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    • The apartment of the Polymarket CEO was raided by the feds
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    The apartment of the Polymarket CEO was raided by the feds

    Online Niel Posted on

    A raid, for show: Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan, 26, had his Soho apartment raided by the feds yesterday morning.

    For the uninitiated, Polymarket is a betting site that accurately predicted the outcome of the presidential election, contrary to many polls. Coplan is now the subject of a joint criminal investigation by the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York into whether he ran the site as an unlicensed commodity exchange.

    The feds seized Coplan’s devices, which led to some really great tweets. Hey, if they’re going to do all this in public, so should he.

    But many speculate that Polymarket is in trouble not because it did anything horribly wrong – indeed, no one was hurt or cheated, the punters are all willing adults who in some cases behaved like thugs – but because disrupt the old way of doing things. and embarrasses those in power. “Financial markets are generally quite efficient, and the evidence suggests that the same is true for prediction markets,” Eric Zitzewitz, a professor of economics at Dartmouth, said CNN. “There is no virtue signaling in an anonymous market when you bet.”

    Polymarket works by allowing users to buy shares linked to a specific outcome. Each share then trades somewhere between $0 and $1; correct bets pay one dollar so you can earn a fair share of the exchange (like a French trader he did betting that Donald Trump will win the election). Everything is done peer-to-peer on the blockchain, so there is no bookmaker.

    “Election betting is a murky legal area in the United States. In 2022, Polymarket agreed to stop offering its services to US users after settling with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to operate without registration. The company paid a fine of $1.4 million.” rEPORTS The New York Times. But since then, the fact that you can easily access Polymarket with a VPN is an open secret; there are tons of US users, contrary to what the feds would like.

    And that aforementioned French merchant? Many theorized that he was trying to manipulate the odds. “How accurate could the predictive power of this platform be if a single fan can go all-in and skew the odds?” he asked CNN, to which Coplan retorted, “If someone takes a very big stand on Trump … there’s someone on the other side, a counterpart,” frequently doing the opposite. “When you see the quotes on Polymarket, it’s not a function of how much money was placed by either side, it’s a function of the market price at that time,” Coplan explained. “Some trades that someone made two weeks ago have nothing to do with the market price right now.”

    Polymarket not only called the races quite accurately, successfully gathering the wisdom of those acting in their own interest, but also quite early. A comparison chart:

    Company spokesperson said the raid on Coplan’s home was “obvious political revenge by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for supplying a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election.”

    “It is disheartening that the current administration would seek a last-ditch effort to go after companies it sees as associated with political opponents,” he wrote Coplan yesterday on X. “We are deeply committed to being non-partisan, and today is no different, but incumbents should do some self-reflection and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach might be what what would have changed their fortunes in this election Polymarket has provided value to 10 million people this election cycle without causing harm to anyone”.

    “Elections will pass, but Polymarket as an information format for the masses, and a way to think about current events + the future, is undoubtedly here to stay.” he wrote Coplan last week on X before the election results were out. He was further vindicated just one day later, once Trump’s victory became clear. We’ll see if the feds agree that his platform is here to stay.

    Scenes from New York: Dear liberal Ezra Klein, finally break pundit omerta and admit what we all knew to be true: that Democrat-run cities are mostly crap, plagued by a high cost of living and plenty of public disorder and inexcusable crime that, in some cases, isn’t even prosecuted. He even talks about the influx of illegal immigrants as something that has pissed people off in places like New York. Is this a sign that the Democratic fever is breaking, and they are finally comfortable admitting obvious truths, or will they be taught a lesson?

    QUICK KICKS

    • I wish there had been more Gaetzkeeping, truth be told. He is a bad choice:
    • Tulsi Gabbard, who years ago served as a Democratic representative in the House and has since made a name for herself as a regular/dedicated Fox News critic, will serve as National Information Director. “I have a lot of questions,” Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said reporters in response:
    • The word reaction is used so many times here:
    • Think tanks are fighting:
    • A extract: “MI assumes that new immigrants generate ZERO additional corporate income tax revenue,” writes David Bier of the Cato Institute. “I doubt MI’s tax policy experts agree. Employees are hired because they produce more corporate revenue. Ultimately, MI excludes more than $700 billion in revenue from its analysis.”
    • “Consumer prices rose 2.6% year-on-year in October overall and 3.3% excluding the volatile food and energy categories,” rEPORTS Bloomberg. “Both figures matched the median forecast of economists in a Bloomberg survey. underscore the slow and frustrating nature of the battle against inflation, which has often moved sideways – sometimes for months – on its broader downward path.”
    • The Trump-Musk relationship is fascinating:

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