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This story went viral A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall.
In the comments, one thing I have observed is the willingness of people to defend insider trading. Here is the highest-upvoted comment on Hackr News:
"Using insider information is how you are supposed to win these. Otherwise it's just random gambling. This is not the stock market. There are no public reporting rules for the weather, song lyrics, what Kim Kardashian eats tomorrow."
Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.
My comments of course were downvoted. They always are. I could make a comment along the lines of the "Pizza tastes great" and I would be downvoted by every pizza hater on that site and no upvotes by everyone else who enjoys pizza, as is the counterintuitive nature of online voting patterns. Writing good comments is an art in and of itself.
If the public image of these prediction market companies becomes rife with stories of insider trading, anyone who doesn't insider trade is going to be understandably pissed. Because prediction markets are zero-sum, if a standard user spends time and mental energy placing a well-thought investment in a prediction market and some inside trader swoops in and capitalizes, that's going to leave a sour taste and disincentivize them from using the site. I'd guess that there are a whole lot more standard users than inside traders, so this could lead to some serious problems retaining their user-base. Perhaps this is a bit far-out, but eventually these sites could become dominated by inside traders seeking to effectively launder money with minimal involvement from anyone who doesn't insider trade.
Hopefully that teaches them to expend a bit more mental energy thinking "hmmm, how many people might possess private information that will let them beat me in this market despite all my research?"
To me that's a dream outcome. I'd like to just hook up to an API that pulls prediction market odds in real time (but doesn't TRADE on them) so I have a preternaturally accurate 'Oracle' I can query about uncertain events. Make the insiders work for me, rather than trade against them.
And eventually people will probably build 'insurance' products on top of these markets, which requires them to be more accurate and liquid. "Oh you're worried that your wedding day might be rained out? We'll sell you a contract that pays out 10x if it happens to rain on that day in that location."
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