Buterin Backs Polymarket’s Controversial Betting Section

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed support for the existence of bets related to “Hezbollah” on the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket.

I support these existing. The point of polymarket is that from the perspective of traders it’s a betting site, but from the perspective of viewers it’s a news site. There’s all kinds of people (incl elites) on twitter and the internet making harmful and inaccurate predictions…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 1, 2024

“The point of Polymarket is that, from the perspective of traders, it’s a betting site, but from the perspective of viewers, it’s a news site. There are plenty of people (including elites) on Twitter and the internet making harmful and inaccurate predictions about conflicts. Being able to see whether people with real stakes think the probability of something is 2% or 50% is a valuable feature that helps maintain sanity,” the developer noted.

He added that it is not about profiting from something bad, but about creating an environment where words have consequences, and harmful predictions and “unwarranted overconfidence” should be penalized.

Buterin was responding to a post by X user Legendary, who expressed concern about the existence of an entire betting section related to “Hezbollah” on Polymarket.

It feels wrong that Polymarket has an entire Hezbollah betting section that makes a war look like a football game to bet on. pic.twitter.com/zrcSYnJmyr

— Legendary (@legendarygainz_) September 30, 2024

The prediction markets on the platform include bets on whether Israel will invade Lebanon within a certain timeframe, whether a ceasefire will be reached, and whether the US will take military action in the region this year.

When asked about potential assassination prediction markets, Buterin stated his opposition to such ideas. He believes the key question is whether such predictions act as an incentive for bad actions.

Yeah I oppose assassination markets, as do almost all PM advocates. Augur from the beginning had an instruction for their oracles to vote invalid on any resolution for assassination markets.

To me the dividing line is: is the market acting as a primary *incentive* for people to…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 1, 2024

Chainlink community member Zach Reines noted that any prediction market could incentivize real-world actions. Buterin agreed, noting that the current scale of such platforms is insufficient for this.

Agree, but I feel like we are far away from that. I would support @Polymarket adding size-based soft-caps. Perhaps have a fee that increases as the size approaches the max, and use 100% of fee revenues to subsidize socially-valuable markets with very low “organic” volume?

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 1, 2024

In late September, the Ethereum co-founder suggested developing a set of metrics to measure how well projects “align” with Ethereum’s values.