This is also true with traditional stock markets, except that laundering real money is much harder to do alone. In the real world an assassin can't really involve more people as those people would realize they are loose ends since they have a get-out-of-jail card in turning on you.
The markets could get ahead of this by stipulating that a resolution via murder will always lead to resolution at prices at a time prior to the death. This would technically incentivize a potential assassin to commit a deniable murder, but if they succeed it won't be the market's [PR] problem.
But there might be an incentive to freeze the price? I think polymarkets should be banned.
People taking sides against each other means the losers and winners are individuals.
Meanwhile sports betting is growing but the winners are “the house”, the companies.
But all they are doing is updating a financial instrument that suggests an increased likelihood, and getting massive bank for not providing the information that would make everyone else bet the same way.
That's the incorrect way of thinking about this, at least according to how US insider trading laws work. If a hedge fund has reason to believe oil prices will spike due to some secret info (eg. they paid some intern to camp out at US airbases and spot outgoing flights), and then they made massive bank on that trade, that's not insider trading. It's not a crime to hoard material nonpublic information and trade on it (ie. "updating a financial instrument ... and getting massive bank for not providing the information that would make everyone else bet the same way"). Now, if they paid off some guy inside the base, that might be breaking a bunch of laws around national security, but still not insider trading.
Note that this isn't about making the market "fair" for other participants but about ensuring confidential information remains confidential (especially relevant in the context of national defense).
First, yes, you’re right.
Second, they raised a shit ton of money under the bull case of mass consumer adoption, which is going to be impossible if that said consumer feels it is rigged.
Let’s all be real here; for 95% of their use cases both now and in the future, they’re a sportsbook. Which is fine! But they’re not going to get to anywhere near returning a multiple on their manic valuation until they act like one. And the first thing to do is to stop with all of the pseudo-academic bullshit about what a prediction market is. And the second is for them to hire someone, anyone, who knows even the first thing about sports because everyone even tangentially connected to this market knows that before six months ago, Tarek and Shayne couldn’t differentiate between a football and a buttplug.
Do you think it is acceptable that someone may have altered their behavior due to the outcome of a bet on attacking Iran?
We can go on and on (I can give you 7 million other examples too, this is easy one), the entire prediction market is meant for idiots to give their money to non-idiots that are rigging the whole thing (without any regulation).
Do you want to bet what I'll eat for dinner next?
A new Polymarket account made over $500k betting on the U.S. strike against Iran
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/middleeast/us-embassy-israel-...
Friday ^^
Surely that’s easy for Iran to hear about.
It seems weird to know the attack was coming and yet their leader still gets killed.
My social circle had largely expected that Iran was getting bombed on Saturday or Sunday once the evacuation notices went out Friday, and this intuition was merely from laymen who follow the news. I don't doubt that insider trading was involved as it's the norm with this Admin, but I also don't doubt that many savvy people could've legally placed successful bets.
More generally, if it was so obvious how come the odds were so long?
If it were so obvious that winning required no insider knowledge the odds should be better.
For a good while there, the headlines went from “oniony” to “sim-city news headline flavor text” to “I can’t believe I share a finite existence with the people being discussed”
I am commenting in this thread to pass time, but I assume there is a such a high chance the linked article is not true, or at least has a hidden agenda, such that it should be ignored or treated as entertainment. Could be product placement, could be completely manufactured rage-bait, who knows, and more importantly, I have no reason to care.
Or both.