"Polymarket should be shut down for this."

Fire Sale

As Los Angeles burns, users of the crypto-based platform Polymarket are gleefully placing bets on the devastation caused by the raging wildfire, which has already destroyed more than one thousand homes and killed at least two people.

As of writing, there are at least nine running bets on the prediction market platform on the Palisades fire (though only three have significant amounts of money on the line).

"Will the Palisades fire be contained Friday?" reads one outcome prediction, with over $40,000 worth of bets placed. The odds, as it stands, are "NO," with a dismal 2 percent chance.

By contrast, a recent wager on whether the fire will burn 10,000 acres by Friday sits at a 100 hundred percent chance, as the damage extended to nearly 12,000 acres today. Somewhere, someone's crypto wallet just got a little fatter.

Anything and Everything

Polymarket has emerged as one of the world's leading prediction markets, a type of platform where users can bet on all sorts of outcomes, including the extremely trivial. Want to make a buck on how many times Elon Musk will tweet in a week, or if Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get engaged before April? You can do that. 

There's also plenty of old fashioned sports betting on the market: over $2 billion has been wagered on predicting this season's winners of the Super Bowl, the NBA, and the Premier League combined.

That said, betting on Polymarket is technically illegal in the US — not that it's stopping many would-be bettors, who can easily sidestep the law with VPNs and their blockchain currencies — underscoring the both ethically and legally dubious nature of the operation. 

All the more striking is the sheer number of outcomes on serious current events, including politics. In fact, Polymarket made a name for itself during the last election cycle, when the site's hivemind correctly predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidency, when many traditional polls favored Kamala Harris.

Wicked Game

Betting with your crypto wallet on an unfolding catastrophe, however, is a new hi-tech low — though perhaps merely the latest testament to the overwhelming ubiquity of gambling today. On social media, the reaction has been one of shock, outrage, and mockery.

"The gamblification of everything is Evil in [the] fullest sense of the word," tweeted writer Tyler Austin Harper. "Capital-E Evil."

"Polymarket should be shut down for this," echoed tech reporter Thomas Maxwell.

The most damning detail is that it appears that the site's operators don't have any scruples about these kinds of bets — as it's been eagerly highlighting some of them on its social media pages.

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