An account trading under the username “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market Polymarket that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be out of power just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.
…Under U.S. commodity trading laws, making trades based on death and war are illegal, since those kinds of bets create a financial reward for violence, human suffering and geopolitical instability.
The future fucking sucks. Literally everything is gambling now, and the people with inside information are gambling the most.
…and you know what, yes, Valve deserves some of the blame for creating lootboxes and enabling the lootbox gambling scene via their hands-off “we can’t control what other people do” approach.
I completely agree. I fucking hate gambling and I fucking hate how much Steam ignores all the damage they’re doing by chasing the easy money.
Blaming Valve for prediction markets is certainly a stretch…
Blaming a single person or entity is not accurate, but if I have to pinpoint someone I usually choose this fella:
Yanis Varoufuckass, former Greek finance minister and economist in residence at Valve studying digital markets leading up to the loot box explosion.
Those that are running the world have decided that they want us to die with nothing, and the new objective is to strip every penny from every citizen. So they saddle middle class workers with a lifetime of college loan debt, and they continue it with overwhelming advertising convincing everyone that they have to own whatever new consumer crap that is being pumped out by China.
And now they’ve added gambling to our lives, featuring ads showing young men having a great time winning, Winning, WINNING! They never show ads of some guy who is about to explain to his wife that he just gambled away their rent money.
They want your money, ALL of it, and gambling is just the stupidest way to lose it. You might as well just hand it to them willingly.