Alex Goldenberg

JPEG monkeys socially acceptable.

I'm referring to NFTs.

Now we're using that same exact infrastructure to make betting on war feel normal, which should worry us all.

As I wrote in War on the Rocks, the habit of treating everything as a trade seemed harmless when the stakes were fart coin, but habits of mine migrate and they seem to be migrating to war.

There are two main problems.

First, as we just discussed, mainstream legitimization.

CNN and CNBC have struck deals with Kalshi to feature betting odds and coverage.

The Golden Globes, which some of us may have watched, integrated polymarket data into their broadcast.

Networks are treating prediction markets like polling data, but polls use scientific sampling, transparent, tried-and-true methodology.

Prediction markets, on the other hand, reflect a narrow group of people motivated to wager money, and they're easily manipulated, as we discussed, by political operatives or foreign actors with resources.

The second problem is, in my opinion, even more insidious, low market cap manipulation, which we've been seeing quite a bit over the past few months.

Someone can spend a few thousand dollars to push a thin market to 99% odds, screenshot it, and suddenly millions of people on X think someone has insider knowledge about an impending crisis, whether it's a war on the cusp of breaking out or a bank going under.

It's a great question.

When you're checking your quote unquote Somalia or Iran position, like checking a stock ticker, you're not thinking about families fleeing airstrikes, civilian casualties, humanitarian crises, economic fallout.

War becomes abstracted into green and red numbers.

The human cost disappears behind odds and returns.

But there's an even deeper psychological problem with these markets.

They create an empathy inversion.

If someone is placed to bet that a strike will happen, they now have financial reason to hope for violence.

Even if they never consciously admit it, there's a part of their brain that's rooting for people to die so they can profit.