Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war
theguardian.comNot a new phenomenon! It happened during the War on Iraq. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/weekinreview/you-can-bet-...
People will bet on absolutely anything; gambling is as old as time itself.
> Wagering was generally legal under British common law, so long as it did not to lead to immortality or impolity.13 Bets about the outcome of events in war, over the death of political leaders, over court cases, or between voters over election results were illegal on these grounds.14 In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the British government increasingly attempted to limit gambling, especially among the working classes. The Gaming Act of 1845 made gambling contracts and debts unenforceable in court (but otherwise liberalized what amounts could be wagered); the Betting Houses Act of 1853 outlawed the operation of betting establishments other than private clubs; the Betting Houses Act of 1874 cracked down of the advertisement of wagering; and the Street Betting Act of 1906 made acceptance of wagers in streets and public places illegal.15 Despite the legal uncertainty in the late 19th and early 20th century, the Fleet Street press reported on election wagering at the London Stock Exchange and at Lloyd’s in markets for Parliamentary “majorities.” [^0]
[^0] Rhode, Paul W. “The Long History of Political Betting Markets.” KU School of Business, 2012 March. https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/Int_Election_Betting_F...
Your comment is a great addition to the conversation. I do just want to add the scale point, though. That source is less than a million was bet, and now there are hundreds of millions bet on the ceasefire, and millions more on other Iran bets, and then even more bet on Russia/Ukraine.
So I think it's a bit overstated to frame it as nothing is new. But your historical context is helpful.
> That source is less than a million was bet, and now there are hundreds of millions bet on the ceasefire, and millions more on other Iran bets, and then even more bet on Russia/Ukraine.
I'd imagine those numbers are typical for any transaction facilitated by the Internet comparing 2003 to 2026.
It seems to me there's an explosion in just the last few years that's noteworthy -- that gambling on war did not simply grow hand-in-hand with all web purchases. Am happy to be wrong, but that's my experience seeing this play out.
"Not a new phenomenon!"
True, but I cannot find anything in the article that suggests such betting is a "new" phenomenon
Often unclear to me what is the point behind the common "this is not new" HN reply when the submission makes no explicit or implicit claims that the subject matter is "new", or that being "new" is significant
IMHO, the "this is not new" replies need further elaboration to clarify the point being made
> Often unclear to me what is the point behind the common "this is not new" HN...
Because articles like this tend to come with a implicit or explicit moral outrage.
So these comments are the equivalent of "yes... and?"
This somehow strengthens the argument of the poster you’re replying to? “yes…and?” is a weak response to journalism intended to shine a light on something that causes moral outrage, especially given that “moral outrage” is justified on a highly subjective basis.
> This somehow strengthens the argument of the poster you’re replying to?
Is that a question or a statement?
I’m sure that immortality was meant to be immorality, but the idea of British law prohibiting some Faustian bargain struck with eternal life on the line if the wager works in your favor gave me a good chuckle.
There was a small period, yes, where the internet was less regulated because the government didn't want to stomp out a new technology and let another country get an advantage. Now that the US has the advantage they are only harming their citizens by leaving it unregulated. Less people engage in a behavior if it's illegal and uniformly enforced.
Wagering was commonly legal, but generally illegal since 1541 Henry VIII banned for laborers & servants.
Still isn't something we should allow legally at scale on a public website. IS != OUGHT
Murder is also old as time itself! Guess we just gotta let it happen!
Every shareholder of an arms company (or holder of an index tracker), is betting on war too.
This mechanism is stupid, corrupt and driving extreme behaviour.
But betting on war is not new, and I find it abhorrent that people will hand wave away the military-industrial complex as an essential component to modern civilisation while calling individuals making bets on war horrible names.
It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye.
> It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye.
Is this meant to be an excuse that justifies this gambling behavior? Children’s hospitals also gain a profit from the suffering and death of children, yet we would find it pretty abhorrent if people started betting on how many children died at the Mayo Clinic. Yet, it’s only scale and semantics.
This is becoming the kind of "VC platform for online war investments". You: 1. Plan 2. Bet 3. Invest money upfront 4. Execute 5. Redeem your profits
Giving people an easy way to profit (i.e. incentive) to use either direct political power or indirect power via bribes is going to have massive consequences on corruption.
We've made profiting off of corruption substantially easier. Anyone who thinks that isn't going to increase corruption is a moron.
Anyone who thinks having more corruption is a good thing is also a moron.
Is there an infinite supply of fools money? There sort of has to be if it's clear that the outcomes are being manipulated by participants in the bets.
I guess people do walk into casinos and play games that are legally controlled to have outcomes favoring the casino.
If you are KGB you can intentionally lose in order to bribe someone.
This whole thing isa KGB propaganda tool + method to give bribes and should be banmed by the Western world.
Traditional financial markets already give people really big incentives to cause all kinds of mischief. Eg buy a few puts, then publish some made up bad news about the company and profit.
Somehow that doesn't seem to be too much of a problem in practice.
I don't care if someone tanks MSFT stock artificially or deservedly.
I do care if someone pays the president of Cuba $300k to launch a rocket at a skyscraper in Miami to start a war so they can make $1M.
If you're invested in MSFT, you signed up to be some part of a casino.
If you just live in the real world, you ideally did not sign up for infinite corruption that actually impacts your life just because someone wants to bribe politicians to get an ROI.
It's also going to lead to assassination markets, either directly or indirectly.
> "Johnny CEO will be alive in 2027"
That might be banned from platforms (though not illegal), but this isn't:
> "Jonny CEO is the primary reason ComanyAbc stock is so overheated. CompanyAbc stock will close above X market cap on December 31, 2027."
That is an indirect proxy for assassination.
There are multiple things that could happen here:
- Assassin(s) place bets for outcome favored by assassination, then assassinate.
- Rival(s) place bets for outcome that do not favor assassination to either claim lack of responsibility or to attract bad outcomes. They might publicly announce it, then quietly work on implementing the outcome or let it arise naturally to take the other side of the bet.
I can think of a number of CEOs, politicians, and world leaders where this would put them in the crosshairs and make market participants very wealthy.
Even the "X candidate wins Y election" outcomes are subject to this.
> That might be banned from platforms (though not illegal)
They are currently trying to fix this: https://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/press_releases/hickenloo...
chances of that passing are roughly in-line with chances of passing a bill to prevent our congressmen and senators from insider trading (you can also bet this as well :) )
I mean, the moment the American Supreme Court gave the president immunity for acts in office, they basically gave him the ability to issue a price list for doing absolutely anything.
Could you explain what do you mean? What's the plan and execution here? Planning and executing invasion? If so, there are much better markets than polymarket for making such bets.
I understood the argument like this: If there is a bet going that a war doesn't start, and you're able to start said war... Then everyone betting on the war not starting is effectively providing venture capital funds for you to start that war.
So if eg. 20 mil is bet on it not starting, the actor holding the proverbial trigger only needs to "invest" sufficient funds to drain the bet and then capitalize on it by pulling the trigger, everyone being against it would've effectively invested into the war
The analogy breaks apart at VC, because they're expecting payout after successful funding, which this doesn't provide.
I think it's more like Kickstarter/crowdfunding for wars. Just as fucked up though
(The "start a war" setting I'm using here is just to illustrate the point. There are a lot more granular bets going on like (place) will be contested etc, effectively creating money pools for offensives)
There's not enough liquidity on polymarket for that. However there's enough liquidity on stock market and indeed it appears that there was a lot of insider trading around start of the war and ceasefire. Polymarket is really pennies when it comes to bets that can be also realized on the stock market.
Now, can you find enough liquidity in the market to turn a profit? Can you find it before it becomes aparent something is off in the bet?
It's a 0-1 bet that resolves one way or the other. If you were able to place the bet, the liquidity is there. But, yeah, if you can't make the bet in the first place without significantly pushing the market then you won't make as much.
Prediction markets should not be legal.
I feel like there is two ways to frame this.
The first people betting on the outcome they want vs outcome they think will happen.
I think the second obviously make sense. If you had two experts arguing over how a war would go and they where willing to make a bet on it that is good because they are putting “their money where their mouth is” or have “skin in the game”. That’s a good thing.
The first implies manipulation or just a moralistic problem.
The issue I guess is it’s not possible to have one without the other. But I would guess most people are betting because of the second reason and not the first.
honestly the profits aren't big enough when you can just go into business if you have that kind of influence
I would also argue that for a bet on war involving the United States, Middle East, Russia or China oil products are a better bet - and it is the world's second most liquid market after forex markets.
> liquid market
USO -- net assets over $2B, tradable by anyone with a brokerage account:
Corruption is surprisingly cheap. That doesn't mean we should ignore or allow it.
That's not what I said, I said that big decision makers aren't causing wars over Polymarket. They're profiting in other, much bigger ways.
Just want to reiterate that prediction markets are beneficial, because they are the most accurate way to provide us with a dynamic mechanism to predict future outcomes from complicated systems.
As was put forth in James Suroweicki’s the Wisdom of Crowds, prediction markets provide predictions that tend to be more accurate than any expert, team of experts, etc. That doesn’t mean it’s 100% accurate, but it tends to be more accurate than any other mechanism that we have.
The benefit is not that gamblers have a place to gamble, but that society has a way to gauge the risks of different outcomes and plan accordingly.
I'm not sure 'have a benefit' maps directly to 'are beneficial'. You also have to consider the downsides, such as people with influence deliberately causing X event to happen (e.g. a war) so that they can profit.
I'm not sure the increased predictability is worth the increased instability.
>Just want to reiterate that prediction markets are beneficial, because they are the most accurate way to provide us with a dynamic mechanism to predict future outcomes from complicated systems.
I'm sorry, but no, this is just absolutely wrong.
If everyone was making these predictions, in good-faith, then yes it would "provide us with a dynamic mechanism to predict future outcomes from complicated systems." However, when truckloads of money is involved, then insiders actually want to have the markets be weighted incorrectly to maximize gain at exactly the point where vega and theta are minimized... at the very last second possible.
Market reflexivity exists and undermines this entire thesis. People need to stop pretending everyone out there is a nice man like Nate Siver just doing this for fun. As long as insiders exist and are allowed to trade, then they have every incentive to induce misinformation until the very last moment when they can trade against it.
It certainly benefits insiders that can bet on outcomes they directly control
Reminds me of the part in National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation when Clark Griswold goes to the 3rd rate casino and starts betting on weird things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would definitely affect the price if there were an expected bias in resolution.
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.
> There is now more than $500,000 (£371,000) staked on whether Russia will capture Kostyantynivka this year .
Now everyone has a chance to profit from war ! Thank you Polymarket
Are users able to bet specifically on whether prisoners of war in Kostyantynivka will be killed? Or whether women and children will be raped? That kind of fine-grained war market could be groundbreaking
I know you're just being snarky, but FYI, oldtimey rape and pillage requires the civilian population to be present at the time of the assault, and that only happened during the first month or so of this war. since summer 2022, the Russian advance has been so slow that women and children had months to safely evacuate. besides, each settlement is reduced to rubble by artillery and gliding bombs before assaults begin.
First result when I put in "polymarket assassination" reads:
"Explore 102 live Assassin prediction markets as of April 6, 2026. Track real-time odds and trade on The World's Largest Prediction Market™"
You make it sound bad, but I personally am very much in favor of regular people having access to the same bad things that the people in charge have.
You think normal folks should have access to precision guided munitions and chemical weapons?
Look, I don't think people should have access to these at all, but at the same time, I think that the average Joe would be a better custodian of these than Trump and Netanyahu.
My hope is that equal access might make us stop treating these things as if they are ok.
This has clearly worked out well with giving guns to the entire US population…
It definitely hasn't, but my argument would be in favor of making regular police forces be unarmed as well, like in the UK.
we have armed police, just not all police are armed
That's why I said "regular police". My understanding is that generally no one (including the police) is allowed to carry a gun in public unless someone already illegally introduced them into play. That's the world I want to live in.
War profiteering for the people!
Lots of publicly traded war profiteering companies. The president even highlighted one a couple of days ago.
Imagine a bunch of people are tortured, removed from their homes, are killed… and you get paid? Are you cheering for it because you’re getting paid?
I can’t imagine wanting to be cheering on death and destruction.
> Imagine a bunch of people are tortured, removed from their homes, are killed… and you get paid?
This is what every military supplier does. What every soldier. What every person holding stock in the military supplier's company, every person shorting oil shares, etc.
Gambling on war and death is disgusting. Sadly, people profiting from those things is nothing new. That does not make it ok though.
You better never buy any life insurance.
Any time the headline is gamblers making millions the reality is 90% of gamblers losing, maybe 9% breaking even or making small wins, and a few making millions.
Well, for sure thats the classic casino stat :-))
'Capitalism': the inevitable reduction of all humanity to fungible currency
Is that necessarily true?
E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine.
Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber.
Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money.
Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
The truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics.
People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.
Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
Stick to the steel man.
If our cash system deems dollars with certain serial numbers worth only $0.80 because they have history in the illicit drug trade, that cash is no longer fungible.
How is that functionally different than a system where a dollar of essential goods suddenly becomes $1.20 across most sellers for a particular consumer due to reliable inferences from an digital dossier inaccessible to the user?
In both cases, consumer confidence suffers. The biggest difference I see is that there's a rabid contingent who correctly yell, "Don't fucking mess with that!" with regard to currency fungibility, and a bunch of people saying, "It's complicated," with regard to surveillance capitalism.
Edit: again, to be clear-- I'm talking about individually tailored prices insidiously affecting large numbers of consumers in a consolidated industry for essential goods.
Edit 2: I know surveillance capitalism isn't the same thing as making currency be non-fungible. I'm looking for insight on what the difference is in terms of consumer confidence and other economic impacts.
Edit 3: clarification to narrow my question. If you can't tell yet, I'm earnestly looking for knowledge from someone who studies economics.
You know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
That may be true, but capitalism has nothing to do wit betting or prediction markets.
You can have those with any government or market style.
With an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.
The price of everything and the value of nothing.
Capitalism is just a projection of our natural competition for scarce resources onto an economic system.
There is nothing natural about distributed ownership and abstract financialization.
Resources would not be scarce if some people were not hoarding.
The supply is greatest at the source.
hoarding what?
you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
You say that as if there aren’t an enormous amount of people for whom $2500 isn’t an enormous amount of money. Even in wealthy nations like the US, that equates to approximately 7% of the personal income for the average person. But for the 65% of the world’s population living on $10 or less per day, that is an increase of 77% or more on their yearly income.
But more important than the cash is the power that money buys. Defenestrating the uber-wealthy of their undue influence in society would have far reaching benefits beyond just money in people’s bank accounts.
About 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day. So that’s like 8 years of expenses for 15% of all humans.
Which is a pretty damning indictment of capitalism
The US has over 770,000 homeless people [1]
1 in 5 children in the USA don’t know where their next meal is coming from [2]
[1] https://https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[2] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunge...
Are you going to work for free?
Even in non-capitalist systems people aren’t working for free
Betting with one another predates any notion of capitalism, or economy.
True, but capitalism eventually makes gambling the whole economy.
How?
Once the capitalists get enough control of the government they rig everything for themselves. In a capitalist system money is paramount and they have the most of it, so their opinion is regarded higher than everyone else's. Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections. Sine not everyone can be connected, luck is all that's left for most people, so it becomes a huge part of economic activity along with whoring and warring. See Also: OnlyFans, and the Department of War.
I think the main cause (that's actually quite anti-capitalist) is that banks and people at power have the ability to create money out of nothing, to lend the money into existence, while devaluing everyone else.
It was very interesting to me where I finally understood how banks (and the overall system) create money. As a bank you start with 0 money, you lend 100 to some person that you "deposit" into their account at your bank. So now on your books you have 100 in liabilities (the money that the person has in your account) and 100 in assets (the money the person owes you). So accounting is balanced. You did not need money to start with, as a bank you just "lend it into existence".
When Bill Gates was the richest guy in the world, he still had to battle the authorities for ten years to import his sports car from Europe.
I'd hardly call that controlling the government.
Again, like I said, the capitalism you knew and loved is dead. When Bill Gates became the richest man in the world he had like $10 billion dollars. Today we are talking about trillionares now. As today's elites aspire to be able to own 1995 Bill Gates 100 times over, so yeah apparently he didn't have enough power back then.
Can you entertain the idea that someone several orders of magnitude more powerful than 1995 Bill Gates might have more effective control over the government?
It’s interesting take for sure. However it appears that in real life nowadays most millionaires are self made. I was surprised when I found out about it too. Seems to contradict your thesis.
What do millionaires have to do with anything I said?
> Once capitalists rig the system for themselves, the only way to get ahead is just pure luck or connections.
Don't you consider millionaires as ones getting ahead? If not then I've got to say - it's absolutely spectacular how rich did capitalism make everyone if millionaires are not even considered rich nowadays!
Musk and Trump got into goverment and are getting rid of everything not for them. While paying huge amounts of money to themselves.
Yeah, that’s definitely corrupt. Doesn’t contradict the fact that people are generally richer than ever nowadays and that capitalism enables that, I don’t mind ultra rich getting richer as long as everyone else is also getting richer.
I don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff.
People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
I think you're mixing up capitalism with commerce. Commerce is where people buy and sell stuff. This is good. Capitalism is where capital is hoarded by an increasing smaller group of people. This is bad.
(Many) people love gambling. Capitalism is great at giving people what they want.
Look around you, the economy is aligning itself entirely around gambling. From bitcoin to nfts to the stock market to AI to art to dating apps to social media feeds to video games to venture capital to literal gambling apps infesting our phones ads sports. And finally we have actual members of the government gambling on policy.
The capitalism you grew up with is dead, the arguments for and against it are old and stale. That nature of what it is has changed. It's metastasized, devolved into something else entirely as the middle class is evaporating, the lower class is continually squeezed, billionaires become trillionaires, people are lighting warehouses on fire citing low wages as the proximal cause, and the President is ordering automatic SS registration as he threatens total civilization destruction.
This shit is not working and it's only going to get worse.
Those are diseases of morality, not capitalism. Someone who lights a warehouse on fire because they aren't paid enough is an immoral person. In a communist country they would be called a Wrecker and they'd face a firing squad for their actions.
Gambling, likewise, is a moral problem. It should be illegal or highly restricted and often was. Many other problems we face now could be fixed simply by reinstating laws that used to exist.
You and I probably have very different ideas about what is moral and what is not. For me, the highest moral crime is greed. A lot of people seem fine with it today. So for you to claim that the fire happened because of the poor moral character of the person who lit the fire, I can just as easily say this happened because of the poor moral character of the people who didn't pay him a fair wage, which leaves us nowhere.
That's why I focus on purely systemic arguments. The humans in the system are abstract. It doesn't matter if they are moral or not, they respond to systemic incentives. So if they're acting immorally according to you, why is the system incentivizing degenerate behavior instead of moral behavior?
there a lot of things that may be immoral but it is the system that promotes it or prevents it. our system promotes it (there are ads for kashi and fanduel on nickelodeon) so it is the capitalism
Do they allow for bets like how many civilians killed by Israel during April?
Or how many schools are bombed by the USA?
Or how many times will it take the USA to declare victory before the end of the conflict?