As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.
My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
At least with sports betting it's limited in scope. Polymarket applies the same warping influence to the whole of politics and daily life. That's the biggest problem and difference to me, yes it sucks if teams are throwing or players are altering their play to make or break bets but ultimately the effect/danger of that incentive is limited. And with the more limited and well enumerated pool of potential insiders places like the league can pretty easily monitor for it while on Polymarket it's down to open source monitoring and a little blip on their TOS that's nearly impossible to enforce.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this.
There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].
> I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences...
Functionally, you are correct.
But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.
Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.
It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.
> As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.
I think time and time again that incentives are most important in determining how a market and by extension a society behaves. These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.
These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.
I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
At the time of the threats the odds were likely very skewed, as in over 99% to one side.
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
There was an interesting article in the Atlantic recently where a journalist spent a year participating in sports gambling. Part of the article discusses the effect it had on his psychology towards participants he had put his money on.
"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."
Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48 hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent: above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.
The pull quote "The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings" misses something. If the reporter changes his story, then the people on the other side of the bet might start harassing him. OTOH individual betters anger will depend which side of the odds they're on.
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.
I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the same time:
You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.
A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.
This caught my attention today as it was in dispute and there were a lot of comments (moslty angry). I like browsing polymarket (never placed a bet myself but it is fun to see the prices). Always thought this would kill someone someday..
Prediction markets remind of the "Safety Training" episode[1] of the Office where Kevin and others are betting on the outcome of various situations. It was pretty funny and absurd back then. Didn't expect it to be so prescient.
Except this is even crazier because the bets aren't on people dying, it's about a reportable event. Any of Polymarket's silence in voicing whether the outcome was determined by this unwilling participant's writing makes them complicit. When there's a single source of truth, it makes a target for vested parties that doesn't benefit from the security the platform and their employees get from hosting the bet.
I am not surprised that this happened. This is the logical conclusion of betting. Like in Muay Thai competitions, some efficient attacks are underutilized because they give the performer fewer points, which can be bad for the people betting on them. And their funding comes from the betting, so they change the sport to match what the gamblers want.
You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.
I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.
This is a major example why we can't have these things, unfortunately. It sucks because they can be powerful tools, but you're never going to be able to fully police this behavior as one of these platforms.
For some reason this reminds me of the Byzantine Generals problem. The fact is that unless you were there we don't really know how accurate any of these statements are. The video evidence is fine but I can whip something up in veo3 in 2 minutes. So while it's not a timing issue exactly (the truth might come out eventually), like the og byzantine generals problem, it is one of incentives toward deception. The real goal here isn't the payout, it's visibility into an active war. Polymarket is gambling at it's core, but the information it surfaces is used as justification for massive financial (and military) deals. I suspect this is likely what is happening here. Whereas before you might report on something and perhaps that's it, because news is always unreliable, now you report on something that has a measurable effect on some deal pipeline. Good on you for reporting on this. Difficult problem to solve tbh.
I would expect a dramatic rise in things like this, because they can be (1) monetized, and (2) scaled.
Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't think people have really noticed that profit is also available if you can influence other people's predictions to manipulate the price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do that at scale? Agentic AI can help.
We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.
When "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is combined with crime it seems clear that betting on crime is acting as an accessory. A business facilitating betting on crime is a criminal enterprise, in the sense of RICO.
Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:
War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise.
Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism.
In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.
Conspiracy theory: the missile hit an unpopulated area. Would it have been possible for someone in charge of intercepting incoming missiles to have been in on this bet? I know these things are automated, because human control would be too slow... but I wonder if there's an angle here. Won't be the first time someone on the inside made money on classified Israeli plans: https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-indicted-for-using-classif...
Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
Alan Kay had a great quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” A quote that many technologists and inventors have used as inspiration over the years as they create things.
It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider trading.
But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten / bribe someone into lying about what really happened. That’s the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of prediction markets has gone negative. You’ve no longer got a tool that helps predict reality, you’ve got a new way to reward people for lying about what is real and not real.
That's the limit of smart-contracts: they can't know the real world, so they depend on "Oracles"/external sources who can be corrupted or coerced, and so even if the foundation is guaranteed in the code, what the code uses as a reference is not...
“who decides” whether a fact is true or not - Apparently, this is an unsolved problem.
Also, I’m curious, who actually decides in this case? Someone who works at Polly market, who is immune to propaganda no doubt?
I found it interesting that the bettors who threatened the journalist accused him of being motivated to manipulate the market. The journalist was motivated to report honestly, the bettors were the one trying to manipulate the market by changing the reporting.
At some point betting markets are going to become a form of market where people are effectively posting bounties. You bet 1,000,000 for someone to murder a public official then someone gets in on the action and hires a hitman to do the job.
1055 comments
The issue of bribing/threatening a sports player to throw a game has existed for over a century. It's not a new problem. The only thing special about Polymarket is the expansion of surface area.
My preferred solution would be to just ban it all, or if you really want to allow sports betting only allow betting on the outcome of events happening in the venue one is physically in.
The existence of sports betting absolutely encourages people to throw matches and the existence of X betting absolutely encourages people to try to make X come about.
Strong regulation and legal consequences could potentially fix this. We don't see tons of people shorting a company and then bombing that company's HQ.
There are regulations. E.g., in the US, 17 CFR § 40.11 prohibits contracts on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law" [0]. The problem is that those responsible for enforcing those regulations are currently uninterested in doing so [1].
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/40.11
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9183-26
> I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
> Strong regulation and legal consequences...
Functionally, you are correct.
But the crux of the issue is Polymarket and Kalshi (YC W19) have successfully argued that they are technically a platform that is democratizing "futures", and thus falls under the CFTC - not gambling.
Nothing will be done to change this. YCombinator (who owns HN) [0] and Sequoia have built a fairly well oiled lobbying muscle with the CFTC and with both the GOP and DNC to maintain this status quo.
It's the same reason both Ro Khanna and Ron DeSantis went to (metaphorically) kiss David Sack's ring back in 2023 at the same donor event XD.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/little-tech-startup...
> As someone generally against gambling, I think there's a fair point to be made that Polymarket and similar sites are not fundamentally different from e.g. sports betting.
They are, because the object of the bet is open, it can be abused to generate incentives for desired behavior. For example if you really want the guy writing about the attack out of the picture, you don't send death threats, you instead make a new bet that says so and so does not write for X publication after Y date. Place a large bet against it and let greed and stochastic violence do the rest.
These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.
No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
For events where a single article could be a fulcrum, it seems like a feasible strategy to wager on the 1% and then try to manipulate the writer into changing the outcome. The chances of success will be low, but likely higher than 1% therefore the expected value[1] may be high.
Most people on Polymarket are gamblers and have no idea what they are doing, but the so-called sharps know how to play the game: Purely on expected value, for example if the market shows an 80% chance on an outcome but the sharp concludes that it's actually 90% then they buy it, then if the market rises above 90% but their conclusions don't change then they sell their shares and if it continues to rise they may even buy the other position. Evaluating the real odds of an event can of course be very hard, having insider information will greatly help here - it need not even pertain to the event itself, just something that will improve your model.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value>
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...
Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.
"Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/polymarket-bett...
(I'd prefer if it said they were evaluating whether to limit the types of bets accepted to make the possibility of harassing journalists less likely.)
You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.
A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.
This caught my attention today as it was in dispute and there were a lot of comments (moslty angry). I like browsing polymarket (never placed a bet myself but it is fun to see the prices). Always thought this would kill someone someday..
[1] https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/Safety_Training
Except this is even crazier because the bets aren't on people dying, it's about a reportable event. Any of Polymarket's silence in voicing whether the outcome was determined by this unwilling participant's writing makes them complicit. When there's a single source of truth, it makes a target for vested parties that doesn't benefit from the security the platform and their employees get from hosting the bet.
You can't introduce gambling into a system without changing other parts of the system.
Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't think people have really noticed that profit is also available if you can influence other people's predictions to manipulate the price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do that at scale? Agentic AI can help.
We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.
Could work in some crime procedural.
A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.
Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:
War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise.
Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism.
In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.
Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
>More emails arrived in my inbox.
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
What do you think, could this help this issue?
It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider trading.
But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten / bribe someone into lying about what really happened. That’s the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of prediction markets has gone negative. You’ve no longer got a tool that helps predict reality, you’ve got a new way to reward people for lying about what is real and not real.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
* https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
... and many, many other stories.
...which was shut down in 2003 "after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market".