So...

>“It used to be the news channels were the callers,” said Kane. “They used to be the final say in big events. Like this officially happened because CNN and Fox News said so. But thanks to Polymarket, there’s a new signal.”

This is interesting because of this:

>At the moment, when there is a dispute, markets on Polymarket are settled by an anonymous group of people who hold a crypto token called UMA.

[...]

>It isn’t known who the largest UMA holders are, or what might affect how they vote. It is entirely possible that the people who finally settle a bet on UMA have large amounts of money staked on it.

So basically instead of trusting CNN and Fox News you trust an anonymous group of people who may or may not profit themselves from their own decisions. I can't see how this is any better.

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zarzavat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No. These resolvers only deal with rules disputes, i.e. disputes over the fine print. This is only applicable if you are gambling on polymarket. The probabilities while the market is open are set by market forces.

Of course you have to read the fine print very carefully to understand what a particular market is about.

The more deceptive thing is the potential disparity between the title and the rules. Most market participants read the rules closely (although some do not), and so the title + headline probabilities may be not as they seem.

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arter45 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes but for example if I look at the current bet on “Military action against Iran ends on…” it talks about the date on which neither US nor Israel initiate a drone missile or air strike on Iranian soil. This seems pretty solid, but we know both countries have launched drone or missile strike even before the current conflict.

So if the war ends but then the US sends a drone to kill one guy in particular, maybe even a terrorist not affiliated with the government, does that count? The fine print is not always that detailed especially for some kinds of events.

This is not surprising for a betting platform, but if this betting platform positions itself as a sort of crowdfunded news outlet, ruling over the fine print essentially means ruling over the news. Obviously all news outlets decide which news they should publish, but at least with traditional outlets you tend to know their biases, the group of people controlling them and so on. Instead the fine print, and ultimately (in Polymarket’s view) the source of the truth about world news, relies on a group of anonymous people voting for what they believe to be the actual meaning of world events.

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_alternator_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think GP is saying that, in principle, the UMA token holders can resolve a dispute any way they see fit, even if in practice it's resolved according to the rules. At the end of the day there is someone who has to arbitrate 'truth' for the purposes of payout.

	▲	zarzavat an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I understand that. What I'm saying is that resolution is only relevant to bettors. It doesn't affect anyone using Polymarket as a passive information source, because nobody is updating their world view based on the resolution of a market, they are updating their world view based on the price action. The price action follows the expected resolution, not the actual resolution. Even if someone were to game resolution to make a market resolve the wrong way, it wouldn't affect how the market priced the probabilities in the time before the resolution.
	▲	janoelze 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		it's an imperfect system, but UMA decisions can also be disputed again, up to two times iirc, which moves the dispute/decision to a different group of UMA whales. tbh, i think this is as good as it gets – unless you stay out of this completely.