[which]

I still don't understand the Polymarket business model. Why take the legal risk of $3 billion in volume as an unlicensed commodities exchange if you're not even going to get paid for it? 1% would be $30,000,000!

[kragen]

Idealism, probably. The objective of prediction markets is to improve the collective cognitive capacity of humankind (see Earthweb for a science-fiction exposition of this by way of a rather heavy-handed plot device). Certain people are willing to take great risks to achieve things like that, maybe including Coplan, who I'm not personally acquainted with.

See Alex Tabarrok's triumphant take from before the raid: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/11/pr...

Here's an interesting question. We know that if a bettor in a prediction market wants to manipulate the market's prediction, it's likely to be extremely costly for them (though Théo's big bet on Polymarket seems to have shifted it a lot, so maybe we should doubt this theory). Does the operator of a prediction market have less-costly ways to manipulate the prediction?

Other than just shutting down the market permanently on Election Day, Mt. Gox style, which is an extremely profitable scam whether you manipulated the predictions or not.

[082349872349872]

> if a bettor in a prediction market wants to manipulate the market's prediction, it's likely to be extremely costly for them

About a decade ago I was told by someone on GOOG's anti-spam team that they had thought they'd finally made it too costly to spam, only to discover that political spammers just didn't care how much it cost.

[seizethecheese]

If you predict exponential growth in the business, and fees in the short run will slow that growth, the utility of charging those fees is negative

[GaryNumanVevo]

CIA cutout