Essentially, Wyldfyre promises to be the “first prediction market for California wildifre.” Every county, city, and region is “priced in real time” through a combination of satellite data, live data from first-responders — and, of course, the wisdom of the crowd, the site explains.

Acknowledging that there are 7,000+ fires each year in California alone, Wyldfyre promises to turn “collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting — one trade at a time.”

Though Wyldfyre only offers simulated bets at the moment — “paper trading now, real money coming soon,” the website currently declares — the shell site is a potent microdose of the growing prediction market industry.

At face value, the site’s creator would have you believe Wyldfyre is some sort of public service, allowing unparalleled access to Johny Public’s collective wisdom on wildfires, as if that were somehow a useful metric for forecasting wildfire activity. The reality is that gambling on the outcome of such a specific event introduces a perverse incentive to create the conditions that fulfill a person’s bets. In other words, allowing somebody to wager on whether a major fire will break out in their neighbor’s yard gives them a strong financial reason to go set their neighbor’s yard on fire (and really, in a dog-eat-dog economy like ours, it’d be irrational not to.)