Unless my memory is completely off, I don't recall Polymarket giving "Trump will win" vibes in the general lead up to the election. When they did, it was probably in the last few days.

If that's the case, I would've expected to the statement to be something like, "From our understanding, our only crime is to have presented an analysis that the outgoing administration also understood to be valid."

[dead]

> It is not clear what the FBI was seeking when numerous agents entered Coplan's apartment at around 6am, or if Coplan and/or Polymarket are the targets of an investigation.

We have no information about why they are there, so you conclude it must be political retribution and they must be protected. THIS is why Trump won. So many people have zero critical thinking skills. When you see something that for which you have no information, you can say "I wonder what is going on." Then, you stop. Things that could be:

* Using collected data to facility spear phishing campaigns. * Running a child pornography/sex trafficking ring. * Participating in dogfighting. * Been a back channel for selling trade secrets. * Had some people killed. * Routing all the information collected to foreign groups, like Russia. * or.. has the other half of messages to someone under investigation whose phone locked.

But, given I have zero evidence to support any of this, let's stick with "let's see what they say."

>Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and one of the president-elect’s closest advisors, wrote, “This seems messed up” in response to the news.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/13/fbi-raid-...

> Corporations have been making these kinds of statements for almost the past decade.

For ever...

Have corporations ever not played the "aggrieved victim" card?

Given Peter Thiel is a big investor in polymarket, and is JD Vance's daddy, I'm sure they will have no problem getting this case dismissed.

This is not a wild take at all. Every major corporation in the US is currently sucking up to Trump because his presidency will be entirely transactional and without regard to the constitutional purpose of the office. If you scratch his back, he will find a way to scratch yours - until it’s no longer convenient for him to do so.

Polymarket also had Harris at 70% to win the popular vote right up to election day, which has transpired to be wrong. Plus; all the betting markets had similar odds for Trump winning; smarket, predictit etc.

Polymarket is a market. Not sure if AMM or order book but whatever. Anyone attempting to control it wasting money.

It is 2024... how are people still credulously using DiscloseTV as a source?

It's not about political inclination but rather that there's no reason to keep trusting a source that has lied repeatedly, sensationalized repeatedly, and seems to have a very loose relationship with being "journalism" rather than entertainment (bait).

> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

I have no idea why your comment was killed, I resurrected it. Apparently people don't want to confront reality.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

> The FBI is NOT an organization that’s dedicated to keeping Americans safe.

The new Attorney General just said that if the FBI doesn't now begin to serve the interest of the american people, he'd get rid of the FBI altogether.

So using the FBI for political targeting may very well soon.

The Wall Street Journal version of the OP article seems to indicate that the ruling did not apply to Polymarker due to it’s settlement with the CFTC in 2022 - but the language used is a little unclear:

> Polymarket has blocked access to Americans since 2022, following a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which accused the company of running an unregistered derivatives-trading platform. Traders say the ban on U.S. users can be circumvented using virtual private networks.

>Election betting was legalized in the U.S. under a recent federal court ruling, but only for CFTC-regulated markets, so Polymarket has remained off-limits to Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/fbi-polymarket-ceo-investiga...

Has nothing to do with elections and all to do with being an unregulated market that has zero KYC.

Kalshi is allowed to offer Futures under supervision of the CFTC[1]. The CFTC had previously said that prediction markets are not futures (they claimed they are illegal gaming), and Kalshi sued to get a ruling that they are futures.

Polymarket has avoided coming under regulation by the CFTC by avoiding US users. For their markets to be legal under current regulations they'd have to have all their markets approved by CFTC.

[1] https://kalshi.com/blog/article/how-is-kalshi-regulated

Even if election bets are legal, the betting market is still highly regulated.

What rake did I just step on? I'm getting downvoted for this.

Yes, because Polymarket offers sports markets, which are still illegal in the US (for US users, anyway). Kalshi has been careful to offer markets in basically everything except sports.

It should be obvious what happened here: Polymarket has been offering grey or black markets to users, using only IP address as the discriminator, which is very easy to work around. They've operated under the Feds' radar for quite some time, and the Feds noticed them after they started getting significant press regarding the election.

The election is the reason they got noticed, but the likely crime itself is sports, not elections.

You're not missing anything — that's exactly how it is. There's nothing that stipulates that US companies must sell to other US companies, and it's a great place for investments & startups, so even if Polymarket isn't licensed to operate in the US it still makes sense for them to be there.

As I understand it (very much not a lawyer), the company complies with US laws by not allowing people in the US to use it, so there’s no issue doing business.

US Cellular <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Cellular>, the US's fifth-largest mobile service provider, as of 2012 no longer operates in its headquarters city of Chicago. <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-cellular-to-sell...>

States like money. If you're complying with local laws and regulations then why wouldn't they want the tax revenue?

Fireworks are illegal in NY and have been illegal in PA for much of the past two decades. Despite this, the border is crawling with fireworks stores. PA made it illegal to sell fireworks to PA residents, but totally legal to sell to residents of neighboring states provided they immediately transport them over state lines.

It was like this for fireworks in the past too. Used to go to Pennsylvania where it used to be illegal for PA residents to purchase them, they'd check your drivers license when you came in to validate it was from elsewhere and issue a 24hr transport permit to get it out of the state. Naturally the fireworks shops were mostly near state borders.

You can do it, but it's an incredibly foolish way to operate, as the CEO is finding out.

I'm not in the US, but as far as I know about the country the legal system there keeps running whether the current US President cares about individual cases or not...

Trump not caring will mean the case proceeds. Why would they drop it?

The standard is (a) whether the act was illegal, (b) the company knew it was illegal and did it anyway.

None of what you listed is relevant since it isn’t illegal for example to suppress speech or mislead the public.

Err, checking the line on a horse race is a much more reliable way to tell who has what chance of winning than going to the stables as a random person, and most likely for a professional as well.

If there is a better predictor than what is implied by the market then someone could make money on it. Hence the odds tend to be pretty accurate (with enough volume) because obvious edges like that tend to go to zero. A good example of that was the last election where people with access to private polls betted heavily and shifted the market one way.

These imputed opinions tend to do a better job than traditional news. On election night, polymarket was ahead of the news channels every step of the way.

Edit: to be clear, I’m referring to polymarket essentially “calling” each swing state well before the networks did. I’m not just referring to the overall outcome.

The US was not founded on this "permission" mindset. It's a free country. If you are not harming anyone or violating any existing laws, you are free to build new products and services. You do not need permission from bureaucrats to invent something new!

Public perception of what it means to be convicted has shifted with this election. Thiel of all people wouldn’t care if he is doing business with someone who is convicted, as long as they continue to make him money and push whatever agenda Thiel has.

For a crypto based business for something that crypto enthusiasts wouldn't consider a crime, probably would help.

If the alternative is prison, yes.

Incorrect. A pardon does require a conviction, however. And it will probably never get that far.

> he shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place?

Was he arrested? The article only mentions a search.

Have you considered that the police or prosecutors in this case may be incorrect or corrupt?

Innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of our civilization. We should not shame anyone who has been searched or arrested by the police.

[flagged]

> 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.

> The objective of prediction markets is to improve the collective cognitive capacity of humankind

Do you actually believe this shit? The people running the casinos making millions off you don't.

That’s generally how it works.

So why not raid the corporate offices too? Why, out of all of the people and organizations involved, just the CEO?

The FBI is quite good at serving multiple warrants in multiple locations at the same time when pursuing conspiracies. Presumably, in the scenario where they are the conspiracy, they could do just as well.

It doesn't seem like a great conspiracy theory to explain what actually happened.

No, because even though insurance companies make profit, the primary motivation of insurance is risk pooling amongst the policyholders. This is not the case for those trading binary options or similar instruments (except for "hedging" - a legitimate use case of producers buying futures, for example).

Insurance is not a prediction market whatsoever, not even a little bit. A market has a buyer and a seller; Geico does not allow you to bet on how many accidents will happen in America this year.

Not GP, but I suspect it's the gambling part? Hence the name?

Gambling is a destructive addition that the vast majority of participants cannot manage well. It harms not only them, but their children and their spouses. How many a kid's college fund has gone up in smoke? A lot of harm is done to very innocent people in pursuit of a ten second rush. (Much like all other addictions.)

I also very respectfully disagree that inventing a name for something is not productive - it's incredible effective, in fact. That's why political campaigns often favour duelling names over hot button issues: it's easier to win broad based support from soccer moms and football dads for 'marriage equality', whereas 'homosexual marriage' may be a harder sell. See also 'medicare for all' versus 'socialized medicine', 'pro-choice' v 'pro-life' etc.

IIRC There is only one prediction market with a single regulatory exemption granted for the University of Iowa and the bets are limited to $500.

The rest of what we see are (binary) event contracts (options)

Based on my understanding, which may be incorrect, they seem to be basically a rebranding of binary options which were illegal in the US for the longest time. With a clever renaming trick things now work :)

But it is not derogatory or euphemistic, it is descriptive. Polymarket is gambling by any definition. Gambling is known and proven to have great harms and risks to society.

(And I got the term "gambling exchange" from the UK where Betfair Exhange basically does what Polymarket do since 2000, without the Crypto glamour.)

Why would you think I don't know how it works? Because I'm calling it a gambling machine and not hyping it up as a prediction market? Is it somehow different from all of the new sports betting sites that have wreaked havoc through the sports industry in a very short span of time? Don't fall for their dumb marketing, it's letting them spread poison.

While I understand that logic, I also find it a bit distasteful. Law enforcement shouldn't tolerate crimes being committed on its watch any longer than necessary.

Of course, the exact meaning of "necessary" is the problem. We can probably all agree that letting a serial murderer kill more people in order to have more evidence against him would be an absolute abomination. But the situation is not that clear with white-collar crime, especially the sort of crime where the harm is not immediately obvious.

Maybe the fact that the FBI could wait that long before pouncing indicates that this sort of betting is, in fact, a victimless crime.

Polymarket could've easily registered as an exchange at any point in the last 4+ years, and then itself filed the suit that its competitors filed. Instead they chose to just ignore the law.

> VC's call it Regulatory Capture

This isn't regulatory capture. You can disagree with the regulation, but the barrier to entry here is not that high. Kalshi is like 5 years old.

"Capture" is a thing, and it does not just mean "any regulation that I happen to disagree with".

You do need capital to stand up a regulated exchange, but, then, you also need capital to stand up an unregulated exchange. And the difference between those two numbers is not nearly big enough to come anywhere close to creating capture.