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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.
Using congressional insider trading as a rough proxy, the vast majority of people are vehemently against insider trading. People have a knee-jerk reaction to unfairness (caveats abound) and thus insider trading must be prevented. Being a libertarian, I'm much more comfortable with unfairness than the general public.
I think it also creates perverse incentives, especially if you're in a position to choose how to resolve the bet. For example, let's say there is a market for whether Canada will send over $1b to the Ukraine between January 1st - April 30th, 2026. If I'm a Canadian MP, especially one of the ruling party, I can choose how to resolve the market - which means if I decide I earned a bonus, I can look at whatever position has a better payout, bet on that, then delay/accelerate sending aid to make my position true.
The issue becomes that "making money" is a much stronger incentive than "doing the right thing" - so you could take even outlandish positions and bet on them.
"But not everyone has that much power! Most people only know a little bit!"
Well, yes, true, but most people have areas of influence. Not everyone can know whether NVIDIA's new chip will make it to market before Intel - but the employees at NVIDIA could delay, find "faults", etc. in an effort to push the date back.
Insider trading is bad when the people betting on it are also the people who decide which direction it resolves in.
Orderbook would be thin for a market like this, your senator would be risking his job and reputation for a measly low 5 figure payout.
Majority of nvidia employees are multimillionaires, especially the ones in position to change timelines. Once again - risking a lot for a relatively small payout.
The conversation about effects of prediction markets on our world are valid, but I think most people overestimate how much of an effect they could have. Polymarket double counts their volume, most markets' orderbooks are thin. Insiders will be getting some peanuts payouts here and there (I personally don't care), smart players like funds have another signal to monitor to be ahead of others. That's really it.
Nah, Canada is corrupt, they'd be fine - we just had our former finance minister and special envoy to Ukraine defect to Ukraine, and we still don't know the list of individuals who are compromised by foreign governments.
How's that defection? People are allowed to change jobs, aren't they?
Sorry, I was exaggerating for comical effect.
Here's a bit more elaboration on what happened:
Basically, I was calling it a "defection" as Freeland has always been a bit of a Ukraine activist in government, and was working directly with Ukraine (as a Canadian MP, which she still is today) when she decided to swap over. It's fairly blatantly a conflict of interest, but I figured very few people would care to know all the details.
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They are thin, but this guy still cashed out a 400k+ profit. Some contracts have pretty big volume and such volume will increase with the popularity of these markets.
We can easily create hypotheticals for people who are not multimillionaires also affecting outcomes for a payout
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