That was the point of Horizon Worlds. They were trying a (very expensive) social play for VR.
The problem is that the intersection/suitability of VR and social media is rather low, while as a counterexample the intersection of mobile and social media is very large. I have no desire to chat with old classmates when I "suit up" with VR goggles, I'm there to game.
Marginal revolution has been talking up prediction markets since before they existed. In fact polymarket probably was created after its founder read Cowen's thoughts on prediction markets.
It may be cherry-picking, but I think some commenters misunderstand this (or maybe I do).
The implication seems to be "12 hours before the resolution things are obvious anyway". But if that were the case, then I could pick some wager that is obviously true but has, for example, 70% chance, and putting my money on that. If it was true that "12 hours before the resolution it's obvious what the result is", everything would be in 0% or 100% buckets. I believe getting event with 30% confidence right exactly 30% times is impressive no matter if that's 12h or 120h before.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about prediction markets, just what I understood from the blog post.
1. As pointed out in the comments, you can inflate your prediction success rate by predicting things that are 100% to happen. There are plenty of 99.9% bets on Polymarket with degens betting on some 0.01% lottery event trying to strike a jackpot against the odds, and those will inflate the perceived accuracy.
2. All you're really doing is paying insiders to leak information a few hours ahead of time. Insofar as Polymarket is unusually accurate on things that aren't ~100% to happen, it's likely because in the 12-hour-window that post measures is when all of the insiders place their last-minute bets telling you what will happen. This is extremely bad for society. It's wealth redistribution from stupid people to unethical people[1], and it could completely compromise national security when eg. an insider tells you 12 hours ahead of time that the US is about to launch an invasion of Venezuela. There is no societal benefit to this.
[1] Even if you have no sympathy for idiots who bet their life savings on markets without having insider information, gambling addiction has extremely detrimental effects on society and directly results in increased crime rates, divorce rates, etc. as people lose all of their money and do bad things in desperation, so it is a problem that becomes everyone else's problem.
In the US specifically, because they weren't allowed to operate in the US until November last year. But... they didn't really try to prevent US users from accessing it, just gently pointed them towards using a VPN and paying with cryptocurrencies.
"Coincidentally", they also gave a bullshit advisory position to Trump Jr. and accepted an investment from his firm (1789 Capital), which I'm sure had nothing to do with them getting that licence. But to be "fair and balanced" to Polymarket, Trump Jr. is also Kalshi's "strategic advisor", so there's that!
Cryptocurrency itself was designed to enable crime. Why else would one want an end-run around governments and law-enforcement, unless one were a criminal wanting to prey on others risk-free?
A statement made from either privilige, ignorance or both.
Just because you might agree with the actions and behaviour of your current government enough, that you don't mind them being able to have a hand in your currency, doesn't mean that can't change.
Not all governments are good, trustworthy or even exist at all. For people in an oppressed or even full out broken society, being this level of criminal is acceptable.
But yes, something used to work around bad governments, will also be used against good governments. Every legit tool can be also abused.
So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?
> So, in your mind, making a payment, recieving a payment and holding money in savings are always bad when it goes against any government's law or order?
That's not how I read GP; "Why would you want to do an end-run around the government when using currency?" is different to, well, whatever it is you are saying (I'm not sure I can decipher it well enough - seems to be "using currency is bad when it goes against laws", but I think that's fine too, so not really sure what your message is - maybe you can clarify?)
Using legal tender is not a problem. Using barter (which is what using crypocurrencies boils down to) is also not a problem. Lack of reporting your income to the tax authorities is a problem. Most bartering systems are too small to warrant the attention of tax authorities, but cryptocurrencies facilitate bartering at scale, which does warrant interest.
Cryptocurrencies enable crime, but they also enable people to circumvent bad policies, and the damage done by bad governmental policies is not small, particularly outside the Western democracies.
Helping the the wealthy opt-out or circumvent bad policy reduces the incentives to improve government policy. A short term win for individuals becomes a long term loss for society.
This is true even in wealthy societies: see private schools, privatized healthcare, private transport.
I've seen reports that poor people stuck in Venezuela have used Bitcoin to take payments for remote work and then to send payments overseas for expenses such as the purchase of a computer (necessary to keep working) that would have been impossible through government-sanctioned means because the government of Venezuela felt it necessary to prevent "hard currency" from leaving the country, which effectively made it impossible for Venezuelans without personal connections to those in power to buy things like computers at all (since Venezuela of course does not have domestic production of computers). Argentina would be another example of another government that had similar controls to prevent hard currency from leaving the country (probably no longer in place, but probably were in place for decades).
I'm not pro-cryptocurrencies, but assessing their impact is not as simple as you and others here imply.
I'd say that the advantage for Venezuelans has more to do on having a cheap and fast way of transferring money than the cryptocurrency itself. IIRC an article that I read pointed that crypto holdings in there where very short lived, meaning people didn't keep the coins as a way of savings
Many kinds of betting markets are or were banned all over the world. The sky didn’t fall, and what underground markets existed didn’t lead to huge gang wars or whatever.
Given that the article is discussing some of the bad behavior typically associated with dark markets (death threats, extortion, fixing) happening in the light, what makes you think that banning them would make things worse?
What you're showing me is a [war crime], which has existed for time in humans.
[Wars] of all kinds have existed for a long time and haven't been banned.
Banning on [particular tactics in war] altogether and pushing it underground would make things far worse.
> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel.
> Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.
Indeed one of the reasons to advocate for the Nuclear Holocaust is because it will eliminate slavery once and for all. Under sufficient nuclear bombardment, we could guarantee zero slaves.
One of the more unintentionally depressing comments I have ever seen on HN, the first guess on the "purpose" of reporting on a war is to profit from it by gambling. Our society has gotten to a dark place.
>what i find sad is a dashboard so that taxpayers can watch their money turning to murder in real time.
The existence of a dashboard is not an inherent endorsement of that murder. It's easy to look at this dashboard as a critique of that murder even if that wasn't the intent of the author. However, your initial jump to assuming that this dashboard is more likely to serve a financial purpose does reveal an actual political ideology (although not necessarily your political ideology), a cold dehumanizing capitalistic ideology, the kind I would consider largely responsible for those murders.
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