00:00The prospect of insiders betting on the timing of military action like this
00:03is about as appalling as it gets in the world of finance.
00:07Ahead of the strikes on Iran, more than $500 million
00:10was staked on Polymarket about their timing, according to Bloomberg News.
00:15The morality of betting on death and destruction is bad enough,
00:19but this is also a national security risk.
00:21Six brand new accounts made suspicious bets on the timing of the strikes on Iran
00:26and won $1 million.
00:28Sure, they could have got lucky.
00:30President Trump had been making threats for weeks.
00:32There's also an index that tracks pizza deliveries to the Pentagon.
00:36Yeah, that's a real thing.
00:38But handing over intelligence to the enemy would be an act of treason.
00:42Should leaks through price signals be any different?
00:45Just imagine if Iranian leaders had taken those bets as a credible signal of US action
00:50and decided to launch preemptive attacks of their own.
00:53This isn't as fanciful as it sounds.
00:55Israel recently filed charges against two people accused of using classified information
01:01to make bets on Polymarket about the country's security operations.
01:05Prediction markets already face questions about insider trading as use of the platforms explodes.
01:12In January, one Polymarket account won $400,000 on bets that Venezuela's President Maduro
01:18would be gone just before he was arrested.
01:21And Kaoshi recently sanctioned an editor who used to work on the YouTube channel of MrBeast
01:27for making a series of winning bets about the content of his show just before they were aired.
01:32Yes, the platforms, their investors and governments must all do more
01:36to stamp out the potential for insider trading.
01:39But that won't solve all the issues.
01:41Prediction markets should just stop offering wages on anything related to war, military action or regime change.
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