Polymarket Refuses to Pay Bets That Us Would 'invade' Venezuela
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The debate rages on over Polymarket's decision to refuse payouts on bets that the US would "invade" Venezuela, with the platform arguing that a operation to kidnap Maduro doesn't constitute an invasion. Commenters are divided, with some pointing out that the terms of the bet were ambiguous and others arguing that even a small-scale military operation can be considered an invasion. As one commenter astutely noted, the definition of "invasion" depends on the context and intentions behind the military action, not just the number of troops or aircraft involved. This controversy highlights the challenges of predicting complex geopolitical events and the need for clearer rules in online prediction markets.
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Depends entirely on what they're doing.
One could be an invasion. A million might not be. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_inst...)
Also, on-the-day commentary about "regime change" was very much premature. A "regime" is not a single person, it is a ruling group, a system (1). The existing regime in Venezuela is still very much in place (2). It is undergoing change for sure, even having a crisis. But it has not yet been changed for something else.
1) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/regime
2) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/07/caracas-venezu...
What I said was "on-the-day commentary about "regime change" was very much premature".
My apologies, for the avoidance of any doubt I should have said "on-the-day commentary about "regime change" having already occurred successfully was very much premature".
Does "The existing regime in Venezuela is still very much in place" not emphasise that meaning?
Is that clearer to you? I didn't think it needed to be added, but people can be creative with misreadings. This seems like a issue at your end.
They went in and out. They used force to enter, but they did not took control of another country. The government and regime is basically intact, maybe with some bruised ego assuming existing players did not tacitly allowed this to happen to promote themselves.
Functionally, the situation is very similar to the situation from before the event, except there was some display of force and it was made clear someone inside is cooperating with usa.
>"Don’t ask me who’s in charge because I’ll give you an answer, and it’ll be very controversial," Trump told a reporter.
>He was then asked to clarify, to which Trump replied, "It means we’re in charge."
Whether or not he's right, the US President's words seem to reveal an intent for the actions to result in the US being in control of Venezuela.
It might happen, if Trump doesn't get distracted by a shiny object first, but it hasn't yet.
Trump is a mob boss. He considers himself "in charge" of them now because he has clearly dominated them, expects them to comply with his future demands, and will continue to use force against them in the future if they don't do what he wants.
To me, it's simple, a foreign army enters your country in violation of your sovereignty? That's an invasion.
They kidnapped the president, lmao, what else could be more against the sovereignty of a nation.
Vague everyday language is unsuitable for contracts. When there are multiple reasonable interpretations, it's impossible to know what has been agreed. It's better to be pedantic and use precise language and narrow technical definitions of words.
Try to "aschkually" a judge irl and post results. Hilarious.
In this particular case, the bets were clearly about military operations with the intention to take control of Venezuelan territory. This is the established meaning of "invasion", in contexts where people care about distinguishing between different types of military operations. But because people could plausibly interpret the word in a different way, the rules did not use words "invade" or "invasion" at all.
It just didn't work.
The War Powers Resolution (WPR) of 1973 sets a 60-day limit for U.S. forces in hostilities without a formal declaration of war or congressional authorization, allowing for a potential 30-day extension for withdrawal, totaling 90 days, after which the President must remove troops.
Airstrikes on Libya (2011): Obama administration argued they did not need Congressional authorization because the operations did not constitute "hostilities" as defined by the War Powers Resolution. Therefore, the Obama administration argued, the 60-day clock never started.
The bombings involved 26,500 sorties over eight months, including 7,000 bombing sorties targeting Gaddafi's forces.
Can you influence outcomes on Polymarket by purchasing enough UMA tokens?
Why would people accept this? Especially if ownership is anonymous and could overlap with market actors?
Because A) they're not paying attention, B) they're in denial and C) because they think they can profit in the short term before it collapses, or that the odds are in their favor to profit despite the risks.
People are very good at convincing themselves that because something has not happened, therefore it will not.
When UMA is eventually abused to make a lot of money, then perhaps things will change.
I've found that dishonest bookies will commonly bet when they have insider information or some way to push the outcome in one direction.
That's why the mob both employs bookies and pays boxers to throw fights.
I'll use that in my travel insurance claim because I've been stuck in the USVI all week and I'm confident my carrier will deny all claims because they will claim this is a declared/undeclared war, which is not covered. If this is a DEA extradition, I'm good.
If they start engage in such technicalities, eventually it would mean that typical bet should be several screens long lawyerspeak/legalese, like EULA, otherwise it can be just rejected more or less arbitrary, based on wordplay, and that will scare off potential bettors.
Raids don't qualify.
This issue already happened with the war in the Middle East when Israel engaged in cross border raids that weren't intended to establish permanent control.
Do declarations by heads of state not count?
I don't care if the almighty comes down, waves their tentacle and says "let there be light" - if it's still dark after their pronouncement, then anyone who bet a light would appear should lose the bet.
Trump's declaration that he is taking over Venezuela fits pretty comfortably within this category.
In your terms, a light did appear. You're right that the light is not directly connected to the utterance. But since the argument above that there was no invasion is premised on a lack of intent to invade rather than on the invasion not having happened, the utterance disproves that.
Emphasis on "intended to". Speech does count as intention, even if you haven't successfully achieved whatever you say you're doing. If the President says the US intends to control Venezuela, then the Polymarket statement is true.
All the Israel markets have clearly established this interpretation. Israel has done many raids intended to influence foreign governments, but not to control territory, and those markets didn't count as invasion.
There are other markets if you wanted to speculate on regime change or any kind of military action, but "invade" has a specific meaning.
This happens every single market and it's free money for people that understand the rules.
Edit: I guess "raiding" as you say, but that's a tactic used during a war, and apparently we aren't at war. If Israel had announced after a raid that their intent was to control the target country, then I would say their raid was actually an invasion.
My favourite invasion market was the Syria one, where Israel took the peak of a mountain on the border of the Golan Heights and the rest of Syria, and there was a huge dispute over whether the peak itself counted as Syria proper.
https://polymarket.com/event/will-israel-invade-syria-in-202...
"I'm running now" doesn't make you jog if you're sitting down, but it certainly kicks off a campaign if you were considering elected office.
JL Austin called these sort of statements "performative utterances" and there's a lot of linguistic debate about them. Nevertheless, "I declare war", uttered by someone with the power to do so, is pretty unambiguously an example of one.
Because those should earn two very different amounts of trust.
(A relevant point is that people were still betting on Trump winning the 2020 election even after the results were out in part because it was possible that Polymarket would side with his opinion, but it's probably for the best they didn't...)
One of the bigger clues is the 15 million or so extra Biden votes that vanished in the 2024 election. Over 300,000 illegal votes happened in Georgia alone, which also cost two Senate seats.
I hope most mail-in ballots are banned by 2028.
Boots on the ground, baby.
Yes, it does. “For now” has no definite endpoint and thus states that the mission targets indefinite control of territory. (“Until <clear objective endpoint>” is not, on the surface, indefinite, though if the endpoint is a fixed point in time but one of conditions that may or may not ever be met, it might still be indefinite if the criteria is temporal definition, but “for now” is indefinite by any standard.)
It does not target permanent control, but permanent is distinct from indefinite.
I also don’t find “for now” to be clearly indefinite, but I agree it depends on which if multiple definitions of “indefinite” you use, and it does fit some definitions.
If a nation assassinates a leader, then leave the country to their own devices (which may include a more friendly replacement), I could see the ground on this logic. NEITHER of these events (killing nor elected replacement) has happened. The US has asserted control.
It's obviously far closer to assassinating a leader and leaving the country to its own devices than the complete destruction of the Iraqi army as a viable fighting force, installation of an entirely new government and extended military occupation, or even something like Russia's ultimately unsuccessful annexation of Kherson.
How slowly would it need to be done to be counted as an invasion? A day? A month?
But if the intention is some other military objective: blow up a military base, kidnap a president, etc, and get out quickly, then I don’t think the word “invasion” applies.
With certainty that is not the original meaning of the word. In Latin and in classic English, the meaning of the word is just: "enter in a hostile manner", as it can be verified in any dictionary.
As long as foreigners have entered the territory of another country by force, that is an invasion.
It does not matter which was the duration of the invasion or whether the intent of the invasion was to stay there permanently.
An invasion may be followed, or not, by a military occupation, which is "establish sustained military control".
Oxford Languages, for one, who provide the definition used by Google:
invade /ɪnˈveɪd/ verb
(of an armed force) enter (a country or region) so as to subjugate or occupy it.
Nevertheless, even here it says clearly that "invade" refers only to "enter", and neither to "subjugate" or to "occupy".
Other dictionaries explain better the distinction between "invading" and normal "entering", which is in the manner how one enters, i.e. "in a hostile manner" or "by the use of force".
Your dictionary explains the distinction by intent, not by manner, but this is wrong, as at the time of the invasion one cannot know which is the intent, which will become known only in the future.
By this definition one could never recognize an invasion while it happens, even when one sees a foreign army entering and killing everyone on sight.
I agree however, that the Polymarket bet has specified that the object of the bet was an invasion followed by an occupation of the territory, so the conditions of the bet have not been met.
And imagine how silly it would be if 1-5 soldiers came across the border by force and left a few minutes later and that counted as a major world event!
The presence is global. The threat is the same as anyone taking over another country. This is some serious hair splitting.
It's really not "serious hair splitting" to point out that they haven't "invaded" a country they haven't even attempted to maintain non-covert presence in, particularly not when you've conveniently provided the perfect analogy of a state assassinating a leader and then letting them pick a successor who might be more convenient.
Venezuela regime did not changed either. The same generals and politicials remain on power, altrough there is bound to be some power struggle between them.
No part of Venezuela (referring to its sovereign territory) was indefinitely occupied by the USA. That's why the market is "No" right now.
The number of dead people isn't relevant here.
Polymarket rules sometimes diverge from what you might consider an "invasion", but those are the pre-agreed upon and standardized rules.
Predictions and betslop are a scourge on this poor and fiscally irresponsible nation.
When there's money on the line, I have years of hard evidence that arm-chair lawyers (ie. betting exchange clients) will do absolutely anything to find potential loopholes in settlement rules and argue that their bets should have paid off.
Make of that what you will.
https://xcancel.com/lolams768/status/2007845728333484207#m
A small detachment US troops of didn't succeed in taking some sort of secondary objective like taking out a coastguard station or comms node, maybe.
One of the strangest things about the entire operation is how the US left absolutely nobody behind to administer the country. Not even a consultant. The Venezuelan VP is now in charge and the government is largely intact. It's hard to see how this affects any meaningful change in the country. I did find it amusing that the opposition leader released a statement with her lips firmly planted on Trumps ass and even talked about "sharing" the Nobel Peace Prize just to see if he's enough of an idiot that such obvious flattery would work.
It's a threat - "Do as we say or you're next." Which the US was pretty public and explicit about. They don't need anyone on site for that. It's not like they actually care what happens beyond the resources use.
What's more likely: the US "desperately" stumbled upon a capture of Maduro at almost zero cost to them after their real plan to seize Venezuelan territory went awry due to heroic Venezuelan defending as the parent implies, or that the intention was to capture and remove Maduro without invading and this was what they did, regardless of whether a few peripheral targets got missed?
That sounds unlikely. They have aircraft carriers and just a large modern navy but a helicopter comes under fire and they cancel the invasion?
With a myoptic view of the battlefield it is easy to convince yourself that the distractions launched to keep the military busy were the primary objectives.
> No, Polymarket is not the house. All trades happen peer-to-peer (p2p).
(from https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/FAQ/is-polymark...)
This term is a bit ambiguous, and there's some nuances that make it different from both sportsbooks and poker.
They don't ever take a nominal cut, their revenue model is in holding USD deposits and making money of interest.
> No, Polymarket is not the house. All trades happen peer-to-peer (p2p). The documentation is purposefully misleading, but it's true that unlike a sportsbook, they don't take the risk of bets. It's a classic case of a blockchain company exaggerating to what extent they are on the blockchain and to what extent they are centralized and just minimally wrapping the blockchain, like when NFTs were actually a URL to an image.
Trades do NOT happen p2p, polymarket functions as an escrow, payments are sent to polymarket accounts and released by polymarket. Each prediction market does have their own contract, but Polymarket staff rules on each event through off-chain (although they are based on the wording used in the specific event).
New events are solely released by polymarket staff (although users can 'suggest' markets).
Theoretically, no. Predictions are resolved through UMA, a decentralized stake-based oracle system, which is at least theoretically decentralized.
Practically, I have no idea how big the overlap between Polymarket staff and UMA stakeholders is.
https://docs.polymarket.com/polymarket-learn/markets/how-are...
"After the debate period, Uma token holders vote (this process takes approximately 48 hours) and one of four outcomes happens:"
Doesn't this whole model break down when the Polymarket market far exceeds UMA's market cap?
UMA's current market cap is $68M. There are some Polymarket markets far exceeding that.
How can it be a "decentralized truth machine"?
https://docs.polymarket.com/developers/resolution/UMA
https://uma.xyz/
If Russia "extracted" Trump would the US not consider it an invasion?
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ultimately, "invasion" is one of those terms that gets used for rhetorical effect more than a concrete claim about the world. If you think the US "invaded" Venezuela, and I think it's better to say they "attacked" Venezuela and "kidnapped" the president, we're not normally going to get into an argument about it - we'll just each use the terms that make sense to us, since we clearly agree about the facts of the terrible thing that happened. But Polymarket has to force the dumb semantic argument because they have to resolve the prediction one way or another. (One of the reasons to be skeptical of prediction markets as applied to geopolitics.)
Was it a large scale one, sure. But it was not an invasion.
But you can also have an invasion of privacy or invasive surgery. In that sense it is about unwelcome intrusion into one's body / sovereignty.
And people are entertained by news articles with titles like, "10 times countries accidentally invaded their neighbors." Clearly the intent to violate sovereignty matters.
I think you can argue that the Bin Laden raid was and invasion into Pakistan. Anytime a military forces enters uninvited, that's an invasion.
> An invasion is a military action consisting of a large armed force of one geopolitical entity entering the territory of another with the goal of militarily occupying part or all of the invaded polity's territory, usually to conquer territory or alter the established government.
What happened on Saturday was not an invasion. It was an extraction/capture operation. It was a large scale one, but they left after they captured Maduro and his Wife.
> I think you can argue that the Bin Laden raid was and invasion into Pakistan. Anytime a military forces enters uninvited, that's an invasion.
No it wasn't. When they killed Bin Laden they didn't "invade" Pakistan. They infiltrated, then assassinated him and left.
Invasion in this context has a specific meaning. The bet on the market would have been done with this specific meaning in mind.
No invasion, means no payout.
It would be like making a bet where someone scores in Football/Soccer from a penalty, but in the game they score from a free kick outside the penalty box. You wouldn't pay out on the bet, because a penalty is not a free kick even though they are similar and had the same result.
I think the Kalshi one is bad because “intent” is not something that can be objectively defined.
It's written there.
I'm looking at it right now but not copy pasting it here.
The definition on Wikipedia seems reasonable:
> An invasion is a military action consisting of a large armed force of one geopolitical entity entering the territory of another with the goal of militarily occupying part or all of the invaded polity's territory, usually to conquer territory or alter the established government
What the US did wasn't a military invasion by that definition as they left after they grabbed Maduro.
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