Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
timesofisrael.com
timesofisrael.com
The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.
My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
Global market is just the largest gambling venue. Always has been. No amount of "monitoring" and "leagues" will keep people from going Boeing whistleblower way.
There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].
If people can threaten journalists for money and get away with it, they will. If people who threaten journalists over money are sent to prison, then after a brief transition period it will mostly stop.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences...
Functionally, you are correct.
But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.
Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.
It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/little-tech-startup...
They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.
not fundamentally different as in "live or die" you mean? the whole point of sports is that you compete whilst appreciating each others' humanity.
In a nutshell, these platforms operate by classifying their bets as 'futures contracts' with 'meaningful real world economic consequences' rather than traditional gambling, allowing them to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than stricter state gambling laws.
It's going to take strong push from lawmakers to close the loophole, and even stronger push from the platforms to stop anything meaningful being done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.
I have never in my life placed a sport bet, nor a polymarket bet. It strikes me as one of the dumbest things to do with your money and time.
But a lot of people seem to genuinely enjoy it. Gambling is part of human heritage. Regulate? Sure! Ban? I don't understand why
The existence of something in no way encourages someone to commit a crime. That is victim blaming (if the concept of 'sport' can be a victim in this case). Sport and people who enjoy sport and people who enjoy gambling on sport don't have anything to do with people who want to cheat and steal to materially gain from it. If you banned sports those people would just move on to some other criminal enterprise to get rich with minimal effort.
In what's happening in the story the fact that people are gambling on a war is certainly quite grim, but it's not really a problem. People do distasteful things all the time. The problem is that they're issuing death threats to someone. That's not really anything to do with gambling.
And doesn't that just mean more resources and energy is going into solving the problem of determining the truth of past events (and, as a result given that these are prediction markets, the likelihood of future ones?)
And isn't that a good thing?
These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.
Just call it gambling. They aren't "prediction markets," they're just gambling. Gambling incentivizes the absolute worst in humanity.
[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.
No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
So I would think there should be some sort of authority with official capacity to state what happened, not just a random journalist that doesn't give concrete sources.
That is why modern reportings best practice is to always support both sides. /s
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.
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.)
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.
I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there
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.
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
Every person on Polymarket is a gambler. By definition.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...
Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.
It opens with a content warning saying that the player will likely become very angry at least once when a baby who you are financially incentivized to watch crash and burn pulls their life together, and that's okay.
I appreciate that they're explicitly covering this psychological phenomenon.
On their page "Quincy Institute’s Position on Russia-Ukraine" they say at the very beginning:
> We categorically condemn Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, and support U.S. assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/12/quincy-institutes-position...
"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/polymarket-bett...
(I'd prefer if it said they were evaluating whether to limit the types of bets accepted to make the possibility of harassing journalists less likely.)
Do we have evidence for the types who indulge in death threats concentrating around certain bet genres?
Example: When Twitter ("X") suddenly started showing the locations of accounts, a lot of folks with MAGA talking points were shown to be anywhere except the U.S. Accounts with millions of followers and tons of influence have never even set foot in the U.S.
Another Example: Polymarket (not the "US" one) is anonymous. Because of this, events like the headline talks about happens. Certain government leaders worldwide could easily be seeding the bets, and playing the market, and you would never know.
Anonymity is nice, however, it is being taken advantage of for power plays. This is why we can't have nice things.
In contrast:
1. Any number of arbitrary unknown bettors on a could commit violence for reasons you'd never have even anticipated, like whether an event happened at 4:59 or at 5:01.
2. The violence can arrive from all sides, simultaneously. Bettors who like what you wrote are not your allies, and one way to ensure an existing report is not revised is to put the journalist out of commission.
3. The same "prediction" market can act as a criminal coordinator for subcontracting the violence, with a new bet: "Will $JOURNALIST revise $ARTICLE with $CHANGE on or before $TIME?"
https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...
A related issue is that war news is heavily censored in Israel; it's difficult for news outlets to report it.
He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.
In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?
You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.
A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.
It's not democratized, in the sense that everybody can play. But, the markets are for sure giving people with power/access/money reason to vote (in the markets) and vote (in whatever org they hold power).
It's disgusting.
This caught my attention today as it was in dispute and there were a lot of comments (moslty angry). I like browsing polymarket (never placed a bet myself but it is fun to see the prices). Always thought this would kill someone someday..
Except this is even crazier because the bets aren't on people dying, it's about a reportable event. Any of Polymarket's silence in voicing whether the outcome was determined by this unwilling participant's writing makes them complicit. When there's a single source of truth, it makes a target for vested parties that doesn't benefit from the security the platform and their employees get from hosting the bet.
You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.
Polymarket accounts are more-or-less just a crypto address.
Whatsapp accounts are somewhat easier to link to a real identity, but still not hard to at least obscure a bit.
The arm of the law struggles to reach across borders, and on the internet, it's quite plausible all those involved are in different jurisdictions.
So it's common and hard to prosecute because the person threatening is most likely in another country.
Just a pedantic, nit pick: you said "should be removed from civil society" but I think you just mean "removed from society" as in prosecuted and imprisoned.
"Civil society" has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_society
Or we could, you know, not legalize gambling.
Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't think people have really noticed that profit is also available if you can influence other people's predictions to manipulate the price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do that at scale? Agentic AI can help.
We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.
Could work in some crime procedural.
A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.
Cryptocurrency (although I hate it) you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
Prediction Markets you don't have to participate, so no harm done.
With AI, you're participating whether you like it or not. Layoffs, Job displacement, etc. There is no opt out here.
Once you're replaced with AI, that is it.
At least with cryptocurrency and prediction markets you can make money but it's obviously risky.
Ultimately with AI it would just push people to cryptocurrencies and prediction markets.
Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:
War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise.
Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism.
In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.
Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
A) They notice that it would land in the middle of nowhere and decided to not destroy it. It's better keep the interceptors for one that is going to hit an important target.
B) They partially intercepted it, perhaps only broke the motor or a fin, but the explosive head was intact. So instead of going to an important target, it crashed and exploded in the middle of nowhere.
>More emails arrived in my inbox.
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
What do you think, could this help this issue?
It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider trading.
But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten / bribe someone into lying about what really happened. That’s the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of prediction markets has gone negative. You’ve no longer got a tool that helps predict reality, you’ve got a new way to reward people for lying about what is real and not real.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
"Player props are inherently more subject to manipulation because only one player needs to be involved in rigging the outcome. [...] Even as someone more sympathetic to gambling than most people you’re probably reading on this story, I’m not sure I’d really care if player prop bets were banned entirely. They produce abusive behavior toward players. They also often put team and individual performance into tension with one another..."
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explai...
If you read some of the now-copious reporting about gamblers targeting athletes with death threats, you'll see that they have people screaming at them and threatening them violently both for performing badly and for performing well.
Truly unhinged and alarming that gambling has been legalized and marketed so quickly and so extensively, in so many forms.
* https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
... and many, many other stories.
...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".
If you are a journalist, it comes with the territory, I'm sure you know.
- Blatant insider trading
- Angry people who were invested in an outcome
These are just a few of the reasons why such prediction markets were not permitted in the first place. It’s just incredibly toxic and creates vicious externalities. There is no way that it is healthy if you allow people to put gobs of money on any outcome because it just incentivizes toxic behavior in an endless positive feedback loop.
> A friend asked Baron Rothschild what he was doing in response to Paris Commune:
> “Why,” replied the famous banker musingly, “French government bonds are selling at sixty-five. I bought five millions yesterday.”
> “What!” exclaimed the friend. “Bought bonds? Why, France is without a government, and the sewers of Paris are running red with blood!”
> “Yes, it is deplorable,” remarked the baron, “but if the sewers of Paris were not running red with blood, I could not buy bonds at this price. France will survive this terrible calamity, as she survived the Revolution, and the seven coalitions against her of all the powers of Europe. Her credit will again be the highest of any nation, and her bonds will sell again above par.”
People who oppose gambling tend to see this as a foreign capitalist selfishly making money off of the dire situation of the French people. People who do not oppose gambling see it as financial support of the French in their times of trouble when others have abandoned them.
There will always be a market.
God help those using this newspaper as their source for betting
It was said Australians would bet on two flies climbing up a wall. But this is madness.
Not to mention, they all prey on people. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and people would come in regularly and drop everything they had on scratch-offs. And a lot of these people clearly did not have the money to spare. It's gross.
On a side note, I find it incredible crypto trading/day trading/meme stock trading etc is not recognised as a bigger societal problem. It is 100% gambling and has the same negative externalities associated with it. But none of the tools gambling companies need to abide by (blocklists, warnings, limits, etc) apply to trading.
The entertainment value of betting does not meet that standard, in my opinion.
There's nothing wrong with a prediction market. There are a lot of reasons why they're helpful in judging the probability of future events more accurately than any single analyst, and are therefore a net benefit to society, no different from newspapers and stock markets.
These are just individuals making criminal threats. They're the bad guys here. They don't work for Polymarket or anything. Your comment is like saying you can't imagine how anyone could go to work at the Olympics after Nancy Kerrigan got struck by Tonya Harding's ex-husband. Something criminal happened, but the Olypmics are not the one responsible.
1) “I believe in what we’re doing as a mostly positive force in the world”
2) “Eh, the money is good”
Probably the same way FB people feel, probably the same way Palantir people feel, etc etc
Gambling (yes, this is gambling yet not subject to its industry regulations) is a public health crisis and the US government is too corrupt and intentionally ossified to react.
The trump administration is not too ossified to react, it's in full support of. It dropped two investigations into polymarket mid-2025, and polymarket is crypto-adjacent, a field which the trump family takes full advantage of.
It's odd that we allow this to happen.
- the emails
- the whatsapp messages
- the discord messages
- the X messages
Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing, in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his direct threats, some of those public like X replies.
Downvoters:
I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned anything in the history of technology.
Prediction markets have value for people as a source of reliable information because they tend to be very accurate compared to any other human mechanism for creating forecasts.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/pr...
We've all been looking around for the trigger for the market-crash-we-all-know-is-coming. Seems like "too much betting on a stupid war of choice" is just dumb enough to fit the timeline we've been trapped in. Very on-brand.
In other news: I'm almost entirely out of volatiles in my own portfolio right now. Cash and bonds until this pops. Frankly the chances are that today will be the day[1] are about as high as they've ever been.
[1] Trump, sigh, basically went on camera and capitulated, telling the world that there is no plan, the US doesn't have the capability to ensure trade through Hormuz and that Iran will deny access until Iran decides otherwise. Markets don't like uncertainty, but they really, really hate losing wars.
But what evidence do you have that only over-leveraged gamblers resort to criminal behavior? Why do you think that some rich person who bet, say, $1 million they can actually afford will not still seek to recoup their investment, especially if it only takes some bribes and threats?
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)
Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb.
Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb.
This needs to be banned.
https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...
In a sense, prediction markets are all forms of insurance. A "war market" is just an insurance market against war. If you do business in someplace that is at risk at war, placing a huge bet on the war happening mitigates the risk of doing business in that place.
There is a reason that insurance has taken the shape that it has -- incredibly detailed contracts, requirements that the insured have an interest in the thing being insured, etc, and the reason is exactly that pure prediction markets went through this exact cycle hundreds of years ago which lead to laws being passed banning the practice. That is why LLoyd's of London exists. It started as a pure gambling and became insurance through regulation and business evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774
I'm not incredibly against the concept of prediction markets, per se, but running them _globally, _at scale_ with _no regulations_ is going to lead to really awful outcomes, up to and including murder.
Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).
There's a very long list.
bet that someone will die by certain date
- More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction.
- Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.
Its a sports book.
A sports book of alternatives.
It's absolutely bonkers but hey, the grifters need a new costume, the crypto one is practically strings at this point
Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.
The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped.
Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.
Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.
It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling over things that involve the death of people. Things like missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.
"Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse.
Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation.
Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care.
Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP.
Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos.
A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive.
And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does.
Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true.
So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves.
But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.
So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.
"The over-weening conceit which the greater part of men have of their own abilities, is an ancient evil... their absurd presumption in their own good fortune, is even more universal."
This is a bad faith start to any argument. It speaks past the conclusion that one side needs apologetics/advocates in the first place.
If the prediction markets cannot produce a satisfactory solution to this problem, then their license to operate should be seriously cut back by regulators. Bets on a vast set of propositions that involve journalistic judgement should be banned, if they can't be blackmail-proofed. The social utility of these markets as info aggregators is marginal at best, and it is dwarfed by the harm of threats to reporters.
It is in Polymarket's court to figure out how to resolve this amicably. Hand over the names of the large bettors on that side of the market to the Israeli police. If your KYC has neglected to gather that info, then freeze all money on that side of the market until each bettor has identified themselves. Or some other means of fixing it, I don't know. Figure it out.
If Polymarket (and its competitors) cannot fix this, then it's time to get tough. Maybe it's time to actually crack down on Americans using VPNs. And if it comes down to it, I'm pretty sure that Shayne spends most of his time in the US, and we have extradition with Israel.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/11/the-gu...
More to your point... I don't think economic theory has anything to do with it. I'm a capitalist and I think that "prediction markets" is just an idiotic rebranding of "legalized gambling" and generally speaking, gambling more than a token sum (say, less than $100) should not be legal exactly because any benefits of gambling is far outweighed by the mountains of externalities it brings. Yes, this includes the obvious incentives to threaten random people. It's bad for society, so it should be effectively banned. The only reason why it has suddenly become legal everywhere in the US is because many states have found themselves under mountains of deferred liabilities and are scrambling to raise revenues however they can without raising taxes. It's shameful.
You can either take the libertarian view that it should be allowed until someone is put in harms way, or take the prohibitionist view that it should all be illegal.
With the latter approach, you will be doing more harm than good potentially, because it will just become an underground betting market, fully unregulated and with the worst of people abusing it.
I see no problem with betting on who will win a sports match, or who will become the next presidential race nominee. At least no more than options trading, or betting on the price of oil, or a poker match.
I agree that betting on someone else coming into harms way, be that violence or other types of harm (loss of property, livelihood, wellbeing,etc..) shouldn't be allowed. A sports team losing, or your preferred politician losing are not someone coming into harms way.
I've commented on these lines before, but reactionary extremist approaches will always do more harm than good.
also, politicians shouldn't be allowed to bet in even so much as a poker game!
edit: lol bring the downvotes, I actually read The Wealth of Nations PLUS Smith's other essays.
What on earth does this even mean?!
There are so many examples of this disconnect. Prohibition did not make for a society that wanted less alcohol, or felt that consuming alcohol was unethical, it actually had the counter effect, opening the door for a considerable larger problem of crime supported production. The war on drugs was/has been no different.
To see this as the top comment here, where you picked Adam Smith as your straw man, could have been Karl Marx or any other thinker, and say it boils down to this or that simple mistake.. Are you serious? There are much deeper issues driving this thirst for Gambling we have embraced of late amongst other dubious things that have been normalized. But pick whatever economic system you want, install it anywhere and the existing ethical issues you currently have will still be there.
Ok this has nothing to do with Adam Smith ... what are you talking about?
Agree with him or not, Adam Smith was a Christian Ethicist more than he was an Economist, and never even remotely hinted at any of those things.
Smith was literally one of those 'Nothing will work unless people with power act responsibly' kind of thinkers. He was way more on the 'prude' than 'libertine' side.
Also - you're not likely using the term 'libertine' in the sense that you mean, look that one up as well.
Finally, even if you mean 'selfish libertarian' - this is also probably not that.
These are just horrible people, probably with gambling addictions, that would be doing all sorts of other horrible things otherwise.
There's no 'isms' here.
They're just villains, same as it ever was.
They are all over the place, far more common than we'd imagine.
You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already heavily monetized—think Page Six, Access Hollywood, livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor Swift’s personal life.
Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made available to the wider public?
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
"The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock"
"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
"[Kelp] was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it"
"every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends... to raise the real rent of land."
- Adam Smith (Ch 11, wealth of nations) [Pasted this from a highly relevant reddit thread(0)]
Adam Smith has wrote extensively about how much he disliked Landlords. It's a great tragedy that most people consider him with only his capitalist aspects but he was worried (from what I feel like) about landlords and many people forget that.
So my point is, that Adam Smith would definitely be against polymarket betting because its a form of renting in some vague sense but more importantly an insider trading and just all the weird shenanigans that we also associate with the parasitic nature of landlords can be associated to polymarket gamblers/degenerate betters too (which is what this article talked about)
(Pardon me if this got long but I genuinely feel puzzled by the fact that not many people in the world know that adam smith, the father of capitalism, even he was against the rent-seeking practices which I feel like can also be talked about to how large social media/corporations are feeling rent seeking on their platforms/algorithms too)
A little ironic at the same time as well on how we justify the existence of these very things in the name of capitalism too. My feeling is that Adam Smith would feel some-what betrayed by what rent-seeking social media hubs and polymarket betting and crypto bro thing is being done in the name of capitalism, when he was so against the practices of rent-seeking.
(0): YSK: Adam Smith spoke of landlords as cruel parasites who didn't deserve their profits & were so "indolent" that they were "not only ignorant but incapable of the application of mind." : https://www.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_s...
Seriously? At least look up what words mean before you thesaurus them into your ideas.
I think you mean libertarian. Unless there’s some spicy details of Adam Smith’s life that the history books left out.
Your logical conclusion is a slippery slope. Lets follow your argument to it's logical conclusion, humans are evil therefore, regulate all their actions, imprison them, kill all humans OMG you are sooo evil I'm absolutely shook. How could you!
Why ought we take your misunderstandings to the"ir natural" extreme?
Here's the actual headline:
> Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story
echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story' | wc -c
107
> Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
These carry the same meaning. No editorializing happened.
I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.
Are you saying that the gamblers were actually the censors or that the reality was that the missile was indeed intercepted and somehow the censors forced the journalist to say it wasn't?
The author is being pressured (IMO) because the degens feel like they can threaten him (physical proximity)
These people believed that no Iranian missiles could possibly get through and instead of accepting they were misled they're shooting the messenger
There was a decision made by the security establishment not to allow reporting on Iranian missile hits in order to make it harder for the Iranians to do BDA.
How naive can you possibly be...
https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/
This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in the near term, it could be obscured.
Unlike the regular markets though, which are dominated by smart money, these markets are dominated by degen gamblers and idiots, so I guess they just shrug it off.