Nathan Radke

But the main issue, and this is what we've talked about, is that the odds on polymarket are affected by the wagers, which means that there are several disturbing ways to play with the way the site works.

Because let's say you're a state and you want to invade another state, but you want it to be a surprise because the best invasions are always surprising.

But you know that the government of the state you're about to invade uses polymarket to make predictions which affect policies.

So you place a few million dollars of bets against the invasion, which then drops the likelihood of that happening on the site.

Your enemy looks at the odds and says, hey, I guess we're safe for now.

And then you roll the tanks in.

Because a few million dollars is peanuts to spend on an effective disinformation campaign.

No, I mean, they absolutely should not be because in no way is it safe.

Instead, what you have here, rather than an accurate way to gauge the wisdom of the crowd, as many problems as there are with that anyway, you

What you've ended up with here is yet another vector through which wealthy and powerful people can expand their influence over other people's beliefs just by throwing money around.

Well, what's fascinating about this is that conspiracy theories always have some kind of esoteric or complicated explanation for the motivations of these sinister groups that are controlling things from behind the scenes.

But the truth of the matter is, and we're seeing it in stuff like this polling market problem, motivations are often a lot simpler than we expect.

Money.

Exactly.

Financial motivations are amongst the most common.

So we could be in a situation where there are shadowy groups manipulating the world from behind the scenes, but they're just doing it to improve their crypto portfolio.

And there's some even more disturbing aspects than that that we can look at.

Let's quickly look at them.

Okay, so what if people in power start using polymarket as a way of just grabbing some quick cash?

I mean, as hard as it may be to believe that people in power would be so venal and greedy to abuse their position to make some cash, but right before the American invasions of Venezuela and Iran, there were very large bets made on polymarket that those events would occur.