[nickelcitymario]

Wait, does this mean Polymarket is also an assassination market?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

This may be an obvious thing that everyone else has caught onto, but... if I were to place a bet against someone dying this year (say it was someone powerful), wouldn't I essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove me wrong and make that death happen?

And isn't that exactly what's happening when people are betting on a new pope in 2025? Doesn't that heavily incentivize some violent individual to take that bet and commit murder?

[Joker_vD]

Imagine any business decision that would strongly benefit from e.g. J.D. Vance not becoming the acting president and Trump remaining in his place for the rest of the year/term. Does making such a decision "essentially be offering a reward for someone to prove you wrong", those someone's being your business competitors/rivals?

Or you could even dial the timeline back to right before the last elections, where this question could literally be about the Republicans literally losing their candidate due to sudden expiration.

My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.

[nickelcitymario]

I don't think those are the same thing?

For example, I'm in Canada. There's a trade war going on. Every business in Canada is now having to hedge their bets for whether and how long and how bad the trade war is going to be. And we all know the trade war is being driven by one person. So yes, "what are the odds of a change in who is running the country?" is part of that risk assessment.

That's not the same thing as saying, "here's $100k if something were to happen to the man in the funny hat".

Technically, you could construe both as hedging your bets. But in the first scenario I'm just making a decision for my business. In the other, I'm offering a reward to make it happen.

Now, that being said, I could see the water getting murky for a publicly traded company that positions itself in such a way that it would truly benefit from such an event, because then a violent member of the public could buy their stock and benefit financially from commitment that violence. But that's not what we're talking about with polymarket.

Polymarket is all about tying a specific financial outcome to a specific real world event that people could choose to influence. It incentivizes outcomes. Some outcomes would be hard to influence this way. For example, I don't think any bet of any size would influence who would win an election. But if the bet was "It would be terrible if someone did X, I'm betting $$$ that no one will", then the only question is whether the $$$ is worth it to someone with the ability to commit X.

[sb057]

>My point is, if someone sees that you hedge financial well-being on e.g. you country not slipping into the civil war over the next few years, and orchestrates exactly that to profit themselves — this is not your moral failing, it's theirs, and even the "well, you kinda tempted them, technically" argument is bogus.

As a third party, I don't particularly care who's in the wrong if I'm living in the middle of a civil war.

[Exoristos]

Most human beings organically find murder too abhorrent to contemplate or I should say plan and follow through with. Modern entertainment media may be twisting your perception here.

[superturkey650]

I don’t believe you’re being against a specific person, so you don’t have a 1-1 incentive based on the bet you’re placing.

[nickelcitymario]

I guess what I'm asking is whether there is anything stopping you from betting against a specific person.

I'm being vague because I don't want to put the idea out there about any specific individual.

[mminer237]

I believe you can put positive or negative votes on specific people on Polymarket.

[barbazoo]

Maybe similar to life insurance re suicide?

[nickelcitymario]

With life insurance, they investigate and won't pay out if they discover it was a suicide.

Is there any similar mechanism with Polymarket for detecting, shall we say, unethical bets?