If you're a grunt trying to contact Russia or china you're much more likely to end up talking to an FBI agent posing as a foreigner. Prediction markets make it easy and anonymous.

A good general rule is to make it hard for people to do bad things, and to not create incentives to do so. This seems to do the opposite.

I think doing war crimes is the real betrayal of the country. But we have a president who think his personal morality is superior to international law, ratified treaties (despite the supremacy clause) and so on. This is overtly and explicitly unconstitutional.

> he would also be willing to take money from enemy x to do the same thing?

The prediction market is the mechanism by which this happens.

Nobody is going to uncover anything on bets when they're done an hour before the event happens. This isn't the stock market and trying to connect it to what happens on the stock market makes no sense.

It's not necessarily illegal use of secret information.

There exists "alternate data", some companies monitor all kinds of stuff, satellite pictures, etc, some of these companies surely saw the inevitable asset positioning just before such a big attack (150 planes).

Just like the Ukraine invasion was first visible on Google Maps as traffic jams !!! at the border at midnight

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/google-...

The irony that operational national security would be greatly improved if only they maintained a well staffed and resourced government kitchen for the Pentagon, but won't for many silly reasons. Oh no, lots of people would have to sit on idle standby many times, or gov't employees would get free meals.

I believe that orders probably do go up. I don't believe the sites/accounts using Google's 'how busy' have any relevance at all. As I understand it, these just use GPS/location data of phones.

It only takes one person to pick up 40 pizzas, after all. Perhaps they could look at time estimates for a new order as a better indicator, if such an API exists prior to ordering.

Stats on politicians trading habits, indicates insider trading like this is standard practice in the USofA.

No beleives MAGA nuts are trading experts.

The big difference here is that if you buy short-dated out-of-the-money options and make it big, the SEC comes knocking on your door and reads your text messages to find out what you knew and when.

It's both easy to track down stock traders due to KYC, and easy to prosecute due to laws.

Polymarket and friends make it both much harder to find the trader, and also it's less clear if there's a legal theory that lets you prosecute someone dealing in these new markets.

Sure, congress and the president can insider trade a bit here and there, but the everyday joe is rightfully afraid to.

Of course the next step beyond that is "leaking" false information as a decoy by placing large bets on certain events. If that happens enough times it seems like it should wash away the value for agencies hoping to act on "privileged" information.

Oh, I suppose one could interpret it as literally as possible, and arrive at that essay's conclusion.

I have always considered the following to be basically synonymous:

* In the absence of info, consider the intended output of the system to be what it is measured to be

* The output of the system is best determined using observation vs reasoning

Most of the examples there are moreso about two systems colliding. Yes, the purpose of the military is to disable the enemy and by god they are disabling a lot of each other so much so that they don't seem to be doing much else.

Except the bus system, in which the purpose is indeed to turn fuel into exhaust, because the busses move whether they are full or not. The purpose of busses is to drive around, and it so happens people like to use them. If the purpose of busses was to shuttle people around, it could be done several other better ways.

If the purpose is to gamble, it can be done many other ways. This system seems purpose-designed (or purpose-emergent) to coax out secret information in the form of large bets.

Untrue. Insiders are incentivized to trade when they can buy at the lowest price. That could be at any point up to the event.

> [...] insiders are incentivized to wait until just before the event to make their trade, [...]

What are you basing that one? And how is this supposed to work?

If you are an insider the incentive is to trade as soon as possible, lest some other insider beats you to the punch, or some conventional leak (or investigative journalist) spoils your party.

This is easiest to see, when there are multiple unconnected insiders: the first to trade wins. But even if you merely suspect another insider might exist, you have an incentive to trade first.

> And that's assuming that you can distinguish an insider from someone lying for the sake of market manipulation.

That's exactly the same as any other noise trader in financial markets, yes. Nothing specific about insider information.

> But somebody could have made billions betting on that.

Just because there's a small bid for 1-to-1000 on market, doesn't mean you can buy billions worth of contracts at that price.

If we want to go turtles all the way down, we could create a market to predict trading by decision makers and thus incentivize leaks from the betting markets.

Well, insider trading should be legalised in general. It would be better for the general public.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Arguments_for_...

> Insider trading is illegal.

Only in some markets and in some jurisdictions and some of the time.

Eg until fairly recently 'insider trading' in commodities wasn't anything you were punished for in the US.

You have completely missed my point. I don't give 2 shits about people losing money gambling. I give a shit about the Whitehouse doing insane things just so they can use the insider information to personally make money. Did you know on Oct 10th someone made $200M on a BTC short position made 30 minutes before Trumps announcement of 100% tariffs on China?

Yeah - in principle betting markets are also bribery markets. Instead of betting based on expectations, one can bet the opposite of the outcome they desire.

It's interesting how those markets avoid any language like "death," I assume to not give the obvious appearance of an assassination market, though death seems covered by "is prevented from fulfilling his duties".

People being charged doesn't mean there's a problem of any significant magnitude for society.

If there's not much money to be made (because of illiquidity and adverse selection keeping market participants out), then there's not much incentive for people to do weird things.

10 years ago we'd be called conspiracy theorists.

Correct. I've always had a hard time getting my point phrased in a way that gets people to understand my point, but I'm baffled that people don't see an issue with creating something that says "Hey if you blow up these random people in Iran today you can make $50 million dollars and no one can punish you" and thinking its not a big fucking deal.

This also isn't a theoretical issue that may happen - it dissapoints me that very few people know this but - on October 10th when BTC fell from $122k to $104k because of a trump announcement, someone created a short position 30 minutes before Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports and profited $200M USD.

This is going to be a very nuanced point, so if you already have your mind made up on "Pro this" or "anti that" you are going to miss it. To me this is clearly a bleeding edge legal and technological phenomenon so if you hold a solid position either way, we are not in the same page at all. Prediction markets are going to be an issue in general in congress for the next years to come, and in specific cases in the courts for the next decades, it's silly to think that we, a random individual commenting on an internet forum, have the right answer at this nascent time, I recommend if you are coming into this with a premade opinion on the subject, to have a suspension of disbelief and enter into the discussion on the grounds that there's not a right answer at this time.

On to the nuanced response:

>"First - I can not comprehend how you could possibly have a charitable interpretation on the war point and how it might have a net positive."

>"I would like to hear a single positive for being able to make BTC bets on killing people."

This has been marked by yourself as a single point, but there's two distinct asks here, which I believe you are conflating. The latter of which is easy to answer, the first one is clearly to be decided and no one knows at this time (and could go either way).

First you ask how it might be a "net positive", that is that its positives outweigh the negatives. Then you ask to hear a single positive. Forgive me for overspelling the obvious here if the contradiction is already clear, but I must dwell on this as it seems to be precisely what's causing you to "not comprehend".

It is trivial to show a single positive, it can be done so in two manners, first showing that a single positive is possible, and then a bit harder would be to argue that said positive is definitely a positive and not a negative, in isolation. On the first type, to merely show that an individual positive is possible, I could do so in three different manners, one which is on good faith and relevant to the actual events/discussion, e.g: "on assasination events, victims can get information on their safety and act accordingly.", the issue is that this might distract you into discussing the specifics of what I just said instead of following the greater argument. A second way would be to show an individual positive that is technically so, but obviously would not be used to argue anything else, which avoids the reader from being defensive, e.g: "It's fun for people to gamble". It's worth noting that this is a single positive in isolation. Thirdly, I can argue anything really, and it is at least a candidate, mere refutation the fact is irrelevant as we are for this point only considering that there could be positives: e.g: "It might solve AGI/string physics", even in the exercise of finding a silly positive effect, we nevertheless find that it's technically possible that prediction markets might fund scientific research.

On the second type, to show that such positive effect is actually positive, I don't think there's much grounds to deny here that there exist individual positive effects. So I won't try to waste much effort, here, I think a stronger argument would be to argue that the net effect is negative, which again is distinct from being able to point out a single positive.

Regarding the net effect of markets on war or assasination attempts, I do not hold an answer, do you? Do you know for a fact whether it's a net positive or a net negative? Somewhere in the US courts, legislation and lawyers there seems to be a different answer. The journalists and a large amount of readers seem to be of course against it, but they don't hold much more power or say in the matter than the bare minimum any citizen gets by democratic vote, and to that extent, the power they hold is just over the capability to affect legislation for companies that have a global audience, and are just headquartered in your country as a base of operations, and would immediately move to another jurisdiction, or give way to a competitor in another jurisdiction if the conditions were to turn too unfavourable.

Personally, I don't make bets on wars, or assasination attempts because of the possibility that they may cause negative effects, it is sufficient and I consider the burden of proof to be inverted, but by no means do I hold the belief that it is a net negative. And I still reserve the right morally and legally to participate in these markets if for some bad turn of luck I were to be caught in the middle of a war, in the same manner that I might reserve the right to own and bear arms.

If I live in a country that is under threat of being attacked by U.S. it is nice to have a website where I can look to get a reasonable probability that the attack happens