The Iran War Shows Why Polymarket Should Be Illegal
www.burnsnotice.com
Betting markets treat the flow of world events as random, but there are people making real decisions and there's nothing stopping them from profiting from those decisions This weekend, an unnamed person with the user name "Magamyman" began placing bets that the US and Israel would soon begin strikes on
  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    8·
    25 days ago

    Something this doesn’t even touch on is the ability to monitor for accounts making bets over a certain amount, in order to discover news prior to the public disclosure. This is not hypothetical, this is commonly done in the OSINT world in various ways (the most well known currently being the Pentagon Pizza Watch account).

    The average investor on Polymarket doesn’t have $100k to drop on bets, so when one account suddenly drops that on several different but related bets, it’s at least sensible to consider it might be an insider. Imagine if Iran was watching this, and put their air defense on high alert as a precaution, and it ended up getting pilots killed.

    In the stock market world, that is absolutely one of many reasons that insider trading is banned; senators all suddenly placing shorts on oil and gas before the weekend could have telegraphed the same thing.