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Polymarket seems to have, quietly and without announcing it, completely stopped putting up any new instances of the primary obvious Iran War markets ("Ceasefire broken by [date]" etc), or any proxy particularly close to them. Only relatively peripheral and imprecise markets remain.
I presume this is most directly in response to heat from Congress about insider trading (which probably was happening) potentially leaking national security secrets (surprise attacks), on top of other more general anti-prediction-market threats and noise of the types you'd imagine.
I personally feel a bit blinded now, like I've had a sense badly dulled. The price of oil is a shitty low-resolution proxy with too many confounders, vs a high-volume prediction market directly asking the actual question.
Is the Iran war about to resume, like bombs start falling again? I dunno, maybe. It kinda seems like it might, and it kinda seems like it might not. Some people (who seem like they might have some greater insight than me) say so, other people (who seem like they might have some greater insight than me) say not. How am I, just some guy, to weigh them? I'd now have to personally be a private superforecaster to do much better than a flat "I dunno, maybe", since the public collective superforecast has now been taken away.
re insider traders:
This is almost always much more uncertain, lost in the noise, and if at all only in retrospect than the reporting makes it sound.
Like it's very likely in most cases to just be hindsight bias + a combinatorial near-guarantee that someone will be right on all of some small set of markets or make a big buy at around the right time, with enough people participating (and there are a lot of people participating in the these)
They don't show you the overwhelming proportion of false-positive "insiders", there are huge whale buys from users with no history all the time and they usually turn out to be wrong, just dumb gamblers; and there are users who are right repeatedly on such topics, in some combination of large-sample-size survival-bias chance + people who are actually very smart and good at this + probably, but usually loseable in the noise and volume, actual insider traders.
But if you bet against the market based on such "insiders", whether betting on the prediction market or "betting" as an actual first-party participant in the events the market is about, you'll probably be wrong and lose from it more often than not.
Why isn't Polymarket a darknet site that runs on Monero? Why is it run by that kid with the afro? What does he add to it? Expertise in making CRUD slop? Did he make the decision to do this? All of it seems so poorly done and thought out. The economy is fake; people will literally do anything but meritocracy.
Because it wants to be a successful business that could eventually make lots of money for the owners.
He is the founder, he created it. He is the world's youngest self-made billionaire so clearly he's added a lot.
It's possible he personally did, but he might not be that directly involved in most individual markets either. Even if he did personally sign on it, he has a bunch of lawyers and management types advising him as well so maybe he felt it would cause too much legal hassle (refer back to them wanting to be a successful business).
Circular argument. Was it necessary to line his pockets? What good comes of it? I doubt it.
Right. Instead of a good website that can run honest prediction markets. Great.
Just because you don't see a value doesn't mean there isn't one. I don't care about going to concerts but I can understand that other people do and that's why the industry makes tons of money off of it. I don't like soccer, but I understand that lots of the world does and that's why they make tons of money.
This might be shocking to learn but people generally like to have money. And most things in the world get done because people want money to trade with, not just to do "good honest work".
So greedy people who like to scam instead of doing quality work and letting money come along?
Circular argument. If anyone makes money, it's legitimate. What about Bernie Madoff? Geez.
If anyone makes money, by providing a service that clearly has both utility and high demand, it's legitimate
Bernie Madoff was not providing a service, Polymarket is
Gambling has no utility.
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Unlike your theoretical darknet version, Polymarket actually has a reputation for reliably paying out. For all crypto's fancy talk of solving trust with escrow and game theory, we've still yet to find any actual solutions for allowing anonymous parties to handle huge amounts of other people's money that works better than the US legal system.
I mean it's mostly defi contracts and there's a plethora of massive shitfights on Polymarket about the UMA resolving things in unsatisfactory ways and/or people sniping directionally correct resolutions via hitting on asterisks in the market rule. Vast majority of the money being 'traded' on PMs right now is sports contracts which is more about 'Let's get Texans and Californians betting when their actual legalization is probably not happening 'than it is about any rationalist true price signals.
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Silk Road, Alphabay, and some others had good reputations for paying out. I'm sure there's something up now like that that pays out reliably, although I wouldn't know.
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