Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets | Hacker News Reader

Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets

engadget.com

111 pointscdrnsf62 comments

Already discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878208

"It sucks that someone potentially tricked a temperature sensor with a hairdryer to scam actual gamblers out of potential winnings" really missed a chance to say it blows.

That’s rather dry humour for such a hairy situation

It went over my head, but I think they’re full of hot air anyway.

"actual gamblers"

Real Gamers

in fairness, hairdryers have to suck so they can blow

Gambling addicts will really gamble on anything, won’t they? It’s a bit strange to see degenerate gambling dressed up as “predictions”.

This looks less like gambling addiction and more like a scam executed for profit.

Yes, gambling. That's literally what gambling is, a scam.

Gambling takes many forms.

If you and I flip a coin for $100, there's no scam.

Sooner or later someone will rig the coin

Potential for fraudulent activity makes something a scam? That list is gonna be long

"Gaming"[0] companies are audited for the expected value each coin toss/slot machine roll etc. has - typically it's a high and unusually precise percentage, like e.g. 95.1681%.

The scam in is advertising, that emphasizes how much you can potentially win, even though obviously on average the house takes those few percent each time.

[0] A term they like to use to describe themselves.

With regards to gambling, yes. The list is all of it.

Or a spherical cow.

It’s a scam when the house takes $1 from that $100 each time. These unlicensed internet gambling halls most certainly take their cut, whatever that amount is.

It's only a scam if they don't disclose that. If the house brought the two people together I'd say it's fair as services rendered. I don't get mad when a bar charges more than the base cost of the alcohol.

Your definition of scam is terrible

“ If you and I flip a coin for $100, there's no scam.” statistically over a time with a fair coin, they’re coming out even.

Add in the house taking a cut each time, now everyone but the house is guaranteed to lose.

Sounds like a scam to me

> now everyone but the house is guaranteed to lose.

Gambling is about more than making money. Most gamblers do not expect to win, they do it because its entertaining. Paying $1 for the opportunity to participate in the coin flip is something many people are happy to do. Negative EV does not equal losing because you forgot to include the entertainment value.

Scams involve deception. There is no deception in a business that is upfront about taking a fee to match gamblers.

If gambling wasn’t about the money then it wouldn’t be centered around money.

This instance is what you could call a scam, maybe even fraud. But in the absence of manipulation or insider knowledge predicting the weather is pretty close to gambling. As is "does bitcoin go up or down in the next five minutes" or "how many tweets will Elon Musk post in the next couple days" (all real bets on Polymarket)

And who fueled the profits? Gamblers?

A lot of gambling is a scam executed form profit. I call it a scam because it's not always fraudulent, it's persuasion and a dash of misleading info. Often one party unduly influences the outcome or has information that the other can't have. Whether it's corruption to predetermine the result of a match, or knowing that the star player will miss it, or a gambling machine that suggests a higher expected payout than the real one, or even a casino's rules that arbitrarily decide whether your win was legitimate or not, in practice the industry is more scam than legitimate business.

We rename everything to make it cooler to sell. Probably been a thing since the times of the sea people.

Even the term "sea people" sounds cooler than "those dudes who live over there by the water"

Preferable to “the beaker folk of the Bronze Age”

I'm a "holy crap how do they keep getting the weather so wrong" addict and it's as irrational as being a gambling addict in that weather forecasts have improved a lot. I've never been tempted to gamble until now, where I realize I can put my money where my (irrational) mouth is.

All that said, gambling addiction is like a disease, same as any other. Holding folks who have it in contempt is about the same as holding alcoholics in contempt. It ignores the fact that it's a real affliction and not a lifestyle choice. Polymarket is taking advantage of that affliction.

You seem to ignore the fact that most people know how bad alcohol, gambling, cigarettes and other addictive things are, yet they still choose them and then suffer consequences.

If you asked someone whether they wanted to get ass cancer and they told you: "yeah, yolo", wouldn't it be a contempt-worthy choice? It would.

Nah I just have compassion for people. For one thing, not everybody knows how bad those things are. If all you see is that "fun uncle" who's always drunk, you learn that drinking isn't so bad. Couple that with being bombarded by positive messages around drinking and the popular belief that anything in moderation is OK, and you end up doing them. The very act of doing them obscures the consequences you are suffering. That's chemical.

The same thing happens with gambling, but it's a dopamine rush instead of an alcohol rush.

I'm not saying people have no agency, I'm just saying there's a lot more going on than just agency.

I also have compassion, and come from (and live in) a country with pretty hardcore drinking culture.

And yet even the "fun uncle" himself knows how bad it is. Before the family gathers and drinks vodka like there is no tomorrow, everyone is aware that it's poison, what they will feel tomorrow, that someone will need to take care of then uncle somehow, and nobody is really even pretending that it's just fun and harmless.

Ultimately it's all about making conscious decisions or not. One could argue, maybe, that inability to make good decisions in obvious situations is the real disease, but it's not really a thing in our culture - or maybe it's actually the same thing you mentioned with chemicals: once you make the stupid decision to drink, vodka is also being used as an explanation for other stupid decisions, making it harder to see one's weaknesses? Not sure.

It’s not gambling, these are legitimate financial instruments designed to allow proper risk management through appropriately market-set pricing on the value of that risk mitigation, and it’s doing this in a way that democratizes risk management in a way previously inaccessible to the public.

j/k totally gambling

How is it any different from the stock market?

(Whether you read this as a defense of polymarket or an indictment of shareholder capitalism might depend on your ideology)

I think what's also telling is Polymarket's non-reaction to this. If there are obvious concerns that the outcome was manipulated, I'd expect them to invalidate the bet - otherwise they're effectively incentivising manipulation.

Polymarket is simply an exchange for these sorts of “contracts” and the results are verified by a separate entity (it’s a DAO, which of course can be manipulated, and was the subject of controversy due to some Venezuela invasion-related “market” resolutions)

Poly market resolution has a long history of controversy. Going back years now the DAO has essentially scammed users with questionable resolutions.

No no no, the outcome revealed new information as the market intends! That info is that people had discounted the rare weather event “a 10% chance of localized hairdryers” on the day in question. The bettor predicted this better than everyone else, making their info public by placing a bet!!! /s

If anything this was great free advertising for their platform

It never occurred to me that Goodhart's law could be applied to betting, but here we are :)

Is there a bet available to determine if the weather forecasted was impacted by a hair dryer?

That's not a bad idea. It actually sounds like it could be a very useful hedge/insurance play.

That'd be easier to game than "will somebody run onto the field in the next $sports game". Just bet yes and bring a hair dryer. Make sure somebody posts evidence to X so you can cash out

If the yes side is heavily favored because it's a "sure thing" then there will eventually be people who bet no and hire guards (or go themselves) to defend the weather sensor from the hairdryer-wielders.

This could be the origin of a new sport, and then betting on it would become even more common

That's effectively what all the 99% or 1% prediction markets are: a bet that an asteroid will destroy the planet or that the Rapture will occur or that we'll all upload our consciousnesses into computronium or whatever is not actually a bet that those events will happen (and that the site and enough of the economy will survive to allow you to collect and spend your winnings), it's a bet that the market will resolve incorrectly.

I can't believe there's no honor among the gamblers!

Finally some hacking news!

They said that Cobra would never acquire the pieces of the Weather Dominator. Now we’re doomed!

Just to be clear, my understanding of news here is France is that there is an investigation for someone having possibly rigged the weather sensor but there was nothing release about how this could have been done.

The hair dryer thing is a joke, even if it is still a possibility, but just to say, it could be a cover, it could be a hot air gun, it could be a hack, it could be just luck, ...

Take care because there are ai generated videos of a guy with a hair dryer doing that, but these are fake!

2 weeks old news OP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47869664

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878208

If that happened, has a crime been committed? I don't think so. Well, maybe tampering with the thermometer might be a crime, but, on the gambling angle, I would say it's not.

If you cheat a casino, you go to jail.

The betting contract depended on the Oracle's data for resolution. The Oracle's data was altered. The betting contract wasn't altered, however the social contract was.

Maybe it's bad to let people bet on anything, huh

Dupe from a little bit ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878208

lulz futures paying off as usual

A fool and his money etc etc.

You love to see it.

hilarious title, engadget is still quality after all these years

Is that better or worse than invading Venezuela to rig a Polymarket bet ?

climate change via hair drier ;D

is this what the cryptobros are doing now?

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