Every prediction market is an assassination market. They claim to trade on "information" but it's more like "influence", and easiest way to influence an event is usually by sabotage.
I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market in the early 2010s. It wasn't phrased like a prediction market focusing on when a person would die, but more like a bounty. If the bounty/pot got big enough, eventually it would be worth it for someone to do it.
Even thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
I think all the big targets for this kind of thing have the legal or government muscle to get in your way? Millions of people usually don't agree on someone dying unless they're powerful.
It seems to me you underestimate the challenges of getting the money from such crypto scheme. A murderer would have to prove to the pot owner that they are, in fact, the real murderer and not someone pretending to be one to get the money. However, there’d be another actor trying to prove who the murderer is - the police. So, you’d practically have to dox yourself in order to get the money, or be able to have such a strong privacy system that a state actor cannot break it and identify you from your communications with the pot owner (lol). If you have such a strong cyber security system, you’re probably better off just selling it for $$$$$$ than muurdering randos.
But these problems would likely be self-resolving in most cases as the crypto pot owner would simply rug-pull everyone.
thats already on a table when you place a prediction that is related to an Individual doing something. you dont even need to spell it out. not sure how we are going to regulate those
Powerful. And written so well, I thought it was real at first, I even forgot about the "this is a short story at the top" and googled Aaron's different betting websites
I like it because each individual piece can happen and we probably all know people by now that are into a piece of it - massive AI use, or into prediction markets, or live streaming, or just a friend who we have learned over time lacks scruples, or have watched them fade in response to life's challenges. The combination of all of these is then easy to imagine and that idea makes a good story.
I think this short story resonates because probably most people know an Aaron - the type that is incessantly looking for some kind of scheme, some kind of get rich quick thing, and will spend exponentially far more effort and misery suffered avoiding real employment than it would take actually just sucking it up and working, and often (usually) with much, much worse results. Yet they persist. A few of them become successful founders, probably, depending on their background. But most don't.
When I was around that age, my Aaron was this kid who matched a similar description, very bright but utterly averse to any kind of work whatsoever, never finished his education, did okay in school but underperformed a lot.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
What’s funny is that there was a bankrupt auto company that was memed back into existence. Hertz, by all logic, was absolutely doomed. Retail traders brought it back from near-certain liquidation and could have made a ton of money. Not sure how many actually sold.
Don't listen to the quitters here kids, go chase your dream, it's worth it. Employment is just helping someone else reach theirs for a pat on the back.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
+1. You have a duty to become as un-ignorant as possible and that will never happen if you take internet advice at face value and never think or learn things for yourself. That doesn't mean employment can't be right for you, but it also doesn't mean you have to settle for another man's trash and pretend it's your treasure.
Agreed. The right advice to young people is; you need to concentrate on politics.
The future is clearly a kind of communism or socialism, there's no way around it now and the world's biggest economic power, China, is communist and turning the world communist has been their plan for a very long time time.
The best you can do now as a young person is to envision what form of communism or socialism you would want for your society and start getting involved in local or national politics.
The paradigm has changed and it doesn't make sense to invest your energy on the old paradigm...
It's impossible to compete in the tech sector. The only sector left where there is real growth potential is also the one that's the most gate-kept. Don't demoralize yourself, just go straight into politics full of enthusiasm and hope.
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
We're speaking in the context of getting steady employment vs taking a very unlikely to succeed moonshot.
Plenty of extremely successful people, including plenty of billionaires, started out with a paycheck with an employer, often for many many years. Plenty more live very comfortable lives. Your framing as the former is somehow "lacking ambition" is just wrong.
Irony is that you should listen to helpful advice from people but decide the ones to keep. For successful people accepting defeat is definitely not an advice to incorporate.
quitters dont generally make careers or stable jobs for themselves. you can rage against the man all you want, as long as you dont delude yourself into thinking you’ll ever be invited to the table or do anything but contribute to the status quo anyway. unless you went to a handful of schools and attended a handful of fraternities. cynical? yes, but that doesnt mean it isnt true. the proof is the overwhelming number of founders fail, even in hype markets.
Very black and white here - a person can easily do both by making a great living and working on side projects/dreams. Someday if the side hustle takes off, maybe even give great opportunities to others to have employment. And give them much more than a pat on the back, or whatever it is you are saying.
Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Shut up and Dance."
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
There's a difference between intelligent and smart, the latter including being able to use your intelligence for a practical, real-life purpose, like improving your own life.
Fantastic writing, very well done. Every small, incremental decision is believable. You can see how the psychosis evolves.
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
It so was. It's amazing how easily we can all tell what's written by a real person these days. It's gotta be like the early days of CGI.... ten years from now it'll be so hard to tell :(
Why make him #5 in WoW of all games? Arena has never been that prestigious and most players primarily engaged in PvE rather than PvP, which didn’t have such rankings.
PvE didn't necessarily have formal individual rankings at that time, but it sort of does now.
PvP was a perfectly legit thing to be sweaty about ranking in. I had about 3 friends who were in some of the top rankings for their battlegroup for their classes.
Also see a lot of comments echoing your point about missing the fact that it was fiction... Next post might have a stronger disclaimer! (But I fear it actually worked in my favour here)
This reads so well I was supposed to go out for a workout but I couldn't stop until I finished it.
Incredibly engaging yet simple writing that flows well.
> The lists page is a brilliant idea and I might steal it from you.
You should! Tom MacWright's website[0] was a big influence on the design of my site. I especially took inspiration from how they structure their reading list and how I could apply that to more abstract objects that I wanted to document.
The ending is quite abrupt, I'd consider another short scene. Perhaps one at Aaron's funeral where there's a little more exposition about the shooter, such as with a conversation with Aaron's mom, or with the wider group of friends. For example, we don't know if the bet was paid out, or if the bettor had some relationship to the shooter.
The shooting itself could have a bit more conflict and tension. Imagine if, for example, there was some kind of animosity due to a fight between Aaron and the narrator. (Instead of them drifting apart.) Then imagine that the narrator saw the bet before the race, saw someone suspicious, put two and two together, and tried to warn Aaron?
I clicked on the HN link and, when I saw "short story", almost closed the tab ... but I started to read anyway. I found it compelling and disturbing from start to finish. Much as my opinions about writing count for nothing, I truly hope that you poat any future works here. A great read.
Some people have always had qualities like Aaron's, and giving them tools like AI causes them to reveal themselves by virtue of becoming that much louder. Those problems are often unfixable regardless, as they are at the level of personality. What is fixable in comparison (but likely not in practice) is not inventing new ways of allowing them to hang themselves and others. But we will invent them anyway, because a promising idea cannot be left alone for long, and consequences will be suffered as a result.
As I was reading, I thought to myself that if Aaron's last prediction market idea doesn't work out, he would probably go insane. This story paints a clear path of 'descent into madness' in a very realistic way. I think if this story was real, that person, with that kind of personality, is exactly one failed startup away from going crazy.
Now the surprising thing is that he succeeded but my take on the conclusion is that the whole world went crazy.
I initially missed the line saying it was a short story and read through most of it as personal experience until the last couple of paragraphs. That made it even more exciting, but it is still very good as a fictional story.
Enjoyed the story, kept me hooked. Reminded me of this site I saw the other day that someone posted about: https://app.crshmarket.com Prediction markets combined with livestreaming is so dystopian to me
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183 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] threadEven thinking/writing about this now, it still makes obvious sense and I'm surprised it hasn't been seriously made yet with crypto: if there's a pot of billions, contributed to by millions, the incentive becomes not just about the money, but the adoration, protection and power that would come with doing so many people a favour.
But these problems would likely be self-resolving in most cases as the crypto pot owner would simply rug-pull everyone.
>rhythmically ejected spurts of bright red blood
Yeah man, like in music, synesthesia, I get you.
Unsurprisingly the author also makes music: https://rorz.io/music
One of his songs is called "Do androids dream of real sheep?"
What a fresh take on that classic quote! Made me spurt my kombucha, lol.
How can someone be SO talented. Thanks for sharing.
Upon reading these words I experienced psychic damage from the blast of concentrated ambitionlessness.
I remember a few of his dumbest schemes - one, he would get gift visa cards, run the balance down to pennies, then as a restaurant server for some crappy chain, would charge a customer with a big tip, put it on the drained card, and due to some weird quirk with the way they processed tips back then, the money would hit his paycheck before the decline would happen. I pointed out it was stupid easy to get caught by the bank and his restaurant but he insisted it was genius and foolproof. Got caught in a month or two, fired, nearly got in a lot of legal trouble but somehow got out of it.
His all time dumbest 'scheme' was when a major automaker was going into bankruptcy at some point during the financial crisis, the stock was pennies. So he invested all his savings, some thousands of dollars, into buying the stocks. Even being so young and barely financially literate at that point I was aghast, tried to explain that when the bankruptcy finishes, his stock will be worth nothing. No, no, he assured me - imagine - this stock was $20 before, when it's $20 again I'll be a gazillionaire. I tried very very hard to convince him that was not correct and of course he lost everything. Shortly after he got into dealing marijuana but by that point I had determined he wasn't worth hanging out with anymore. No idea what happened to him.
You can do it, be resilient and stubborn, go against the grain and things start to work out.
The correct advice to give is "don't do it. It's really hard and you'll probably fail".
Anyone who quits after receiving that advice was never going to make it anyway.
The best you can do now as a young person is to envision what form of communism or socialism you would want for your society and start getting involved in local or national politics.
The paradigm has changed and it doesn't make sense to invest your energy on the old paradigm...
It's impossible to compete in the tech sector. The only sector left where there is real growth potential is also the one that's the most gate-kept. Don't demoralize yourself, just go straight into politics full of enthusiasm and hope.
This is where you can actually change things.
Is this genuinely the advice you'd give to someone who's less experienced in life? No wonder society is the way it is, most people have extremely low ambitions and then don't even bother working on those.
Plenty of extremely successful people, including plenty of billionaires, started out with a paycheck with an employer, often for many many years. Plenty more live very comfortable lives. Your framing as the former is somehow "lacking ambition" is just wrong.
everyone has their own status quos and goals.
Great story and creating the character Aaron. You did an excellent job in making a very believable person that I think most of us have run into in tech adjacent spaces.
(Ref: https://www.quotes.net/mquote/3799 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkoPq5AOCOA )
It made me think of Justin.tv, which was Justin Kan streaming himself. There weren’t betting markets, but today there would be.
Twitch—what it ended up as–shows how much people crave community. Like other social media, there are many examples in chats of people with believed friendships and parasocial relationships with streamers. For smaller streams, sometimes these are real casual friendships. For larger ones, it’s the dark other side of Aaron.
Anyway, I’m glad prediction markets didn’t exist in those days. I wish they didn’t now (we don’t need more outlets for gambling, in my opinion), but this was a great story nonetheless.
>What I'm saying is: that the sum total of blog posts I have actually published (for myself, not for work) is zero.
thanks for publishing this story. it kept me hooked throughout. i hope you continue to publish more.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
Breath of fresh air between all the AI """writing""".
Thanks OP, great read
PvP was a perfectly legit thing to be sweaty about ranking in. I had about 3 friends who were in some of the top rankings for their battlegroup for their classes.
I also didn't see that it said "This is a short story" at the top, so I read more than half thinking it was nonfiction. Heh.
Also see a lot of comments echoing your point about missing the fact that it was fiction... Next post might have a stronger disclaimer! (But I fear it actually worked in my favour here)
I wonder if it was AM's writing contest. Your writing is great, keep going.
You should! Tom MacWright's website[0] was a big influence on the design of my site. I especially took inspiration from how they structure their reading list and how I could apply that to more abstract objects that I wanted to document.
[0] - https://macwright.com/
I actually had to look up "Come bet on Aaron’s life with us" to make sure it wasn't real.
I also liked your WhatWeSee art exhibition, pretty interesting concept.
Another commenter suggested I could have made a parody site / post -- maybe an idea for next time...
> I also liked your WhatWeSee art exhibition, pretty interesting concept.
That's kind of you. I've been experimenting a lot recently with getting agents to make art, and the results are certainly interesting!
Opinion
The ending is quite abrupt, I'd consider another short scene. Perhaps one at Aaron's funeral where there's a little more exposition about the shooter, such as with a conversation with Aaron's mom, or with the wider group of friends. For example, we don't know if the bet was paid out, or if the bettor had some relationship to the shooter.
The shooting itself could have a bit more conflict and tension. Imagine if, for example, there was some kind of animosity due to a fight between Aaron and the narrator. (Instead of them drifting apart.) Then imagine that the narrator saw the bet before the race, saw someone suspicious, put two and two together, and tried to warn Aaron?
Anyway, great story!
As was the ending of the young man's life.
It works perfectly as is. Often in life there is no denouement.
Now the surprising thing is that he succeeded but my take on the conclusion is that the whole world went crazy.