Betting Platform Changed the Rules Mid-Game on $85M Wager

Polymarket, a platform where people bet on future events, rewrote the terms of an $85 million bitcoin bet after the fact—overriding its own referee system. Traders who made bets based on the original rules lost money. The episode reveals a basic problem: when the stakes are huge, the platform's owners have power to change outcomes, defeating the entire point of using an automated arbiter.