• stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netOP
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    21 days ago

    For one, some people don’t know it’s rigged, while others think they can guess how it’s rigged and profit off it. I saw it a lot when I followed cryptocurrency scams - thousands of people bought into obvious pump and dump schemes because they thought they could time the dump and cash out before it hit. And even during the old analog days, tens of thousands of people bought into obvious pyramid schemes because they thought they were early enough to make a profit before the scheme collapsed.

    The old saying “you can’t cheat an honest man” has a lot of truth to it, and degenerate gamblers are gonna gamble degenerately.

    And for the prediction markets and the insider trading, it’s because people can’t. The online stuff uses anonymous throwaway accounts, and the more traditional insider stock trading only gets noticed when (if) the insider publicly reports their stock trades months or years later.