alt Hacker NewsPolymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
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I really wonder whether privacy would actually be the answer here --- prediction markets as they are now where the odds are public really shouldn't be called prediction markets, they should be called "outcome-shaping markets" because largely that is what they do, they let people shape real-world outcomes with massive amounts of liquidity. If instead these were privacy protocols where you can see how much liquidity is on a specific market, but no one can decrypt how much liquidity is on each side until the outcome executes (i.e. using threshold encryption, commit reveal, etc), you'd have a very different situation where your ability to predict in advance is what gets rewarded and there is no ability to "copy trade"
I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.
I think time and time again that incentives are most important in determining how a market and by extension a society behaves. These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.
These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that there was no safe course of action for the journalist because there was money on both sides of this outcome.
No matter what he reported, he would have the other side threatening him.
Polymarket heads think they're so smart as they simultaneously reveal a total lack of awareness about feedback loops.
There was an interesting article in the Atlantic recently where a journalist spent a year participating in sports gambling. Part of the article discusses the effect it had on his psychology towards participants he had put his money on.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...
Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.
FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...
So Polymarket would settle the bet based on reporting from a single source? That seems to be very open to manipulation. In fact, for something as inconsequential as this, I'd just bet heavily myself if I were the reporter.
Reminiscent of Jim Bell and his idea for an assassination market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell
Except this is even crazier because the bets aren't on people dying, it's about a reportable event. Any of Polymarket's silence in voicing whether the outcome was determined by this unwilling participant's writing makes them complicit. When there's a single source of truth, it makes a target for vested parties that doesn't benefit from the security the platform and their employees get from hosting the bet.
The pull quote "The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed. But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings" misses something. If the reporter changes his story, then the people on the other side of the bet might start harassing him. OTOH individual betters anger will depend which side of the odds they're on.
This is a major example why we can't have these things, unfortunately. It sucks because they can be powerful tools, but you're never going to be able to fully police this behavior as one of these platforms.
I would love to read the Philip K Dick story about this, but I'm not enjoying living in it.
I believe this is the bet in question: https://polymarket.com/event/iran-strikes-israel-on
This caught my attention today as it was in dispute and there were a lot of comments (moslty angry). I like browsing polymarket (never placed a bet myself but it is fun to see the prices). Always thought this would kill someone someday..
I'm imagining something probably horrible and fascinating at the same time:
You could almost imagine world events being "democratized" by these markets at this point - a significant event will happen (or not happen) by the grace of who is betting on what outcomes and how much volume is at stake. If you subscribe to the view of human history as being staked to material outcomes, then at some point the PolyMarket betting volume becomes an important variable. Betting volume on an event may subsume the actual material interests.
A terse example: two rival kingdoms exist, and it is generally known that kingdom A wants to annex a sliver of the other's fertile interfluve. General consensus is that this will someday happen. Now introduce PolyMarket, what happens? You have people in both kingdoms (and the rest of the world) betting on when/if it will happen. At some point, maybe the betting skews more towards the annexation never happening, and the volume continues to rise as the scales are more tipped. At some point then kingdom A has to contend with the massive amount of value they will subsequently create or destroy if they choose to pursue annexation. Individual actors within the working bureacracy of kingdom A will inevitably use the privileged information at their power to enrich themselves via the market, further tilting or manipulating things in one direction.
Huge kudos to the journalist for standing up for his principals.
The gamblers would have had a much easier time convincing a journalism LLMs that their article was "a lie".
Prediction markets need mandatory cooling-off periods for high-stakes events. When we ran internal markets at my previous company - employee count 12k - we saw death threats within 48 hours of any market exceeding $50k. The pattern was consistent: above that threshold, someone always had enough money at risk to abandon civil discourse. We capped individual positions at $5k and threats dropped to zero. Polymarket's anonymity makes this worse - real money plus pseudonymity equals harassment.
Man, something like this is going to be a plot point in a movie/tv series soon.
Could work in some crime procedural.
Sooner or later a college athlete is gonna get killed for missing a shot.
Freedom ain't free I guess.
I mean, all of these behaviors:
- Blatant insider trading
- Angry people who were invested in an outcome
These are just a few of the reasons why such prediction markets were not permitted in the first place. It’s just incredibly toxic and creates vicious externalities. There is no way that it is healthy if you allow people to put gobs of money on any outcome because it just incentivizes toxic behavior in an endless positive feedback loop.
I would expect a dramatic rise in things like this, because they can be (1) monetized, and (2) scaled.
Polymarket and Kalshi allow you to monetize almost any outcome (as they themselves will tell you is the goal). Therefore, there is profit available if you can predict the outcome better than other people, or if you can influence the outcome. But I don't think people have really noticed that profit is also available if you can influence other people's predictions to manipulate the price and sell at a profit. Spread disinformation. Suppress information that hurts your position. Sending death threats to journalists? Sounds like an avenue to accomplish that. Want to do that at scale? Agentic AI can help.
We need to severely restrict prediction markets, and soon, or there's going to be a lot of adversarial activity at scale, and we can't always predict what kind of activity that will be.
I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).
Same thing has been happening with sports bets for years, this particular point (threats) isn't unique to political betting.
Conspiracy theory: the missile hit an unpopulated area. Would it have been possible for someone in charge of intercepting incoming missiles to have been in on this bet? I know these things are automated, because human control would be too slow... but I wonder if there's an angle here. Won't be the first time someone on the inside made money on classified Israeli plans: https://www.timesofisrael.com/two-indicted-for-using-classif...
Deeper conspiracy theory: could the military actors involved in these wars fund themselves via betting markets? A 14M bet could fund a lot of drones, probably more than the cost of drones required to achieve a certain outcome ;-)
Polymarkets should be banned altogether or as highly regulated as casinos.
Alan Kay had a great quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” A quote that many technologists and inventors have used as inspiration over the years as they create things.
It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider trading.
But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten / bribe someone into lying about what really happened. That’s the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of prediction markets has gone negative. You’ve no longer got a tool that helps predict reality, you’ve got a new way to reward people for lying about what is real and not real.
Athletes are also receiving death threats from gamblers.
* https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete...
... and many, many other stories.
Polymarket and similar platforms are a cancer and need to be shut down. This is an early symptom of something that will become much, much worse in an increasing manner. Stories like these make more people aware of the platform, adding users and further degrading humanity.
Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia!!!
A reminder that Donald Trump Jr is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket (with his firm also investing in Polymarket).
Gambling (yes, this is gambling yet not subject to its industry regulations) is a public health crisis and the US government is too corrupt and intentionally ossified to react.
“who decides” whether a fact is true or not - Apparently, this is an unsolved problem. Also, I’m curious, who actually decides in this case? Someone who works at Polly market, who is immune to propaganda no doubt?
Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate a poly market bet by 2040.
I found it interesting that the bettors who threatened the journalist accused him of being motivated to manipulate the market. The journalist was motivated to report honestly, the bettors were the one trying to manipulate the market by changing the reporting.
One has to wonder if the people placing these bets didn’t have some plans of their own.
A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.
Does the "Continue without disabling" button on the adblock popup just not do anything for anyone else?
The gambling market is really bringing out the worst of us.
Prediction markets remind of the "Safety Training" episode[1] of the Office where Kevin and others are betting on the outcome of various situations. It was pretty funny and absurd back then. Didn't expect it to be so prescient.
Prediction markets need to be banned globally ASAP, but it would've helped the article to bring proof of:
- the emails
- the whatsapp messages
- the discord messages
- the X messages
Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing, in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his direct threats, some of those public like X replies.
It is a sad story, showing why all these bright ideas about using hive-mind to predict a future are not going to work. It is sad, and I can feel the author worries, but still I want to laugh. It was so fucking predictable and prediction markets didn't predict it.
When "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is combined with crime it seems clear that betting on crime is acting as an accessory. A business facilitating betting on crime is a criminal enterprise, in the sense of RICO.
Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern:
War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise.
Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism.
In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.
This part of the story stood out for me:
>More emails arrived in my inbox.
>“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel.
>Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written.
>“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.)
this seems to be a main issue.
Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear.
I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default.
What do you think, could this help this issue?
I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.
If there’s something that screams late-stage capitalism any louder, I don’t want it…
[dead]
I sense a large number of Polymarket apologists in the comments. Polymarket's existence is a symptom of the ubiquity of Adam Smith's libertine, some would even label satanic ("Do what you wilt"), "free" market thinking. We ought to take it to its natural extreme -- where Polymarket encourages gambling on when specific celebrities, politicians, or even random individuals might die (there is already a name for this: "death pools"). I am sure if they followed through on this openly there would still be advocates and defenders of the practice and counter-claims "there wasn't unequivocal evidence that Polymarket influenced their murder" etc.