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Comment by elar_verole | Hacker News Reader

I think you are underappreciating how "manipulation of poly market odds" can be destructive when you are betting on geopolitics. Here this means that every decision is now a conflict of interest, and that doing the unpredictable (politically, economically etc) has a financial incentive for potential insiders. Sounds pretty dangerous to me.

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On the other hand we have had stock markets forever. Sure you couldn't directly bet on e.g. if trump would invade iran, but you could indirectly bet on it by betting on things like the price of oil.

I dont think this is a new threat.

It's all fun and games until someone decides to bet $100K that someone they don't like won't die via assassination this year.

It was the crash of the stock markets that eventually created the social situation that pushed people into WW.

Comparing crusty old stock markets to the mass appeal of shiny, low-barrier-to-entry Polymarket is somewhat naive.

Polymarket is way higher barrier to entry than the stock market. For starters you need to sent ETH over the Polygon network. Stock market is in dollars.

I don't think Polymarket even allows US people yet, but Kalshi you can fund with a credit card even.

How is that any different from existing financial markets?

Heavy regulation, harder to anonymize, and overall less person exposed to insider info because you can bet on only a subset of stuff, and not everything that can ever happen. Mind you, I still think these existing financial markets do have a ton of issues of this kind (trump's tariff to manipulate the market is a very recent example), but why add more on top of it ?

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