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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.
Do you want the "prediction" in "prediction market" to mean something other than "massed guessing" or do you want the price to reflect as much information as possible so users can actually rely on the market price for other things?
I can understand the urge to want everyone to be playing around with the 'same' information, for fairness' sake, and the person who can use that info to best guess the outcome wins, but there's all KINDS of private, otherwise inaccessible information out there that it would be beneficial to draw into the open by incentivizing insiders.
This information can benefit people who don't even participate in the market to have, is the thing. Seeing that there's suddenly an 85% chance of a new, completely unannounced iPhone being released is potentially useful, and you're under no obligation to trade against that info.
You WANT someone who has some specific, meaningful information to trade on it ASAP so as to update the price and disseminate that info to others who may be able to utilize it in their own trades or inform their own actions.
The unfortunate fact that a lot of people DO choose to gamble against potential insiders is really the only part I find morally questionable. Pumping and dumping and wash trading and hype trains happen all the time in 'regular' markets, though. Should people have been stopped from trading GME during the short squeeze? People got a tad pissed when exchanges blocked them from trading.
The funniest thing possible would be if it was Nicholas Maduro himself, trading on his polymarket account right as his door was being kicked in.
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