Can someone articulate what the harm of this is?

Ignoring the gamblers losing money because they lack insider information, the harm is that you changed the incentive for war. It is motivated by money for the gamblers, not military or political objectives. The difference between this and rigged sports gambling is that people die. They die on a whim and they die unnecessarily. I shouldn’t have to explain why people dying is bad.

It's a rigged game. If there's a bet that player X will foul player Y, without proper safeguards, player X can bet on himself and then intentionally player player Y. The actual harm is that by the rules of the betting, no one should know the outcome who could also bet on the game, so the losers are being robbed of their money.

In this particular context, it's also possible that there are illicit transfers of money without being immediately noticeable. Bribery could happen at the highest levels with it being very difficult to trace and prosecute.

Like any insider trading you are transferring money from the public to yourself. More interestingly for the prediction market angle: you are leaking secret information by doing that. If you make big trades in anticipation of specific events other market participants can see it. That could be extremely serious if say it endangers a military operation.

If an insider, say a member of the Department of Defense (or War, duh) bets a certain date: they could internally influence the decision to execute on that date rather than possibly a better (earlier?) date that could yield less damage or loss to either side.

Both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading when people able to influence outcomes are able to bet on those outcomes.

It’s more a sign of corrupt and morally bankrupt leadership, which should be alarming enough by itself.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/treason-in-the-futures-ma...

Corruption, especially blatant corruption like this undermines credibility in institutions.

The fact we’re talking about this is a testament to the low standard of integrity and and morality we carry as a whole.

To me it looks like this:

If you are not an insider with special info and special access, no matter what you do in the market, you eventually lose to the insiders. So, if you blur the details a bit, you're just giving your money to these people.

The rational move would be to just not participate in a market where insider trading happens. I don't really understand why people aren't avoiding these markets like the plague.

Insiders fleecing dumb people. Then dumb people get pissed their finances are destroyed and they'll never pay off their debt or support a family or attract a mate, and so they go down a rabbit hole of insanity and depression on social media, getting conned by influencers and AI slop and then vote for whatever the rage du jour some grifter politician is selling, or worse they shoot up a school...

2026, yeah baby!