Polymarket gamblers betting millions on war
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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...
So I think it's a bit overstated to frame it as nothing is new. But your historical context is helpful.
I'd imagine those numbers are typical for any transaction facilitated by the Internet comparing 2003 to 2026.
Murder is also old as time itself! Guess we just gotta let it happen!
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
Because articles like this tend to come with a implicit or explicit moral outrage.
So these comments are the equivalent of "yes... and?"
Is that a question or a statement?
If there is a submission or a comment that makes a claim such as "this is unprecedented", then a "this is not new" reply, preferably with supporting evidence, makes sense
But that's not what's going on here
Wagering was commonly legal, but generally illegal since 1541 Henry VIII banned for laborers & servants.
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.
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.
Prediction markets should not be legal.
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)
USO -- net assets over $2B, tradable by anyone with a brokerage account:
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.
Somehow that doesn't seem to be too much of a problem in practice.
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.
Something is very wrong, if Cuba is so easily bought.
Btw, if that were so easy, why would counterparties even trade with the better at these prices? (And why wouldn't they also spend money influencing the president of Cuba?)
And: a war with Cuba with seriously dent share prices. So you can already do the bet you suggest by shorting stocks or buying put options.
I guess people do walk into casinos and play games that are legally controlled to have outcomes favoring the casino.
This whole thing isa KGB propaganda tool + method to give bribes and should be banmed by the Western world.
> "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.
They are currently trying to fix this: https://www.hickenlooper.senate.gov/press_releases/hickenloo...
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.
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 the increased predictability is worth the increased instability.
I don't agree with the other commenters about the "insider" trading. I think since the point is to get information more quickly, I don't really care whether it's insider or not, but I do think it's a bad idea for someone to cause certain improbable events by betting on them.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Now everyone has a chance to profit from war ! Thank you Polymarket
"Explore 102 live Assassin prediction markets as of April 6, 2026. Track real-time odds and trade on The World's Largest Prediction Market™"
My hope is that equal access might make us stop treating these things as if they are ok.
I can’t imagine wanting to be cheering on death and destruction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'd hardly call that controlling the government.
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?
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!
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".
And it's not just because you are hoarding your labour.
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?
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.
Which is a pretty damning indictment of capitalism
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...
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.
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."
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 can have those with any government or market style.
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?