> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world

I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.

It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.

Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market.

The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.

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jubilanti 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket.

No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.

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ambicapter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.

You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.

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PowerElectronix an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.

	▲	ambicapter 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What fair market price are you talking about? The price decided by the prediction market?
	▲	bobthepanda an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.

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cyanydeez an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.

Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.

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AtNightWeCode an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.

	▲	AtNightWeCode an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Downvotes on HN is always fascinating. Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/coinbase-ceo-s-bizar...

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freejazz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket

They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical

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WarmWash 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They can take any position they want and do whatever they want, the point is that these oddball markets are very thin so there just isn't much money there to harvest. You can only bet $50M at your chosen risk if you can find enough people to take the other side, and these markets simply don't have many participants betting much money.

Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.

	▲	freejazz 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It seems like it's a huge assumption on your part that the bets you are describing are in the "0.89" range and not something significantly higher, even disregarding what others pointed out about this having already provably occurred.

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entropicdrifter 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, they unironically just attacked a strawman and sat of their laurels