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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

I think people are missing one of the points of the article. It's not just that agents are hammering the site, it's that there might be lurking vulnerabilities that allow malicious usage, which is why it went down, then came back up with a fraction of the data and a reduced design.

The article says (speculates?) that malicious users are trying to get privileged access for an edge in prediction market betting. From the article:

> If you could see The Numbers data before everyone else, every single week, you would have a significant edge over all the other traders - learning the answers slightly ahead of publication would allow you to front-run the trades.

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If it's the case that prediction market traders were trying to front-run the market outcomes, the prediction markets should put the fix on their end by locking down trading before a market closes with some time buffer to prevent this.

Why should that be necessary?

You can unilaterally stop trading 'before a market closes with some time buffer to prevent this.' No need for centralised action.

Because markets succeed or fail based on perceived fairness.

It is in a prediction market’s best interest to not become the place where you go to get fleeced.

Today they’re the Wild West and run like the early days of darknet markets, but if the

Could you please rephrase your last sentence? I appears to be incomplete.

> Because markets succeed or fail based on perceived fairness.

Commodities markets in the US only got anti-insider-trading rules very recently. I don't think fairness perceptions have changed much?

That's assuming the prediction markets all play fair and by the same rules. If Polymarket were to do that, its competition could choose not to. Since these exchanges are not tied to any one country (or jurisdiction), its users would jump ship. Because the users don't care.

See also stock market trading, where companies would go to great lengths to shave nanoseconds off of getting information and putting in trades. Now apply this min/maxing to worldwide, unregulated and anonymous.

This is what tech libertarians / cryptobros want.

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