Thursday links

The coins can be sued

In ancient Greece, the legal system allowed inanimate objects to be held responsible for their actions.

For example, when a statue of the Olympian athlete Theagenes of Thasos fell on a man and killed him, the man’s sons sued the statue, which was subsequently found guilty of murder. The court sentenced the statue to exile by being thrown into the sea.

In that same tradition, the “law of deodand” in medieval England stipulated that objects found to be the cause of a death were to be “given to God.” In practice, that meant they’d be surrendered to the Crown.

This proved quite profitable for the kings and queens of England. “For roughly 750 years, English communities conducted systematic legal proceedings for things like horses, wells, and ropes involved in accidental deaths and suicides,” the Nebraska Law Review explains. 

In 1535, for example, a jury in Nottinghamshire, England, deliberated on the case of a farmer who was crushed by a falling haystack. “The offending hay, having killed the deceased, was appraised, and its value was forfeited to the state to be used for charitable purposes.”

The haystack wasn’t literally on trial as it might have been in ancient Greece, but it was held equally responsible.

In the US, however, inanimate objects have found themselves back in the dock.

In United States v. The Little Charles (1818), the federal government sued a schooner — the Little Charles — for violating the Embargo Acts of 1807.

Being inanimate was no defense for the wooden ship. Nor could it argue that it was only following orders.

“This is not a proceeding against the owner,” Chief Justice John Marshall clarified, “it is a proceeding against the vessel, for an offence committed by the vessel.”

Ouch. The schooner was found guilty as charged and forfeited to the government.

The US government has also sued a dinosaur.

In United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton (2012), a 70-million-year-old theropod was accused of illegally smuggling itself across international borders.

Despite being ably represented in court (by a paleontologist), the skeleton lost its case. Tyrannosaurus Bataar was seized by the government and forcibly repatriated to Mongolia.

Even money can be held liable for its actions.

In United States v. U.S. Coin & Currency (1971), Justice John Marshall Harlan invoked the principle that “inanimate objects themselves can be guilty of wrongdoing.”

Justice Harlan cited the English legal tradition of deodand as part of the Court’s reasoning. 

Which brings us to my all-time favorite case name: United States of America v. Approximately 2210.8222 of SOL Cryptocurrency.

Approximately!

Under the rules of civil asset forfeiture law, inanimate property can be legally personified as the defendant, allowing the government to sue an asset directly — even if they don’t know exactly how much of it they’re suing.

This is particularly useful in cases related to cryptocurrency, where the assets are so often stolen by anonymous hackers.

Anonymous hackers are unlikely to show up for their court date.

When there’s no defendant to arrest, US law allows the court to arrest property instead.

“The Court made a probable cause finding and issued a warrant for arrest in rem with regards to the Defendant Property,” the cryptocurrency complaint read.

The Defendant Property was approximately 2210.8222 SOL.

Polymarket’s Alpha traders

The FT profiles “Alpha” — the “secretive and selective group chat” where some of the most dedicated and successful Polymarket traders share their ideas and expertise with one another.

A lot of colorful characters are involved, including an Ivy League political science PhD who felt so guilty about taking money from the “suckers filling his orders” that he posted long legal explanations in the comment section of Polymarket begging people to stop taking the other side of his trades. 

A leading member of the Alpha group told him to delete the public posts and join the private group chat instead.

(I imagine him quoting the Dick Fuld-inspired character in Margin Call: “We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.”)

Another trader in the group — a student at Oxford — tells the FT that the only deep research he did was to look for big bets on Trump and then check if the trader who made them held the TRUMP memecoin in the crypto wallet that funded their account. 

If so, he took that as confirmation they were betting with their heart instead of their head and took the other side of the trade.

(There’s academic support for the idea: prediction markets appear to have a pro-Trump bias.)

Most of the time, though, he made his money picking off the “stale” orders that people tend to leave in the order book even after the news has changed.

It sounds like hard work, though. “He spent most of his days in his college bedroom, sitting at his desk, eyes glued to his laptop, infinitely looping X, Discord and Polymarket,” the FT reports.

“It feels almost irresponsible not to take this money,” the trader said.

Another trader profiled is a Russian mathematician with a particular talent for forecasting when and where earthquakes would happen.

“I don’t really understand why he’s good at that,” a member of the group said.

The FT estimates that Alpha’s 30 or so traders have collectively made about $40 million on Polymarket since 2024.

Not bad for “getting paid to play a video game of reality,” as one of them put it.

Still, they wouldn’t recommend quitting your day job.

“It definitely consumes my life in a way that is not positive,” the political science PhD said.

The Oxford student agreed: “I don’t have thoughts anymore. I can’t write anything. I don’t yearn any more.”

If you trade prediction markets enough, you might become an inanimate object.

— Byron Gilliam