https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/preside...
I HIGHLY recommend going onto a sports subreddit match thread during a match and seeing what people say, versus the post match thread, a few hours after the match. The difference in tone is striking. While some people are probably just passionate, I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
I'm a firm believer in 'there's nothing new under the sun'.
> There's already been tales of journalists being harassed to change stories in order for over-leveraged betters to win polymarket bets.
So the only thing that has changed is who is doing the harassing.
> I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar. I grew up around them, this does not surprise me at all.
Sure but I can't help but wonder if many of them have money riding on the games which makes their anger much more understandable. Perhaps those you grew up around were also having a bit of a flutter.
Can you guarantee a fair trial when anyone can bet on the outcome, including the judge and the defense?
It has changed the outcome of some sports matches. It could change the outcome of far more important events.
I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.
Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on unusual deaths or serious injuries of... prediction-market executives.
Actually, now that I think about it, let's get rid of the minimum, there should be no minimum, all bets even five cents must be fully disclosed and attributed to natural persons, no hiding behind "corporations are people, my friend" nonsense.
https://youtu.be/RmUQptXfiWs?t=485
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
EDIT: Oh, I initially thought that you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations but not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. Which is not what I said, I only said (implied) that it's not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. I made no representation regarding whether I think it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations.
However, what I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more, because... if ordinary people could trade in assassination markets then they would choose to assassinate the government's assassins, and then the government would not react or respond in any way, so then the government would no longer be able to coordinate assassinations, and the general public would stop using the assassination market, and then the problem is solved. Is that right?
The system is already very much like that, we should try to go in the other direction, not make it even more attractive for corrupt individuals.
When someone in charge only cares about personal profit, it is only them that will benefit (and a couple of megacorps), to the detriment of millions, and humanity itself (look no further than the current events).
Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
Instead, most volume is in sports bets. People just like to gamble.
Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes.
Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.
Those are contradictory words
I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
Make a prediction for it: When will Gamma/Data/CLOB require subscription: 2026, 2027, etc.
Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos