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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.
I'm not here to promote it. I think that if we're not very careful, existing prediction markets risk stumbling into incentivizing that by default, and this is a bad thing. Prediction markets might be fine among intelligent and conscientious forecasters, but I think they're another entry on the very long list of "good-sounding ideas that go badly when you roll them out society-wide".
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