Polymarket lets people bet on the likelihood of news events, thereby yielding some sort of predictive consensus on the future or, as its hosts declare, “the wisdom of the crowd.”

It is nothing of the sort. To call it legalized gambling would be giving it too much credit; it’s a sham, at best, and more likely a continuous, rolling scam that lets people with more information profit from those with less.

I’m all for markets, but to work efficiently they have to 1) evidence transparency in what information factors into them, and 2) provide everyone with the same access to said information. That’s why there are so many reporting requirements for publicly-listed companies, and why every business utilizes standards of accounting that are, well, standards.

Then, I might decide that Company X has some potential to succeed while you could believe that they’re destined for failure. Markets are created to allow my belief to push the company’s valuation up and yours depress it. Ideally, its how we arrive at a”true” if not at least circumstantially accurate valuation, and we can make buying and selling decisions thereupon.

There’s no such market working at Polymarket; it’s simply a bulletin board of Yes/No questions on which people can place bets. A bettor has no visibility into what others may or may not know; someone working inside the government or a business might have information that informs their bets that you don’t have.

But you’d never know that, even after you lost the bet.

Some goes for bettors who might have some influence on the outcome of their bets; while the days of an entire baseball team throwing a World Series so its gangster sponsors could profit, there’s nothing stopping someone from posting something influential on social media. Again, you’d never know it.

“The crowd” playing at Polymarket isn’t “wise” but rather conniving and secretive, and their conclusions aren’t predictive of anything other than human beings’ capacity for wasting their money.