
I mean the real purpose is to make money on intelligence-based bets. And what's great is after the fact when everything decrypts you would still get to see the exact timeline of sentiment as it changes, completely undisturbed by the market's existence. This is extremely good data for designing systems to make the correct prediction next time based on things happening in the real world, instead of following the herd and looking for tea leaves in the odds graph. It's the only way to get pure, dollar-weighted sentiment data without the market skewing itself.

andai 7mo ago

>outcome shaping markets I heard something remarkable many years ago, that there are websites on the dark web where you can bet on which day someone is going to die. In other words you can pay to have them assassinated in a very indirect way. It's like kickstarter, for assassinations. When enough funds are raised, a willing volunteer simply places a bet on the day when they plan to carry out the deed. So they win the bet by default. Obviously this is a horrible use case, and I'm not sure if such websites actually exist or are just rumors. But I have to wonder about the model itself. I often thought about an inverse Kickstarter. Where you post an idea, people fundraise the idea, so the idea itself is validated. And then worthy contenders step forth to build it. (I guess donors could vote on who ends up getting the money to actually build it, or if there's enough they could even get divided between them for prototypes.) For example, there seems to be a lot of interest in e-ink laptops, and a successor to flash. People have been complaining for decades, but not much gets built. How much interest is there? Well we can measure that objectively! You vote with your wallet. Right now, it's a "pull" system. You have to hope and wait for a small number of highly motivated people. You have to hope they will launch something you're interested in. But what if you could push? I think we could do a lot more proactiveness on the crowd side of things. As a recent article here mentioned... people actually do know what they want. And of course this idea isn't just limited to products and services. I think there's a lot of potential for this idea in government as well.

jacquesm 7mo ago
You are describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
- casey2 7mo ago
  Not acknowledging a problem doesn't make it go away. Isolating people decreases the problem, but alienates them from the wider economy. I'd rather live in a world with open, regulated [0] , assassination markets even if that increases the amount of money behind assassinations. Of course I'd rather live in a world with no muder and death, but seriously, grow up. [0]the value of a human life is $xM + $yM for their occupations, so now payout for hits below that amount

sporkland 7mo ago

I assume a lot of people don't know the fundamental odds of something happening but have a vague sense on if Mr. Market has gone bananas or not.

janalsncm 7mo ago

That wouldn’t solve the issue in the article. The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor.

arduanika 7mo ago
Yeah. It seems like one of these two things is true: Case 1. sam0x17 has read TFA carefully and he is proposing, without spelling it out very well, that the oracle should point at anonymous deciders instead of at vetted outlets with well-known reporters. This is the charitable case, but it seems unlikely, and it carries its own problems. or Case 2. sam0x17 goes through his life wielding a giant hammer called "privacy", which he swings about wildly without ever feeling the need to look very closely at any given nail. In fact, he'll even shout "privacy" in the face of a situation where privacy *is the problem*. Goons are hiding behind privacy to threaten a reporter and his family? Let's give them more privacy, that'll fix it! HN can be very predictable sometimes, but hey, at least nobody ITT has suggested Rust yet.
- sam0x17 7mo ago
  You didn't even read my message. At no point do I say the oracle target should be private, that would be ridiculous. Public oracle, private markets on both sides of the issue, until the issue is considered closed, at which point we get to decrypt and find out who betted yes and who betted no. Liquidity would still be public, so you know how much money, but you get no intelligence signal, so world events don't get shaped by the market.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - arduanika 7mo ago
    Yes, I read your message. > At no point do I say the oracle target should be private Yeah, that's why I said that Case 1 (the one where you actually read TFA) was unlikely. I included it out of charity, because it was the only way I could eke out something remotely relevant to the article from your original comment. Instead, your original said stuff like: > they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity > no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side > where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade" These things are not at issue in TFA. You are talking about completely different news stories. So now, we're in Case 2, the more likely case, where your comment has nothing to do with the news story under discussion, and you're just injecting your irrelevant fixation. In case you didn't notice, I was replying to a commenter who exposed your irrelevance: "The gamblers threatening the journalist know how much money they individually gambled on an outcome, which means they know how much they stand to lose if they cannot pressure a source to alter reporting in their favor." Did you read... his comment? My comment? TFA?

dlenski 7mo ago

This doesn't make any sense… If you want to bet on a binary outcome without knowing how much other participants are betting on the 2 possible outcomes, that's a bookie, not a prediction market. The entire rationale for claiming that prediction markets "aren't just gambling" and have a legitimate social value is that they surface sentiment and valuation in a transparent and credible way. (And that's even before we get to the fact that any kind of betting dependent on journalistic work could incentivize outcomes like the death threats reported here.)

sam0x17 7mo ago
You're still making a prediction, it's just much less likely to affect the outcome I personally think that entire social value rationale is actually what makes prediction markets dangerous / socially bad Seeing the total liquidity, fine, seeing the odds in real time, really really bad, will shape real-world outcomes vs if the market didn't exist once liquidity is high enough

ActorNightly 7mo ago

Should be the opposite IMO. I don't think anonymity should exist on websites that are publicly accessible. If people want to start forming their own meshnets over wifi or LoRA or whatever and remain anonymous, then all the power to them - because those kind of people are the exact opposite of the type of people who make death threats to journalists.

patcon 7mo ago

Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community. I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there