To be fair, I think if PC gets punished, others who have done it before should be punished as well.

Let's move on, change the rules and enforce them moving forward.

The community guidelines are guidelines, not rules. They aren't supposed to cover every loophole, and it is terrible precedent to say that people are rewarded for exploiting a loophole instead of just reporting the loophole to the mods.

Readers should know that Evan6 is an alt of PC.

I don't have a strong opinion about the need for punishment, but I do have some thoughts:
1. The markets that were used for profit manipulation can be marked non-predictive. I'm not sure this would revert any league results or rewards, but if it does anything, it's probably right to do it.
2. I think that PhilC was operating in a situation where reasonable ambiguity about the rules existed. Many types of market manipulation ARE allowed on Manifold. I think he's honest when he says he thought it's legal. I definitely think those things should be banned moving forwards, but the case for applying it here seems questionable.
3. I don't like the framing of this poll and the markets. The wording almost presupposed that PhilC is guilty.
4. If you do decide to punish PhilC, please make sure to make it count. Many "punishments" on Manifold don't go against what people really care about. I think most people are really on this website for the sense of accomplishment from making profits. Just taking mana away from Phil doesn't punish this motive. Plus he's a whale, so I'm not sure if removing the amount that he got from Wiggleman would even make a dent. I generally think punishments on this site should be in a form of temporary or permanent bans rather than (or maybe in addition to) deducting mana.

@Shump

1. These types of markets should be marked non-predictive generally, that would be a great move to prevent the (currently perfectly allowed) paper profit manipulation that causes them to become self-fulfilling whalebait. I don't think it would be fair to do it retroactively though - that would be a bit of a rug-pull I think Manifold should avoid. Future such markets should be marked as non-predictive before it matters to people's betting (or policy should be that they will be so that people know when they start betting that the non-predictive status will likely be applied).

2. Salty has stated before that these sorts of profit transfers are equally disallowed and that he intended to update the guidelines to make this clear. One can rules-lawyer about the guidelines not being updated such that this clarification is not yet explicit, but I think that's a pretty weak argument.

3. There is very little doubt that PC laundered balance into profits via a collaborator - no other explanation of his trades with wiggleman is remotely plausible, and the manalinks showed wiggleman was betting PC's own mana against him. Unless he was conned into this by someone else, or like, gave his login details to someone else or something, it seems very unlikely he didn't do it - the question is just whether it should be punished or not. He is also "guilty" of making lots of self-fulfilling profits on meta-markets, but nobody thinks that should be punished (just avoided in future by making the markets non-predictive).

4. Agreed - particularly, if illegitimate profits are the problem, they should be reversed in a way that actually affects PC's profit stats, and not just his balance. I suppose reversing the illegitimate profits is one thing, and actual punishment is another thing, both should ideally be meaningful.

copying comment from elsewhere:

@chrisjbillington has kindly mentioned that I should actually fight, which seems against how I am. I feel like people know this already, but to summarize.

I personally don't think I should get punished. I talked to a few people before running the operation and they reassured me that it was legal. They pointed out that guidelines didn't disallow friends (or even strangers in this case) to want to bet against you.

David admitted to the lack of changes here:

I did not know of any comments that said it was disallowed, it definitely wasn't reflected in the community guidelines, and certainly was not punished in the past, even though he / Manifold knew about it.

David admitted to the lack of enforcement here:

I think the profit that was transferred should still be undone, but I agree it did sort of seem like league profit manipulation was fine.

@PC I'll just reiterate what I said in the other thread, which is that I didn't twist your arm into "fighting" anything, and that this is a mischaracterisation.

I'd be fine with just removing the profit he transferred from WiggleMan to himself and not retroactively changing leagues, but that still counts as 'punishment'.

Additional context can be found in the comments here and here. We also have this from just tonight:

I agree with PC that the community guidelines badly need to be updated, but David has said repeatedly in comments that it is still against the rules to do league profit manipulation whether or not it's with alts.