Who will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 28?

Will the price of gold be at the end of the week?

Who will win the World Cup?

All of these are relatively benign bets you can make today, but there are other bets that

maybe aren't so benign, like will Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro be removed from office by the end of January.

That well-timed bet was made in the hours before the U.S. captured and extracted Maduro, netting the anonymous investor $400,000.

Hello, 2026. Are prediction markets democratizing information, as some argue, are we monetizing reality in a way that incentivizes

perverse motives? Here to help me dig into how prediction markets work and the risks they pose

both financially and politically is Alex Goldenberg, fellow at Rutgers University. Alex, thank you for

joining me. My pleasure. I want to start with a bet that really made the world take notice of political prediction markets,

and it's the one that was made on the ouster of Maduro.

What are prediction markets and what happened with this Maduro bet?

Prediction markets work great for a lot of things.

Election forecasting, technology launches, corporate earnings.

But when you apply them to military operations, you can create risks that are fundamentally

different.

That's what got me writing about this.

We now have, we'll get into more

detail on this, I hope, Ukrainian volunteers, Russian military bloggers, and potentially American

security clearance holders, now converting, you know, potentially insider knowledge of military

operations into profit through anonymous crypto wallets. This isn't theoretical anymore.

As you mentioned, 2 a.m. local time on January 3rd, the U.S. forces captured President

...