Comment by alkonaut
8 hours ago
So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet heavily myself if I were the reporter.
Polymarket doesn't resolve the bet, UMA token holders do.
https://docs.polymarket.com/concepts/resolution
Not even that. It is settling a bet on voting. But you are taking a bet on voting on the right side of the outcome. This is independent on the actual bet - this is outcome voting. You make very little money if you vote on correct outcome, and lose a lot if you vote on wrong outcome. So there is an incentive on voting on correct outcome.
https://rocknblock.io/blog/how-prediction-markets-resolution...
Not going to defend Polymarket, but that's usually the case for markets that should never existed that depend heavily on opinion and/or reporting.
For example, "Will Trump talk Macron before 31 of March?". Someone is going to get scammed no matter what: the market rules will set some basic resolution scenarios, but you'll find sources saying it was a letter, or sources several countries and in several languages saying that it was an exchange between their offices/assistants, or smoke signals, or god knows what, while a single US source will say they talked without any further detail, or it is simply reported 1 month after the fact when the money has long moved wallets, and then people vote based on the combination of factoids they've been exposed to. In principle the perverse incentive of voting wrong to earn money will make you lose money on the UMA itself (unless there's a coordinated effort, which has already happened, but IME it's rather rare).
Other markets are indisputable bar black swan events, like, "how many Oscars will X win", if it's 6 it's 6 and no source will say 5 or 7. That makes opening disputes 100% a money-losing option.
If you can keep the public misinformed for long enough, you can gradually sell off your position instead of losing the whole bet.
And the people taking the other side of the bets. You have to kind of be a fool to take an anonymous bet with an outcome that can more or less be chosen.
There exists a sensible way to handle this. It is to require at least three independent news outlet reports of an event (as defined in the bet).
A related issue is that war news is heavily censored in Israel; it's difficult for news outlets to report it.
Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
> Or y'know, ban this betting activity to begin with.
Ban it where exactly? If you’ve got personal knowledge of where these knuckleheads reside, speak up. It’s entirely possible that it is banned where they are and they just got a VPN and did it anyway.
It's really hard I think. I mean if we assume sports betting is never going away (Outside of the US at least, sports betting is barely controversial and is basically now, unfortunately the oxygen of a lot of the whole sports industry).
A lot of the large sports betting orgs (Unibet, Bet365, Ladbrokes, etc) allow betting on at least some contests that aren't sports. Like elections, Eurovision song contests and so on. So it becomes difficult to draw a line between the things that are legal to bet on, and those that aren't.
And as we know, even if two things are clearly on either side of what should be legal but you can't make a good distinction of what makes one of them illegal, it tends to be the case that both remain legal.
I think the easier short term fix for this is to have KYC laws and actually enforce them.
It already is not accessible in the US, although ideally it should be in the same of freedom. If you are from the US and don't value personal freedom, you are free to leave it, as it is a core tenet of what is American.
Making death threats to a journalist or anyone already is illegal. There is zero reason to ban betting considering the sensible mitigation that was noted.
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