#polymarket

The second time I heard about it and realized that it was serious, I just stared at the screen for a good minute.

Why?

Because the "You can wager on anything and everything--wars, death tolls, conflicts, anything, there's no subject too taboo to put money on" concept was not new to me.

Where I'd run into it before, however, was in fiction.

Specifically, the Star Wars Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy written in the late 1990s.

Where it was deliberately done as a plot and setting point showing the corruption and inhumanity of the seedy underbelly of Imperial society--the sort of environment that the Star Wars bounty hunters moved in. It was deliberately shown as corrupt, rife with insider trading, betting manipulation, and cruelty.

And now it's real.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture

The most selectively believed-in verse in the conservative catechism is the idea that "incentives matter."

Sure, "incentives matter" if you're seeking healthcare. That's why you're nibbled to death by co-pays and deductibles – if you could get healthcare whenever you felt like it, you might get too much healthcare. "Incentives matter," so we have to make sure that you only seek care when you really need it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

But rich people don't need to be disciplined by incentives. They can get no-bid contracts with Uncle Sucker without being tempted to rip off the USA. They can force their workers into nondisparagement clauses without being tempted to act like a colossal asshole, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who tattle on them. They can force their workers into noncompete clauses without being tempted to underpay and abuse their workers, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who take their labor elsewhere. They can force their workers into binding arbitration clauses without being tempted into maiming or killing them, secure in the knowledge that the workers can't sue them.

So incentives matter…when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies.

But incentives really do matter. That's the premise of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This comes up all the time. Google got its start by observing that people who made websites linked to other websites that they found important or worthy or informative. With this insight, Google repurposed the academic practice of "citation analysis" to predict which pages on the internet were most authoritative, calling it Pagerank.

Google Search, powered by Pagerank, was vastly superior to any search engine in history. But as soon as Google became the most popular search engine, people started making links to bad websites – sites filled with spam and malware and junk – in order to game the results. The metric – inbound links – became a target – get inbound links – and stopped being a useful metric.

There is something quite wonderful and life affirming about the idea of Pagerank: the idea that people are, on average, pretty good at figuring out what's good. Rather than taking Yahoo's approach of having experts rank and categorize every website on earth, Google trusted "the wisdom of crowds" and it worked (until they created an incentive to subvert it).

"The wisdom of crowds" was in the air in those days. James Surowiecki had a massive bestseller with that title in 2004, expounding on the idea that people were, in aggregate, good at figuring stuff out:

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

Surowiecki's book revolved around a famous anecdote from 1906, when 800 people at the Plymouth county fair were invited to guess at the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician (and eugenicist creep) Francis Galton noted that the average guess of 1207 lbs was within 1% of the actual weight, 1198 lbs. This turns out to be a repeatable phenomenon: if you get a lot of people – non-experts, experts, people paying close attention, people who barely think about it – to guess about something, the average is surprisingly accurate. Importantly, it's often more accurate than the best guess of experts.

This idea of the wisdom of crowds inspired a lot of 2000s-era internet projects. Some of them (Yahoo Answers) were pretty bad. Others (Wikipedia) were astounding. Of course, economists observed that "the wisdom of crowds" sounds a lot like the idea of "price discovery" – the idea that markets are a way of processing widely diffused information about desires and capacity in order to derive and emit signals about what should be produced.

Economists have long spoken of future events being "priced in" to markets – for example, the price of oil today reflects more than the diminished supply resulting from Trump's military blunders, it also reflects "the market's" belief that oil production capacity will be disrupted for a long time to come. Add up all the different buyers' and sellers' guesses about the future of oil (incorporating diffuse knowledge about damage to infrastructure, capacity to rebuild, and intentions of the actors) and (we're told) we'll get a number that accurately reflects the real situation.

And, unlike Pagerank, this number can't be manipulated by flooding the system with spurious, self-serving inputs. If you want to move this price, you have to buy or sell something, which costs money. And because the market is "deep" (with a lot of participants), the sums you'd have to inject into the system to alter its consensus is incredibly large – more than you could possibly stand to make by manipulating the price itself. Incentives matter.

Put "markets," "the wisdom of crowds" and "incentives matter" together and you get "prediction markets." Just create a market where people can bet real money on the outcomes of events and you can recreate Galton's ox-guessing miracle, but for everything – how much new solar capacity will come online in Pakistan next year; the likelihood that the Toronto Transit Commission will finish the Ontario Line this year; whether a biotech firm will ship an AIDS vaccine before 2040.

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Jermaine Fowler 

April 5, 2026 (Sunday)

This weekend, a betting market opened on whether an American soldier bleeding in an Iranian mountain would be found alive.

Yesterday, he was found.

For 48 hours, the United States and Iran raced through the mountains of Isfahan province for the same man — a colonel, wounded, evading on foot after ejecting from a downed F-15E. One crew member was pulled out within hours of the crash. This man vanished. Iran offered $60,000 to anyone who found him first. The IRGC searched. American special forces searched. A CIA deception campaign seeded false information inside Iran to buy time. Equipped with little more than a pistol and a tracking beacon, he scaled terrain to a ridgeline 7,000 feet above sea level and waited more than a day while two governments hunted him from opposite directions.

Polymarket, a prediction market where anonymous traders bet real money on real-world events, opened a market on which day the United States would confirm his rescue. People placed bets. On a man in a mountain.

He was found. Trump posted “WE GOT HIM.” The market closed. Someone collected.

It was not the only market.

Whether Gaza starves. Whether Gaza is cleansed. Whether the Sudan war ends before December 31. Whether a Ukrainian city falls, and by which date. Whether the Strait of Hormuz closes. Whether Kharg Island changes hands. Whether U.S. forces enter Iran by December 31 — 90% odds, $142.4 million behind it. Whether a nuclear weapon detonates before 2027. Whether a ceasefire arrives before the famine does.

Another market, confirmed open: whether another African coup happens by October 31. Not a specific country. Not a named government. Just the continent. Whether it produces another one before the deadline.

Two hundred nineteen war markets. Still open.

On the morning of February 28, before the first bombs fell on Tehran, a trader placed a bet. Polymarket’s own odds said 17% chance of U.S. strikes that day. He bet yes. By the time smoke rose over the skyline, he was collecting. One trader made nearly $1 million from dozens of bets placed hours before unannounced U.S. and Israeli military actions, winning 93% of five-figure wagers on operations nobody was supposed to know about. Six suspected insiders, identified by a blockchain analytics firm, placed a combined $1.2 million bet that the U.S. would strike Iran. In Israel, a military reservist was indicted for using classified material to bet on Polymarket during the war. During his interrogation, an air force officer said this: “The entire squadron is on Polymarket. The entire air force is betting.”

In the United States, nobody has been charged.

“Super cool,” the CEO of Polymarket called it, that the platform creates financial incentives for insiders to share information with the market.

Named strategic advisor to Polymarket and investor through his venture fund, Donald Trump Jr. also advises Kalshi, Polymarket’s primary competitor. His father commands the soldiers whose survival was wagered on this weekend, and his father’s administration sued three states this week that tried to regulate the industry. A spokesperson said Trump Jr. does not trade on prediction markets. He only advises them on marketing strategy.

Polymarket did not call the market on the colonel’s rescue a death bet. Nobody did. The nuclear detonation market ran for days, at its peak 22% odds, hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume, before disappearing without a public statement, as if it had never existed.

The people it was pricing did not disappear.

Long before there were prediction markets, there were lotteries. The 13 original colonies ran them to fund their infrastructure, and a $1.5 million lottery financed the Revolutionary War itself, and Virginia’s wealthy landowners had already, by the 1680s, formalized horse racing bets into a system with written rules and set stakes and careful limits on who could participate. Gambling built this country, and then the country banned it, repeatedly, whenever it became associated with the wrong people — the wrong skin, the wrong neighborhood, the wrong kind of desperation. The mob ran it underground until Nevada legalized it in 1931, and Atlantic City followed in 1978, and tribal gaming opened in 1988, and state lotteries spread through the 1980s sold as education funding. Sports betting, federally restricted in 1992, was unlocked by the Supreme Court in 2018. Within seven years, 38 states had legalized it. By 2024, commercial gaming revenue hit $71.9 billion.

Every expansion arrived with a rationale — economic stimulus, state revenue, personal freedom — and each one made the next easier to accept.

Although governments learned this last, clinical research had confirmed it long before: what makes a reward addictive is unpredictability. A slot machine programmed to pay out on any spin without pattern produces more compulsive play than one that pays reliably, because the next pull might be it, and that might is the drug. Even loss drives continuation. A near-miss, the horse that finishes second, the slot that shows two of three, activates the same response in the disordered brain as a win. Not disappointment. Want. Governments learned what the industry always knew and built lotteries. Then sports betting. Then prediction markets. Each expansion dressed in the language of the last.

Between the scratch ticket and the war market, a two-hundred-year staircase. The industry built it one step at a time.

Someone has opened a market on whether you will starve.

Not whether aid will arrive. Whether the famine will be severe enough, widespread enough, confirmed by a trusted source, to resolve the contract. Your hunger is the variable. Below the threshold, the bet does not pay. Above it, someone collects. This is the Gaza market, open now, denominated in dollars.

In Sudan, after three years of civil war and more than 150,000 dead, famine spreading across Darfur, an open contract asks whether a ceasefire arrives before December 31. Resolution is what the contract requires. Not peace.

Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo — banned from accessing Polymarket under OFAC sanctions. Someone else is pricing their wars. They cannot see the odds assigned to their survival. They cannot see the market.

There is a market on whether another African coup happens by October 31. Not a specific country. Not a named government. Just the continent, and whether it produces another one before the deadline. Someone looked at Africa and saw a recurring event, something that happens often enough to price, a pattern that pays.

Your survival is irrelevant to the contract. What it requires is confirmation. That enough of you die, or enough of you live, that the question resolves.

Polymarket told users clicking its most disturbing markets that prediction markets could give people directly affected by the attacks answers that TV news could not. A public service, it called this.

Gaza was not clicking. No reliable internet. No reliable food. Someone else was clicking on their behalf, pricing the threshold, waiting for the confirmation.

There is a word for what Polymarket is. The industry prefers exchange. The Trump administration calls it a swap, a financial derivative. Three states called it gambling and got sued for saying so.

The word underneath all the other words is action. The compulsive gambler does not care what he bets on. He needs the action. Once you have trained tens of millions of people to need it — through two centuries of expanding access, normalizing risk, building the staircase one legal step at a time — you do not need to tell them what to bet on. Someone will open the market. Someone will price the famine.

The nuclear detonation market is gone. The soldier came home, and the markets stayed open.

Gaza is still there. The continent is still waiting.