https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/two-southeastern-colorado...
sexual assulters deserve respect due to their manliness and will-to-action
hmm can't see what's wrong here? well that's your intelligence level
Here's the negative externality that no one will care about. There's no reason gamblers won't repeat this stunt, until us poor schmucks who just want an accurate temperature reading have to build a fortified compound in order to do so.
Unlike computing systems, the physical world is a shared mutable environment. It is effectively impossible to lock people out so that you can get a reliable, clean measurement even when people are not intentionally sabotaging the data model.
There are ways to robustly clean this up analytically but it is largely beyond the capabilities of current tech stacks.
You're right that this isn't a technical problem, it's a social one. This is why most sports leagues simply banned betting... until recently, now that gambling companies have bought their way in. The players always end up manipulating games.
Can you expand on that? Even just conceptually that sounds really hard, how would you know whether you're measuring genuine (unexpected) changes in the environment rather than the result of (possibly sophisticated and coordinated) deliberate manipulation?
Stitching unrelated proxies and sensing modalities into a coherent data model is a spatiotemporal graph reconstruction problem. The join predicates require non-trivial inference algorithms if you want to avoid being buried in false positives. From this you can derive an estimate of ground truth and a model of uncertainty at a point in space and time.
The model of uncertainty is dynamic and unpredictable. It is difficult to manipulate the measurement without producing data that falls outside the uncertainty model across every proxy by which someone might construct that uncertainty model. This is similar to how e.g. GPS spoofing is detected in military systems. All GPS updates must fit within a (classified) dynamic uncertainty model relative to INS; if an update falls outside the model then the GPS signal is presumed compromised and updates ignored.
At the limit, this restricts manipulation to values within the uncertainty model. If you have a lot of unrelated proxies, you can make the window of uncertainty tight enough that manipulation becomes effectively impossible. At a minimum, the adversary would need to be able to manipulate every proxy and modality feeding your uncertainty model simultaneously.
These graph, spatial, and spatiotemporal algorithms scale very poorly on traditional data infrastructure and these data models easily run into petabytes if you are stacking multiple independent data sources.
Example of this?
Now imagine we're can't have this basic resource anymore because some nerd fuckr needs to win a bet on the internet
Makes me want to bet on creative uses of a baseball bat
The issue here is you'd need a lot more land because any asphalt near a temp sensor is going to give you bad data.
Ah yes. The way to measure temperature in the city is to move the thermometers outside of the city. Makes perfect sense.
Trying to eliminate gambling has vexed many an emperor and cleric.
In a bit of expensive equipment I own it happens to have 4 temperature and pressure sensors, located in two different locations on the unit. All of them generally disagree with each other on the exact temperature by around 0.1 C, which is fine for my use of it.
Building Byzantine fault tolerance into absolutely everything is expensive, and makes everything we do and buy more expensive. It would be better and cheaper to rely on social trust, if that's possible-- and it was possible before these gambling sites. Prediction markets are burning social trust as fuel to make profit, they should be heavily taxed, the way polluters are taxed, as destroyers of the commons.
I can reasonably test that the bolt is in a locked position every time I close the door and turn handle on the lock. But a single remote sensor could have malfunctioned or simply be out of calibration a few degrees.
If the actual temperature at the airport is important to any set of users enough so that the difference between it being 18 or 22 deg C is relevant, one should expect that there be at least 3 sensors (much like clocks) and assuming variances between the 3 sensors are within tolerance an average of the 3 temperatures is taken.
Three sensors doesn't solve the problem. Manipulating becomes marginally more difficult with three sensors, but it's still very possible, and with enough monetary incentive it's still even likely that it happens again.
So why not 5 sensors? How about 10?
And what about more consequential issues like the toppling of governments or military blockades where true redundancy is impossible and people are actually harmed?
Is there not a point where you start to blame the incentives that are being chased?
Ultimately they don't care too much about this kind of tampering, except when it has the potential to damage their reputation. They otherwise don't care about the specific outcome of a bet; they make their money regardless.
We are only seeing the very dumb here.
Good luck proving it.
> IIRC, someone bet on a streaker at the super bowl, did the streaking themselves, made 6-figures on the bet, bragged about it publicly, and the market negated the bet and recovered the money.
Yeah, exactly. Far easier to prove and to even get the idea to investigate that person in the first place.
So as long as you are subtle about it they won't even investigate, as a public investigation would make it seem like tampering was common.
In my city, the airport has wildly different weather than the city center, and the data I get has no relation to what I experience, for example.
Being held hostage by bad actors until you fortify your defenses seems to be a very unnecessary technical solution to an easily predicted social one.
Normalizing this only means the subterfuge becomes more subtle, not that you remove it entirely. But you preserve the incentives by not changing this system. So you're spending a lot of resources wastefully when you could just... not.
A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.
Can this really be said with a straight face?
Suppose you're an oil company, or a trader with a large position, and "hottest year on record ten years in a row" is bad PR that will make bills you don't like more likely to get passed. Or for that matter a company selling carbon capture stuff who wants to make sure it goes the other way. How about tobacco companies?
This has been a huge problem for as long as public data has been used to make decisions affecting profits.
No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that.
Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.
Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds.
Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.
Isn't that the same thing that happened here? It's a news story because they got caught. There is apparently already a law against this sort of tampering and it makes sense to have that law.
> Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained.
Oil and tobacco companies are the canonical examples because they're huge and contemptible, but the incentives scale all the way down. A small industrial plant is only allowed to use river water for cooling as long as the temperature isn't too high, they now have the incentive to cause the reading to be lower. The local school doesn't have A/C and therefore cancels class whenever the outside temperature is above some threshold, what happens when the kids figure out that the temperature sensor they use is in a public place?
You can make messing with the sensor illegal to apply a disincentive to counter the incentive but that doesn't mean the incentive wasn't always there to begin with.
I have bad news for you. The manipulation of weather sensors for profit has a history that long pre-dates prediction markets. You just weren't paying attention until now.
Okay, I'm intrigued about what I've missed. Give me more information about this history, please.
It's going to happen.
It'll happy by proxy too. When they figure 90% of Tesla's or SpaceX's valuation is tied to Elon, suddenly he becomes your mark.
There are roughly 2,500 individual companies listed in the US alone with a market cap that exceeds 1 billion dollars. Tesla's market cap is 1.4 trillion - about 1,000 times the size of all prediction markets put together.
In other words, to the extent this incentive is of societal concern, it is not because of prediction markets - that is the tail wagging the dog.
Edit: to be clear I think these markets are a scourge as they currently operate, but not for this reason.
(1) https://predik.io/en/blog/open-interest-mercados-prediccion-...
Notice also that the murder (or tampering with sensors etc.) is the thing you don't want happening in your jurisdiction, so that's the thing you have to prohibit anyway, because even if you ban short selling or prediction markets in your jurisdiction, having them in any other jurisdiction in the world would allow anyone to just place their bet there and you're right back to needing to deter that by punishing the murder rather than the bet.
> Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces.
It is entirely possible that there was causality in the forward direction if the bettor had inside information about the assassination operation beforehand.
I knew my previous employer was getting acquired before the markets did -- I had inside information -- but I had no way to make the deal go through.
Revealing inside information through prediction markets is mostly fine. You may think people shouldn't need a financial incentive to do so but clearly they do, and clearly other people are willing to put up with that money for it.
Probably automatable, and simply counting on automated systems and panic selling. Might be possible just with the AI package these days (not even requiring a traditional media article).
This is a ridiculously over-broad claim.
First of all, prediction markets shift incentives in a pernicious way; they don't magically erase or override all pre-existing incentive structures.
And secondly, professional athletes of all stripes appear to be receiving a lot more threats of violence from gamblers (including "prediction market traders") than they were a few years ago.
'Decapitated bodies, death threats, that's our daily life': Tennis players, helpless targets of angry gamblers [ https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/08/decapita... ]
https://www.wtatennis.com/news/4288181/wta-and-itf-release-a...
When the vice industry kept gamblers mainly confined to their own community, it was ugly enough (see the “people with pipes” debt collection trope you refer to). I don’t care too much about how people get their jollies. But I don’t see much good in letting vice behaviors and motivations slop out onto the wider world uninvited.
To your question, then: I’d draw the moral line at “don’t base forecasting gambles on any indicator produced by someone who didn’t agree to be used that way.” If I—as the entity or constituency who incurs the cost to produce an indicator—want to hire the prediction market to run bets on it at arms’ length from me, fine. If not, no.
The burden should be on the gambling interests to prove they’re contributing value to a specific domain, not on everyone else in every domain to prove gambling’s specific negative externalities.
Quite likely it has already happened.
There's been an enormous amount of betting on various military strikes by the Trump administration, much of which looks like insider trading.
Almost certainly there have been insiders with money on the line who were financially motivated to launch lethal attacks, which they might have otherwise paused or delayed.
It's much more effective to make the decision first and the bet second.
Your decision maker is now going to make decisions differently than they would if they hadn’t made the bet, due to the financial incentive. It hopefully won’t be blatant, but they’re going to be more committed to the original decision.
What did I say that contradicts this?
> Why almost certainly?
Because I haven't seen any clear reporting with evidence documented down to the level of individual decision-making.
I'm pointing out that the version where the market causes the decision is the much less effective way to do things. So I don't think it's so certain to have happened.
When the decision comes first it's still a problem but it's a very different problem.
I should make this explicit, I guess: If you make the decisions before betting, you don't really care what the market says beforehand, you'll make plenty of money either way.
> the version where the market influences the decision is the much less effective way to do things.
Okay, so two possible scenarios: "market influences decision" and "decision influences market."
1. Polymarket offers a contract called something like: "Will the US launch any lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean on April 30, 2026?" A commander of a drone unit for the US military bets $500 on "yes". At 11:51pm on April 30, he's trying to decide whether or not to issue an order to fire on a boat, or to wait 15 minutes for better visual identification of the target. As a result of his bet on Polymarket, he's strongly incentivized to issue the order right now.
2. It's 11:51pm on April 30. A commander of a drone unit for the US military is reviewing images of a potential target boat. He idly opens a browser tab to Polymarket. Lo and behold, he sees that the odds of "Will the US launch any lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean on April 30, 2026?" are at only 0.3%. He's strongly incentivized to issue an order to strike right now and to quickly buy that Polymarket contract before news of the strike breaks.
Does it matter which of these two scenarios might actually be taking place? I don't think so.
A fortified compound would affect the temperature reading.
A depressing thought: it will only tip in favor of common good when the probability of something that we today consider “normal” becomes so small that betting on that finally becomes profitable to insiders with influence. Imagine that world…
[0] No, I’m not going to change my writing style because it is considered a “tell” of LLM use.
I believe that these are the specific Polymarket bets in question:
April 6 (https://polymarket.com/event/highest-temperature-in-paris-on...): this appears to have been something of a "test run", since the odds weren't particularly lopsided until it suddenly spiked in the evening local time.
April 15 (https://polymarket.com/event/highest-temperature-in-paris-on...): the odds were quite lopsided in favor of 18°C, until suddenly reversing in the evening. This is presumably where the fraudsters made all their money.
The prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes. If that's the level you are playing on, you're playing at the lowest possible level, and probably won't win.
The markets are now about properly modelling other peoples' manipulation of prediction. That's how Wall Street works as well. Companies can beat earnings and their stocks crash immediately after. It makes zero sense if you just model companies. It makes full sense if you stochastically model how an ensemble of humans behave under incentives and human-written bots behave under human-written policies.
"Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model. That's the level you need to play on to profit in these markets. It's not that different from how a chess engine works.
Is this comment satire? Bet on things being intentionally and secretly manipulated by people you will never meet? In what direction? This just sounds like a recipe for participating in the most financially dangerous questions.
ML can help you optimize things after that, but locating diamonds in a soup of noise is not really where ML shines.
The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.
This vastly increases the barrier to entry for the normal person though. Is your position that just because laws don't work 100% of the time we shouldn't bother with them?
But wow what a useless way of conversing that is. They asked because it's unclear what you're implying. So could you please clarify if you think regulation would be useful? Or should be done despite being futile? Or shouldn't be done? I can only think of those three answers, is there another?
It is indeed unfortunate that the level of corruption in the current US administration likely precludes any action on it in the current term.
Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable? If you make it too hard and risky for most people to participate in, you'll limit the negative effects. You could probably quite effectively discourage it by sanctioning any transactions with one of these markets, you've got some opportunity because at some point the cryptocurrency needs to be converted to/from cash.
Of course, you'd have to dedicate some investigative and enforcement resources to the effort.
If to bet on a prediction market you have to both use a VPN and launder your money like you're a drug dealer, and I don't think many people would do it.
Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe, but the folks capable of doing that are part of the same administration supposedly doing the manipulation, so they would not investigate themselves.
Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0]
Indeed, the president's son works for Polymarket, and has invested in it [1]
0 –https://www.npr.org/2026/04/02/nx-s1-5771635/trump-cftc-kals...
1 – https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/08/polymarke...
> Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe,
But if you're (say) and American betting on it, the money almost certainly flows through one of those entities. And if you're using bitcoin the ledger is totally public, so you could track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa).
> Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0]
Choosing to "do something about it" or not is a different question than can something be done at all. I was addressing the latter.
I don't have access to that. The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.
If your question was purely technical, the answer is maybe, depending on the exchange flow. e.g. Maybe it was exchanged through Monero along the way or something, then the answer might be closer to "no".
KYC data is certainly confidential.
> The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.
I'm not obsessed with the Trump administration, so let's not make everything about them, OK? There are other governments in the world and there will be other administrations in the US in the future. I would like to talk about prediction markets in general.
The existence of illegal gambling is far less a problem than the issue of legal gambling from your phone.
You absolutely can market make on Polymarket. The barrier to entry is actually extremely low; you can do it from an AWS instance in Dublin (the closest non-geo-restricted region to the Polymarket exchange), and don't need the kind of infra that is needed to market-make on US stocks. Retail can absolutely do it on anything crypto-based.
In order to market make, you just need to price probabilities better than everyone else. That's it.
On Wall Street on the other hand it has come down to FPGAs and free space microwave links because fiber optics' index of refraction causes a ~31% reduction in the speed of light. If you don't have millions of dollars you can't get into that game. Over-regulation cas resulted in this space being only accessible to the ultra-rich.
Turns out the US federal regulator is not doing their job, and is actively trying to prevent US states from imposing regulations.
I am only half-joking, but this gave me an idea for how to finally get the local courts+LEO near me to get off their asses and actually do some law enforcement and prosecuting - I just gotta create prediction markets on the crimes occuring in public in my neighborhood.
They're interfering with officially gathered data, used to forecast the weather. And they're not just gambling. They're also gaming the system to make money on it. This goes far beyond 'just gambling'.
If that's illegal they should be prosecuted for that. Luxury goods create incentive for theft, but nobody suggests luxury goods stores should be banned to reduce the amount of theft.
There's plenty of legal avenues for the next administration to outright shut these firms down
For instance chess wagers on polymarket are super interesting because it's far more informative than a chess engine, even though engines are much stronger than any human. The nuance is that engines don't appreciate human factors like how easy/hard a position is to play. And so an engine might just say 'dead draw', whereas a strong human can say 'nah, white has very good winning chances here' - and the polymarket wagers end up reflecting that. And so there it's mostly strong players making money from people who think turning on their engine and betting based on what it says is something nobody else must have thought of.
>A temperature of 18C was seen as a 99.6pc probability before the temperature spiked later in the day.
99.6% of them didn't take the insane bet. And at least one of those 0.4% (by value? count? idk) decided to cheat.
I don't think the actual bet was insane, but the concept of betting on the weather is insane.
People still show up compulsively everyday.
Lotto (at least where I live) also shows the odds, which are always ridiculously low. Still, people play, because the human brain isn’t built to understand odds. It’s essentially worthless as a metric.
See https://misinfounderload.substack.com/p/tales-from-predictio...
Man I hate headline writers…
We’re I contracted to (legally and ethically) red team a temperature station, a “battery powered hair dryer” would be pretty low on my list of techniques for a number of reasons. First attempts would involve mirrors - parabolic or otherwise- to heat the device from a distance without potentially affecting wind speed / direction sensors.
Or you could hold it until it ticks 18.9 or whatever the bet was.
If you create a bet on {person} getting assassinated by {date}, you greatly increase the chances of somebody on the "Yes" side thumbing the scales.
When you put money on the line for events that are influencable, things get dark fast.
Seemingly harmless sports betting is rife with stories about mob members going to extreme lengths to change the outcome of a sporting event.
It's not hard to see how bad a bet like "so and so won't show up to event x" can go. These don't have to be bets about killing or injuring people to result in people being killed or injured to win a bet.
These companies are a pox on society.
Also, in roulette there's nowhere to put your money on whether a countries leader will be dead by the end of the month
Individually, yeah, by all means they can prey on people. But they're on the list of things that have been preying on people for centuries, like alcohol, and all kinds of other things. Ring-fencing casinos has a track record of some success at containing them.
I mean, sure, I'd love to wake up tomorrow and for all of the human race to have advanced to the point that to every last individual we are no longer gambling and that industry vanishes in a puff of smoke. I am as far into the belief that they are immoral as it is practically possible to be. But they are at least a known and knowable risk.
These prediction markets are blindsiding us. We could put up with them for another few decades until we coevolve further with them, or we could just, you know, not. Just end them now. Plus, prediction markets have a certain meta-ness to them that casinos largely lack that will keep them fresh and coevolving their own new ways to predate on us. Casinos have basically reached their final form, prediction markets could take yet more decades to get there and it's possible there isn't a stable endgame with them. Or, again, we could just end them here and now.
Even humoring your logic begs the question: Why is monetizing an "information advantage" valuable to society?
Polymarket prediction results can be swayed by whales and differ from reality. Example: they ruled Tesla unsupervised full selfdriving a real usable feature in ~Feb 2026. It still doesn't exist and won't. This decision is far from being the only such one.
The short version is, it's about control and power.
Today it’s the temperature at an airport in France. Maybe another day it will be the lifespan of an geopolitically important person.
Polymarket in particular started out using crypto and off shoring with a "not legal in the US, wink wink" to get try and dodge regulations.
Then you do not understand gamblers. They make emotional decisions not rational decisions. That's why the lottery works (i.e. "someone has to win")
Clickbait headline FWIW.
Telegaph is a disreputable tabloid. There are better sources.
https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:1c00dcc26094b...
Traffic jams for cash now is a reality.
All gross.
I'm just not sure why anyone would take a bet against someone who can single handedly make their side win. It would be like someone making a bet that I won't eat a hot dog for lunch tomorrow. Of course I'm going to eat a hot dog for lunch tomorrow. Why is there anything alarming about that? It's just stupid that anyone is taking the other side of that bet.
Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts.
Try to scale this anywhere from hairdryer usage to trip temp sensors to nuclear bombs going off in poor countries.
It's just a pity it basically depends on all participants in the prediction market being basically unaware that they are participating in a prediction market, and being oblivious to the incentives to create the outcomes they are predicting by the very act of predicting it with money.
But other than that minor detail, that little minor catastrophic flaw in the foundation, it's a beautiful argument.
I think we can call it as a society. It's a failure. We can go back to banning them, not just for moral reasons, but just pragmatic ones. The theory doesn't work. The supposed benefits don't manifest, and "unanticipated" costs to everyone do. We did the experiment. (Again.) We can close this out now.
Make of that what you will.
Even the US Government has executive and legislative officials profiting from secret information they know from doing their duties.
I wonder when someone who does cloud seeding will place a bet about rain at some unlikely time and place.
Or the next large forest fire.
Each year, one of my state's legislators introduces a bill to outlaw chemtrails [0]. It never leaves committee. This year, he added the plot of Termination Shock [1] to his bill. This proposed legislation already includes "cloud seeding" as a crime. Penalty of $500k/day and each day is a separate crime.
0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/26rs/hb60.html
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)#
Sure you might argue, maybe this was an issue with Polymarket choosing a weak source rather than the gov, but is that really true? If you question measurements like this you quickly get labeled an climate denier.
IMO this is good for the world, temp measurements should be based on thousands of sensors not just one. And if cloud seeding works, all the better for humanity, it's likely a key to terraforming future planets.
The degenerate idiots from Polymarket bet on this particular sensor. There's no law preventing people from betting on single sensors. And we can't make laws preventing people from acting on the world in all the diverse ways that can be exploited to cheat in prediction market.
We should just blanket ban this negative-value industry. We don't want people betting on forest fires and then starting them.