I hate this instance of the multiverse.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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Which cyberpunk novel is this one pulling from? Yakuza hunting down a reporter over gambling losses isn’t one I remember.
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner gets close. It introduced the idea of gambling on world events back in the 70's under the name Delphi Pool. Great little read, too.
Coincidentally, we're steadily on our way to living in the kind of future he predicted in his other book, The Sheep Look Up.
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This is some Black Mirror shit.
Black mirror is just how the world sees america.
You guys really haven’t figured out it’s the rich vs poor yet?
I highly recommend watching South Park S27E5 titled Conflict of Interest
Aired September 24, 2025 , it explains how poly market works, specifically in the context of Israel's genocide and how it relates (and doesn't relate) to US Jews.
Isn't polymarket partially run by the Trump family
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/26/polymarket-secures-investment-from-trump-jr-backed-1789-capital.html
Yes, this is a way to do insider trading at scale with crypto markets to get money from idiots who are still clinging to NFTs and make the money disappear
This started here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWVKiBsdvRA
“I make my living on the evening news,
Just gimme gimme something,
Something I can use.
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry.”
I want to make this perfectly clear. "You wanna make a bet?" died in fucking elementary school for me. Like it should for every mature, sane human. Gambling is for, and done by, the most immature, underdeveloped losers in our society. I've never once met someone who went to a casino and told me about that I didn't instantly lose a measureable amount of respect for. I would have absolutely no qualms about levelling every casino on the planet and forcing the property owners to donate the land to public park space.
You are not "winners with no winnings". You are losers.
The fact that it is growing in popularity and we now have douche canoes on polymarket every second commercial just tells me we're devolving.
Basically all of modern society functions off of the back of an elaborate , rigged gambling system.
That's what the stock market is, in a very real way.
I still don't get how they make the stock market appear distinct from horse racing for example. Same shit, different name. And don't hit me with the "but you could research the stocks beforehand so it's not random" yeah and you can research the horses and riders and it's still fking gambling and basically 99% random. Well except for insider trading. That's like a Mafia in gambling, it's somehow even worse.
I don't care for organized gambling either, but this is so over the top hahahahaha
God forbid a couple buddies see who's buying a drink or two over game of chess or pool
I dunno, I have a lot of respect for people who gamble in casinos and get kicked out for winning too much against the house because they've mastered card counting and pattern recognition.
I also don't see a big problem with people occasionally hitting up a casino for some fun once in a while - it's no different than hitting up an arcade really.
My problem is the industry preying on people who don't know when to stop and get suckered in by the advertisements. That and people like this toddler in the article that likes to make bets but can't stand when they lose.
Exactly. If I go to a casino, it's with a set budget of what I can lose and I walk out if I hit it. It's just my entertainment budget for the day.
I don't go expecting to win big, and will usually bounce if I end up with a net gain of around $30-50.
But I've only been 3x in the 15 years since I turned 21, and one of those was for a Smash Mouth show (it was a really fun show).
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Scummy black market-ish betting on bad things results in attracting bad people, shocking.
Interesting thing though. How is Polymarket going to arbitrate such things?
There's going to be discussions that are never going to be truly resolved as opposed to, for example, sports betting, so how does this turn out?
I guess they got a smart ToS but they're incorporated in the US so I guess they'll be tested in court sooner rather than later
Why not set up a Polymarket bet for how Polymarket is going to handle this? Or whether they face any kind of legal repercussions at all.
No joke, this is actually very much how it works. For disputes they use UMA tokens, which allows whales to just buy the vote. Although "being too expensive to corrupt" is the point, there's a bunch of recent news about votes for $50 million markets bought with $7 million worth of coins (which are reusable, once you own them, you can vote on every dispute with the same tokens and voting power).
Well gee, that doesn't sound like a nightmare of a Ponzi scheme at all
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💕🎉 WE’RE ALL IN HELL! 🎉💕
military correspondent for The Times of Israel
Eh, let them cook
These suckers are going to spend $900,000 on an assassination?
Words are cheap
Can somebody eli5 me this? I am not sure I am getting it
Poly market is a gambling platform where people bet on things that will happen in real life.
Bob made a bet that Iran would bomb Israel on some specific date.
Unrelated and unaware about Bob, Fabian is a journalist. Fabian wrote an accurate article describing an attack where Iran bombed Israel.
Bob's bet was wrong. He's about to loose a lot of money. So Bob threatens to kill Fabian. Bob tells Fabien he must change his story, so Bob doesn't loose money.
First, that is deeply fucked up. Second, who pays or determine which way a bet went?
Do you see how many bets may end up in ambiguous states where it is interpretable which side won?
~~If the bet is successful, Polymarket pays out — just like how more conventional betting works ~~ (Edit: this is incorrect — it uses matched betting. See the comment below mine for more detail)
In terms of who determines which way a bet goes, it seems like this is also Polymarket, and that they rely on journalistic coverage and official announcements.
This journalist reported that one of the missiles landed and exploded, and it appears that this was used to deny paying out to the people who places at bet that no missiles would land that day. The gamblers tried to coerce the journalist to change their report to say that all of the missiles were intercepted, and that the thing that actually landed and exploded was just a missile fragment from the intercepted missile. I have no idea whether this would've actually changed the outcome of the bet from Polymarket's perspective, but the gamblers certainly seemed to think so.
It highlights the absurdity of betting on events like this
Actually Polymarket never pays out. Every bet is matched with someone holding the opposite bet (and prices to make a bet shift accordingly to market demand for each side). Polymarket just rakes in fees, but they never lose money regardless of how a bet goes.
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What's even more fucked up is that there's nothing preventing DoD employees from also betting on this stuff while simultaneously being the ones deciding the who, what, when, where, and why of bombing another country.
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Shayne Coplan is the billionaire manchild who owns polymarket along with a couple other billionaire cofounders like Peter Thiel. It's just like bookies with details decided before the bet is made, and the house/market/organized crime organization take a cut for guaranteeing the bet pays out.
For an entertaining and sufficient way to understand what's going on, I highly recommend watching South Park S27E5 titled Conflict of Interest
Aired September 24, 2025 , it explains how poly market works, specifically in the context of Israel's genocide and how it relates (and doesn't relate) to US Jews.
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Suddenly they care about Israelis coming after journalists.
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