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“If pieces are located, but not the cabin which contains the vessel’s passengers..." you didn't win [1]
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Date: 2023-07-03
More capital than brains. Want to bet?
“For the purposes of this market, the vessel need not have been rescued or physically recovered to be considered ‘found,’”the description page for the submarine bets. “If pieces are located, but not the cabin which contains the vessel’s passengers, that will not suffice for this market to resolve to ‘Yes.’”
On the site, betters buy and sell shares on the outcomes of events using cryptocurrency, and can redeem their shares for $1 each if their guesses are correct.
Since Wednesday, people wagered at least $300,000 on the fate of the vehicle using the crypto platform Polymarket, Mother Jones reports .
Online gamblers bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on the fate of the submarine that went missing on a recent expedition to the Titanic, in what online critics called a “dystopian” use of digital finance.
Holy shit. This whole project was so criminally slipshod from beginning to end. So many sentences like this one: “Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of finance and administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot.”
https://t.co/gHS0u8AONr
Since Wednesday, users of Polymarket, a crypto-based futures trading platform, wagered over $300,000 on whether the “missing submarine” would “be found by June 23.” Naturally, this prompted online discourse about the ethics of profiteering from an event that was likely to turn out fatal.
“[W]hat stage of capitalism is investing in someone’s death,” one Twitter user asked , posting a screenshot showing Polymarket’s evolving spread on the submarine. The sentiment hit a nerve, and the post went viral, accruing over 9,000 retweets and over 150,000 likes. “Actually insane. Imagine making money off of if someone is gonna die or not,” another user wrote in a reply that was liked over 1,000 times. Others started criticizing Polymarket directly for opening up the sub market.
[...]
Truth is, you can bet on almost anything on Polymarket: propositions as light as where French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé will play next year; ones as as dark as whether Russia will detonate a nuclear bomb by 2023 (betting “yes” and expecting to collect seems like a leap of faith); and the bizarre, like taking odds on if a former sexual partner of NBA power forward Zion Williamson will release a sex tape. So it’s not surprising that a global news story ended up generating bets on the platform. But I still wanted to know just what kind of person sits down and bets on the outcome of the fate of a submarine and the people inside of it. Are they calculating sickos? Financially efficient “eat the rich” types? Clear-eyed hustlers trying to make it in a precarious economy? All three?
www.motherjones.com/...
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[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/3/2179202/--If-pieces-are-located-but-not-the-cabin-which-contains-the-vessel-s-passengers-you-didn-t-win
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