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Comment by Uhhrrr | Hacker News Reader

Placing a bet based on insider national security information should be regarded as leaking. But the markets aren't the problem here.

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Well markets give a huge financial incentive for it. Before you had to get paid a bribe for an intelligence agent. Now you can just "legitimately" bet on a market. It's a LOT easier and more spread out, I imagine.

The existence of banks gives a huge financial incentive to rob them. That doesn't mean we should get rid of banks. It means we should create a huge disincentive to rob them (which we do). Same thing needs to happen to people using national intelligence secrets in prediction markets.

That requires active participation in regulation and enforcement.

If anything, this administration is moving the other direction when it comes to betting markets, crypto, investments, etc.

What you are saying is logical for how enforcement should happen, but it isn’t happening that way.

Banks are about saving money and reducing risk. Arguably when they got into high risk investments to make high reward is what contributed to the 2008 recession.

Not sure if banks are the best example of proving the country is not headed towards high risk gambling.

On the other hand, it provides the whole world with the information and not just some spy agency. Isn't that more fair system?

And people dying in question is army, professional murderers for hire themselves, not a big loss.

You couldn’t design a better system for incentivizing leaks if you were trying. Hell, the CEO literally said as much. Not sure how you can conclude the markets aren’t the problem.

Yeah I had to reread that part... I was like, no way the CEO of Polymarket publicly said on record that it incentivizes leaks. Had to check to make sure I wasn't on the onion.

The CFTC has been defunded and dismantled. The industries it regulated don’t even bother to put on a mask anymore.

He was talking about companies at that part of the interview, and getting company info leaked to the market is generally a good thing.

Wow, it took some time for me to dig the interview out(0). I think it's stupid that Atlantic did not link to it, and that they misrepresented the context.

I agree that company info being leaked is whatever. No one is hurt by knowing that Apple is working on a foldable phone; maybe an exec loses his million dollar bonus and can't upgrade his yacht this year, and the market can operate off of that knowledge.

But the flip side is that there's no way to distinguish between leaked company info and leaked government info, and up until this era of history, there was rarely financial incentive for anyone to leak govt info, and even if there were, it was almost impossible to do so completely anonymously.

I'm not necessarily agreeing with the article. Who knows if that actually happened? But the incentives make it more plausible than ever.

(0) https://www.youtube.com/live/t647EWQst5A?si=TPNx7RbxWvn9wVdn

Let's make bets on "xxxx leaked yyyy info", so people will be incentived to discover/denounce who cheated.

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