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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

Gained 1.5 million. Lost 2.6 plus two years in prison and his wife's job. Not a great trade.

If you ignore all the ethical aspects of it and look at it as a purely economic transaction, whether it was a great trade or not depends on the odds of getting caught, not just the punishment if you get caught.

That's true. I wonder what the odds of getting caught are. I wonder how the odds would change if you had someone unconnected to you who placed the trades and shared the profits.

As I write this I can imagine a cryptocurrency marketplace for insider information. The insider asserts some fact about a company and stakes an amount in crypto. Buyers see the potential - e.g. "Amazon insider staking 1 million for X% return" and can choose to take on the deal or not. If the buyer does take on the deal they see the information and if the information is borne out then the buyer must return the insider's investment plus X%. Otherwise the buyer gets the insider's stake.

There's a lot of rough edges and potential for abuse, but I can imagine something like this making it hard or impossible to prove insider trading.

That marketplace would immediately be flooded with FBI agents and dogs. At least find a way to obfuscate it like "roses" on craigslist.

> As I write this I can imagine a cryptocurrency marketplace for insider information. The insider asserts some fact about a company and stakes an amount in crypto. Buyers see the potential - e.g. "Amazon insider staking 1 million for X% return" and can choose to take on the deal or not. If the buyer does take on the deal they see the information and if the information is borne out then the buyer must return the insider's investment plus X%. Otherwise the buyer gets the insider's stake.

We don't have to imagine it too hard, something very similar already happened! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-22/fake-i...

Theres something much simpler - tokenized stocks. These are coins that track certain popular stocks and indices. There is certainly one for Amazon.

True. They forgot the first rule of insider trading. You have to be rich before you do it. It’s off limit outside the elite.

Could have bought a few houses around town and made more money.

Great financial advice from a poor guy.

The point was they risked some much for so little. So little that in their case, price gains a few houses around them would have netted them more and not risk jail time.

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