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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).
Prediction Market valuation has a lot more to do with the regulated existing gambling industry being stuck in a bit of a quagmire due to state by state licensing and this being a solid potential runaround to get into states and age-groups that aren't otherwise available.
Sounds like he's made something quite valuable then, a workaround for a major industry that has been regulated to hell and back by big government.
Yeah but the end state here is this also getting brutally regulated. It's how this industry works. It's just a shame that a lot of people are arguing in favor of prediction markets on vague 'I'm a rationalist and like the idea of superforecasters' grounds when they don't get that it's actually a machine for 18 year olds and Texans betting Football
Indeed,
For my part I continue to maintain that it is not only morally and logically incoherent, but economically irresponsible to treat prediction markets any differently from how we would treat betting on a horse race or a ball game.
It's worse than that, because it also allows insider trading on literally anything you can stand up a market for, and you can also use them to directly incentivize specific behaviors without individually bribing someone or having a causal link back to the act to the person who funded it. And people complained about stochastic terrorism!
Jim Bell spent years in jail for promoting this idea.
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