These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
Whoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel.
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"
It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
We ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.
I don't even think Karen got involved, it was just the Bush administration seizing the opportunity for more corruption, pork barrels, surveillance and harassment of the population at large full stop.
You mean the incident where his copilot intentionally locked him out of the cockpit and crashed the plane into a mountain? Hardly seems like an indictment of locked doors to me.
There was also Helios 522 where one of the cabin attendants only managed to enter minutes before the engines flamed out, there is a strong argument if the door wasn't locked he could've entered earlier.
And my understanding is that the current theory for MH370 is that the pilot locked out the copilot and then depressurised the cabin.
There are non-fatal cases like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 where the copilot locked the captain out when we was in the restroom (though loss of life was still a possibility, one of the engines had flamed out and was on emergency fuel).
As with all incidents, there are many factors that lead to them, but in these cases the presence of locked and reinforced cockpit doors contributed to the incident (in malicious cases the fact the door was impenetrable was clearly part of the decision-making, and in accident cases it was obviously an impediment to any positive outcome once the incident occurred).
When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.
> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.
I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.
But it the long run we should maybe still attempt to solve it, before there are mandatory body scans everywhere and cars only start, if you do a mental examination first?
Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.
Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.
Oh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter.
It also substantially changes the definition of who's an insider. Polymarket has bets for random things like a particular word being used by an announcer. Suddenly the announcer is an insider on that bet.
I don't understand why people would want to bet on such an easily gamed outcome. I can understand that some people are compulsive gamblers, but it seems such a foolish thing to bet on. To me, it'd be like betting with someone about how many fingers they're going to hold up.
People sometimes do drastic things when they experience large gambling losses. They might embezzle, rob, scam, be unable to pay rent or debts. It has a significant effect on people who are not directly involved in gambling.
Enough people do care about pro sports that someone who doesn't still needs to worry about being caught in a riot should something like this happen. (they already worry about riots for real wins/losses)
The main relationship is to all gambling. Sports likely gets assumed to make it worse because people still believe the myth that the Super Bowl is the worst DV day of the year.
Yeah. You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home. For obvious reasons. But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
> You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home
This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.
I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Both of your examples are people protecting their insurable interest. Ownership is the most common insurable interest, but there are many other ways to have one.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
Even if you have an insurable interest, moral hazard may arise - acting recklessly or other abuse, while knowing you are insured/covered. Somewhat similar to friendly fraud in retail/ecommerce.
Insurance normally has fine print about those things. Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide. Fire insurance doesn't pay out if you intentionally burn your house down (the fire department also will investigate because even though it is their job they don't like risking their life fighting fires)
You can get insurance without the above provisions, but it will cost a lot more. Once in a while someone manages to collect on a claim for loss of their expensive cigars after they smoke them - but this is rare and usually not worth the cost.
This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
some life insurance policies pay out for suicide after an initial exclusion period. this is often six or twelve months. insurers can include it because suicide claims are relatively uncommon.
if there is evidence that someone took out the policy with the intention of creating a claim then the insurer may treat it as fraud and decline it.
Insurance doesn't exactly cancel that. Maybe in a theoretical world, perhaps.
For example, I have a decently-sized life-insurance policy. If buying insurance "exactly covered that", I would be indifferent to whether I lived or died. But I'm not. And I can't think of a policy-size that would make me so. Money is an imperfect substitute.
Less dramatically, I have really good auto coverage. The car itself is nothing special, and the coverage I have would make me whole (minus a very small deductible) But I am very much not indifferent to replacing the car with money, and it would take way more than the deductible to change my mind on that.
The hassle-value alone would go way over. And hassle-value is usually not insurable.
Insurance fraud is absolutely a thing--but the insurance company still wants you to prefer that the event doesn't happen. That it doesn't work perfectly doesn't really invalidate the point.
Unless you short the property. Essentially, sell it now on the bet that it will drop in value later. Then it burns down and you repurchase the vacant lot and return the property to the original owner.
> With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
I don't think any corporation "cares" about social issues, but, fwiw, polymarket isn't as ok with it as you imply. Polymarket reportedly detected the suspicious behavior, reported it, then worked with investigators to nab Gannon Ken Van Dyke.
Yeah, you are being pedantic. The clear meaning is that you're not just allowed to insure arbitrary properties.
If you wanted to correct a misconception, you should provide a better, more complete understanding, not just express frustration about a misconception that doesn't even exist outside of an uncharitable reading.
In this case, that means refining the point to the more accurate model, that you need an insurable interest -- i.e. reason you don't want the event to happen, even knowing you'd get a payout[1]. Your counterexamples only work as such because that exists![2] If you want to fix all the people who don't have your superior understanding, that would have been a great way to help them out.
>I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It exists because it's approximately true: you can't get insurance on 99.99999% of buildings in the world because you have no insurable interest in them. And any time someone could correct that false premise, they probably just complain rather than providing the complete understanding -- exactly the choice you just made here.
To be clear they had explicitly written in the contract from the start that death didn't count. And they paid out the full amount - just not to the same betters they would have if he had left office alive.
There are a lot of things short of death that we don't want to encourage either. There is a huge grey zone here that I frankly don't want to entrust to private entities.
I've seen contracts on whether California will burn this summer.
Any bum defending these contracts is to me either a shill or way too dumb to understand the concept of incentives.
Oh and there was an Israeli journalist that got life threats because he reported that an Iranian missile struck some place in Israel, and apparently there was a huge bet on it on polymarket.
Funny how average HNer is opposing Flock cameras that solve real crimes by covering it up as a "freedom" yet completely fine regulating contracts with hypothetical incentives.
Remember how things ended up when insurance policies on loans you didn't hold were allowed... I think there is quite a lot of good reasons to ban those sort of bets.
In German law, any contract, including bets, is void if it is “sittenwidrig”. For example, if your wager in a bet is to become one’ slave in case you lose, this bet is void.
I suppose they never specified the wager. But, given the topic is prediction markets and the topics of the bets, I thought it was implied that the wagers would be exclusively in money. With that in mind, is there any example of a law against specific topics being betted on?
Nope. "We're just an intermediary between people" is a 100+ year old yarn that casinos and bookies have been trying to spin. If you're presenting a point of entry to a betting line and taking a cut, congrats, you're the house. Doesn't matter if you adjust the betting line manually based on intuition or algorithmically based on betting volume. Sometimes it doesn't get enforced because of corruption, but if this was the case, then why aren't there tons of independent unregulated poker casinos where players just play against each other? If you facilitate and take a cut, you're the house.
My phrasing was poor, but they do so generally in a very good faith fashion. It's not just a wink wink rake type thing. For instance there are no fees at all on the most popular and high-volume markets - geopolitics and world events. And not only are there are no fees even on smaller markets for market 'makers' - people who put up an offer, but they provide a percentage of all fees collected from market 'takers' back to the makers, as a means of encouraging liquidity.
What the hell are you talking about? You are absolutely not allowed to bet on whatever you'd like with another individual. Depending on what you're betting on (for example, the price of a stock or the throw of a card), it falls under varying different regimes. This is highly regulated and has been for most of the whole of human history.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
In Spain in elderly caring homes there was a tradition to bet on Bingo matches for simbolic prices (barely one or two euros, enough for a coffee and that's it). It was legalized on paper recently, but technically everyone turned a blind eye.
It was, believe it still is, somewhat similar in Australia, where the game Two Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up), which was a wartime favorite among soldiers, was implicitly or allowed on Anzac Day despite being gambling.
There's many true crime cases where the spouse took out multiple life insurance policies then did the killing to earn money. It's a bounty. We should care about the effect in practice.
> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
They can already do this easily with the stock market.
Usually though people's pay/power directly correlates with how badly they can screw the company if they go (legally) rogue.
But anyone can get a job at XYZ, buy puts, and go and set the factory on fire the next day. Betting markets don't change the fact that you'll be arrested, except that you'll be arrested for a few thousand dollars rather than whatever you can squeeze out of options.
The difference is if someone sets fire to a factory that fire will be investigated and odds are that person will be caught (not always, but few people know how to set a fire that large and cover their tracks). By contracts someone who works in the factory is much more likely to be able to figure out how to "have an accident" doing something they normally do, everyone knows it is then but they just get a "do better next time" talking to, and the factory throws up some more guards.
Anyone who can figure out "how to have an accident" can do it. A fire at an aluminum plant last year tanked Ford stock 6%. For a relatively boring stock like Ford, the right options would have moved 1000%+.
> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.
The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.
what are these "actual odds" and if you have the time machine that lets you observe the necessary outcomes to calculate them, why are you bothering with making money on betting markets?
The "actual odds" is that if you get, say, 100 bets that were at 10% yes when the bet was resolved, you'll see that around 10% closed yes and 90% closed No.
So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.
The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.
Him placing the bets or a co-conspirator placing the bets and sharing the profit is the same thing. He is effectively betting on himself saying those words which he then goes on to say.
I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
> Him placing the bets or a co-conspirator placing the bets and sharing the profit is the same thing.
So we're in agreement that if he is not profiting from saying it, then it's OK, correct?
> I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
If my friends make a bet that I will/won't do something, and I choose to make one side win, that is not match fixing. I'm sure match fixing only applies to regulated games. If people want to make bets on unregulated games, and lose their shirt, they have only themselves to blame.
For something to be match fixing, the government has to recognize the activity as a sport, and most state laws require the person to benefit from the fixing, which the CEO here is not and/or they require "rule tampering" - there was no rule broken here.
Depends how you count profiting from it, if you only count direct monetary profit, or if you count things such as favours to be profit.
There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
T hen again crypto isn't known for its bastion of legality and morality, therefore I would assume there are some deals going on in the background which are probably illegal, and if not that then unethical - not that they would care about that.
> or if you count things such as favours to be profit.
There needs to be evidence of such a thing, no?
> There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
I have motivation. If people are placing stupid bets on me, I sure as heck want them to suffer for it.
I'm sure some people view a CEO doing this as unethical, but I fully support it. Whoever lost money on that bet had it coming.
Of course, my preference is both sides losing money, but we can't have everything.
Speaking of ethics: There is a reason why betting and gambling are categorized under "vices". If you make any bet on things out of your control, the questionable ethics begins with you. Don't put it on a third party who was not involved in crafting the bet.
I believe in some jurisdictions, private bets are not legally enforceable (i.e. if I make a bet with you and lose, it is my legal right to refuse to pay). There's a good reason for that!
They can take any position they want and do whatever they want, the point is that these oddball markets are very thin so there just isn't much money there to harvest. You can only bet $50M at your chosen risk if you can find enough people to take the other side, and these markets simply don't have many participants betting much money.
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
It seems like it's a huge assumption on your part that the bets you are describing are in the "0.89" range and not something significantly higher, even disregarding what others pointed out about this having already provably occurred.
It depends on the market of course. In looking it up the only markets that have ever come even close to that sort of payout are things like presidential elections where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
Nobody's making millions betting on things like the weather.
>where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
So what's the point of polymarket, then? If at best we get "negligible" "insiderism", how is it that we are supposed to be benefitting from this as a society the way OP and others insist that revealing insider preferences "would"
Because it's the most effective tool we know of for surfacing the true odds of something (Which also includes the fact that insiders will place outsized bets to move the needle towards the truth.)
An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
>An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
Trump didn't win by a landslide and he barely won the popular vote...
>The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
Praying someone has an example besides the election, to which it seems to have made absolutely no difference at all
It's not supposed to make a difference but to provide information to people, which it does a great job of. Go browse Polymarket and the odds they lay on most of everything are about as close as one can get as to the "real" odds of that thing. They're essentially like a superhuman pollster. I'm a big fan of them but have not placed a single bet. It's simply that if you want to see what's happening in the world, a browse of their front page is way more informative than browsing a e.g. news website, especially in modern times.
As for the election, a Republican winning the popular vote by a couple million can't be called a landslide in nominal terms, but it is in terms of normal results. The DNC currently completely controls California and New York. After those 2 states alone Trump was down 7 million votes in 2020. The rest of the states tend to be either very small or relatively competitive. To make up the popular vote amongst them requires a very large edge. Polymarket had Trump as a 2:1 favorite the day before the election, and he would indeed go on to win every single swing state. The corporate media and their associated pollsters had Harris ahead.
If the information does not make a difference, what is the point of the information? White noise is "information". Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is "information". What is the point?
> As for the election, a Republican winning the popular vote by a couple million can't be called a landslide in nominal terms, but it is in terms of normal results. The DNC currently completely controls California and New York. After those 2 states alone Trump was down 7 million votes in 2020. The rest of the states tend to be either very small or relatively competitive. To make up the popular vote amongst them requires a very large edge. Polymarket had Trump as a 2:1 favorite the day before the election, and he would indeed go on to win every single swing state.
And the numbers were actually much more closer to what the national media outlets reported... so again, what is the value of the "information" on polymarket? All it reflected was that there were a couple of whales that were betting hard for Trump. The results did not remotely reflect the polymarket odds at all as you concede. I'm not sure how you think that doesn't end the conversation, but it seems to be more of a political point you are making that is divorced from the reality of the numbers reported.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "make a difference." But providing accurate odds on a wide array of topics isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds.
But you already conceded the odds were not accurate.
> But providing accurate odds on a wide array of topics isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds.
I didn't say they were. You are making the broad meaningless distinction of implying that the "information" provided by "prediction markets" has any value. If it does not have value, what is the point of having the markets?
>Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "make a difference."
If the availability of the information makes no difference societally, then what is the value of the information? I'm not sure if you are being so obtuse on purpose, or what. But you keep saying it provides information... so what? As I pointed out... white noise is information.
> and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds
No they did not. Trump did not win by twice as much and certainly did not in the popular vote.
Oh boy. You don't even know how prediction markets or even odds work, at all, yet are abnormally strongly opinionated on the topic, and just assume you know everything without bothering to even check once. Of course. Prediction markets are binary yes/no. When Polymarket prices Trump as a 2:1 favorite, that does not mean he's expected to win 66% of the vote, but that if you ran the election 3 times, he'd be expected to win twice.
Polymarket's accuracy (as defined by an event corresponding with the majority position) is 90% a month out from an event, and 94% 4 hours out from an event. I suspect a weighted analysis (e.g. a 90% event should happen 9 of 10 times, not 100%) would show even better results. That is dramatically higher than you get from things like pollsters, and it's all freely available to the public.
Correct, but there is a direct correlation between the size of the market, and the power of the people determining the outcome.
Then there is also the fact that the power of the people determining the outcome is inversely proportional to their care about betting markets.
Put this together and you get "The larger the size of the market, the less the people who can single handily swing it care about doing so".
If you are someone who can command hundreds of thousands of people to bet millions for or against you, you almost certainly lose more than you would gain by gaming it.
Mind you the market also naturally prices in this risk of the one person going rogue and taking them winnings for themselves. You will never find a market for "WarmWash will post nothing for 3 days straight on HN" because no one will take the other side of it.
When they're not thin they're popular (sports, awards), they favor insiders and/or various levels of manipulation (throwing dildos at a match), or both (military strikes, stock market, etc). They're full of natural or artificial drama, and people love to throw money at that.
I have a bot betting on a handful of what I consider (so far) markets that are impossible to cheat (bar UMA shenanigans): nobody has any control over the outcomes, previous knowledge is very limited. It makes some money, but looking at the depth, the volume, and my metrics, even being the fastest 100% of the time without worrying about bankroll, one of them would gimme roughly $1-2k a week.
There was a good Perun video on this topic which goes through the various ways in which a betting market can distort or affect a war effort (and can be applied to a larger organisation like a company)
Donald Trump made a fake school where he was telling single moms to max out their credit cards so that they could eventually take a photo in front of a cardboard cutout. This would be for like $5-10 grand
Single moms historically don't have tons of extra money, and Trump was ostensibly a billionaire.
Is there any difference in practice between placing a large bounty on some known person dying in the next week and just straight up ordering a hit on them for that amount?
You raise a good point: There's nothing intrinsically good about betting and trading venues, and the sane default option might well be to prohibit it. We allow stock and bond trading as it fulfils important functions [1].
What you describe (profiting from creating havoc by some "short" bet) is indeed problematic and is regulated.
This is also one more reason why trading should not be unconditionally anonymous. Another reason: proper trading venues have rules against "squeezing", namely that no entity may hold more than some threshold ratio of the open interest. That's obviously impossible to enforce with anonymous markets.
[1] Tradings allows individuals to time-shift consumption, it funds productive enterprises, it incentivises convergence of market price with fundamental value, which in turn is what enables efficient investment allocation, and it allows the emergence of an economy-wide equilibrium of savings and investments. Note though that all of these functions might well be fulfilled by having, say, one minute of trading a day.
Or maybe we should somewhat regulate the stock market, require identification of traders, have a regulatory body that can retroactively investigate suspicious trade patterns and determine the identity of who's behind them?
At least the stock market is supposed to have a purpose besides gambling, to raise investment for companies. (Whether it's actually successful at that is a separate matter.) And anyways, your scenario would probably be considered insider trading, and that's already banned.
You're not that wrong - look at e.g. Tesla. Back in the day, the point of the stock market was not to make money off stock price changes, but to make money of the dividends, which was much more stable (but has a different set of issues associated with it)
Historically similar services have also been used to try to manipulate the real world by using bets for creating opinions. Like if you get to vote between candidate x and y and x leads by 75% to 25% on Polymarket maybe you don't vote for y even if the real numbers may be way closer.
Well, this is what's happening in the stock market with the insider trading, pump and dump schemes, shorting and many more algorithms that utilize power imbalance to extract more capital for decades.
Polymarket is quite tame in comparison, in my opinion.
Sounds like a solution structured the wrong way, the world should leave alone people who don’t commit crimes and take care of the people who manipulate the world in horribly destructive ways instead of limiting what law abiding citizens can do. These people who use their power to manipulate bets are almost always not corrupted by polymarket, but they were already criminals.
This is very naive. Many people have incentives to manipulate the financial markets, also with real world consequences. Should we ban financial markets as a result?
Do you really think that there are no people, who have bet on the price of something in one direction or the other, who enact real world consequences on people or other entities in order to ensure their bet? This is par for the course.
Financial markets serve a worthwhile purpose and can’t be gamed to the same degree as Polymarket. Polymarket enables completely absurd levels of dangerous manipulation, with significantly worse potential real world outcomes.
These people committed crimes, such as the catch all 'securities fraud'. Polymarket is unregulated and lots of ways to commit ethical fraud without committing legal fraud.
I would have expected it to be illegal in the U.S by now but we live in a strange reality where the current administration's family is literally profiting off of it.
> I would have expected it to be illegal in the U.S by now but we live in a strange reality where the current administration's family is literally profiting off of it
Legislation by who is willing to "donate" the most; law of the jungle capitalism.
Can someone give a more concrete example around all this?
How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught? Didn't they catch someone that had pre-knowledge of the Venezuela campaign?
(I'm not asking because I want to do this, I'm asking because it's not clear to me how this is realistically possible.) Also, given that you can't just create a market on either platform, it's not like I can just say "XXX has 3 months to live".
If a criminal wants to make money on crime, they have better ways to do it than put 10k of their own money to make 50k by killing someone.
I just don't get this whole argument. If you're a contract killer, why put yourself and the contractee up in the feds sights?
> How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught?
Assuming you get away with the murder, guessing that's not the part you're asking about, a concrete example: https://polymarket.com/event/next-french-presidential-electi..., bunch of people on that list, surely many of them are like the typical European politician, mostly without assassination protection most of the time. Place a "No" bet on one of them, then hire someone to assassinate, and Polymarket indirectly drove someone to murder another person, as they could profit from it.
As a contract killer, I don't think you'd put yourself or your client more up in the fed sights than without Polymarket, it'd just look like another bet.
Its just stochastic terrorism is the thing. Betting markets on a a negative outcome are ginning up a big "you could make money if the bad thing actually happens" and over enough scale you'll get that idea into the head of someone who concludes they should try and make it happen.
This is the same reason it is generally illegal to make public statements lamenting that someone hasn't killed a person.
The problem is if you are a criminal you need to cover your tracks and your client tracks. Someone can meet with an assassin to kill so and so on a street corner. However how do you get a large amount of cash to the assassin if they pull the murder off. Large amounts of cash are too often tracked, and most other electronic payments are as well. Bitcoin has a public ledger that is not as anonymous as advocates like to claim (and the police are presumably getting better at understanding it)
I don't know if a contract is a good way, but it gives some deniability.
Unfortunately there are ways for people to spend money on these sites. That's why the Netherlands has legalised gambling because the bad websites couldn't be stopped.
They are easy to stop - follow the money. A few sting operations where you lose a bet and then the courts agree to enforce your reverse change and they will shut most of this down. Bitcoin payments are a little harder to shutdown, but the friction makes it much harder.
You can also follow people. Tax fraud is how a lot of criminals are caught - we don't know what you did but we can prove you didn't get the money legally and that is enough.
> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
Maybe a bit out of scope for this article, but seems like in every country “Younger millenials and Gen-Zers” are turning to gambling online while traditional gambling (like Vegas) dies.
I feel like this might be a net negative from the pure speed and access in which you can lose money online vs real life, but idk.
In practice La Quiniela works more like a lottery than betting, though. No immediacy, no lights and sounds, no adrenalin rush. I don't think there's much risk of people falling into severe addiction by playing that.
For some people it becomes more like a ritual, some groups of friends do it together as something social to talk about football, I think it leads in some degree to people paying attention and talking about lower rank matches :D
I've played a couple of times solo and in group but never sticked to me.
No related to the point, but what it did stick to me for one season was La Liga Fantástica from Marca ( a fantasy league on paper) when I was a child, because it had the data component, you had a budget to pick players etc, This was before we had internet broadly, if I remember correctly the paper would publish huge lists with the teams ranking or the players stats. But what I do remember was some of my best players like Zalazar :D
Ludopaths often try to put on the same level national lotteries with sports betting and other means of information based betting.
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.
> Play money means it's much easier for anyone anywhere in the world to get started and try out forecasting without any risk. It also means there's more freedom to create and bet on any type of question.
Their investors/lawyers probably did not want to back the risk using real currency adds.
I would go further than this: all forms of online gambling should be banned, globally. It's probably sufficient to remove them from app stores and to remove their access to the international financial system, which is very doable.
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
I strongly disagree and think all forms of gambling should be legal.
Sadly, from my point of view, you're right that right now going after the on/off crypto ramps would be enough to dissuade most people from using crypto gambling sites. I hope for a more educated populace that can bypass these laws and engage in whatever consensual activities they want to, as long as they're not directly harming anyone.
Again, you are imposing your world view onto others. You should be able to do it however the hell you want. I don’t like gambling, and I don’t like many other things, but that is why we are all different and have agency. Accountability is a different argument, but gambling? Please.
I'm sure you've be entirely fine with me and a few friends placing wagers whether or not your house burns down next month. Nothing illegal of course, just hundreds of thousands of dollars wagered on whether or not your specific house burns to the ground for any reason.
Unregulated gambling has very obvious externalities. Don't insult our intelligence by suggesting it doesn't.
The DF clearly states that there cannot be contracts on topics of war, terrorism, assassination, gaming and unlawful activity and in general anything that:
- incentivize harmful acts
- create manipulation risks
- are "contrary to the public interest"
So, all these contracts on the topics of US attacks, sports, whether California will burn due to fires, openly violate it.
But CFTC's head has publicly stated that they won't act on them.
Dodd-Frank does not clearly state there cannot be those contracts. Dodd-Frank grants the CFTC jurisdiction to govern those contracts. what you are saying was struck down in court in September 2024 where the judge ruled those contracts are legal but the content, fairness, and quality of such contracts are CFTC jurisdiction.
Insider trading is already illegal. What needs to be regulated is not markets, it is politicians. Once that is done, markets can peacefully continue the way they are.
Hard disagree. In the prediction market case, we're seeing many categories of people being incentivised to act on markets: soldiers, diplomats, staffers, journalists, businesses, sports and esports teams, as a quick, non-exhaustive list.
Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?
They are certainly critically flawed at the moment, but I still feel that with proper traceability, KYC, etc. it would be a much fairer system than the current betting companies. It’s one of those use-cases where blockchain technology actually makes sense.
The genie is out of the bottle. Crypto-only underground prediction markets will always exist. I think it is better to heavily regulate legal options instead of pushing them underground. That didnt work for drugs or prostitution, and it wont work for gambling.
Except it generally worked for gambling for a very very long time. The existence of a black market does not mean something should be legal. Human trafficking happens, but that doesn't mean we should legalize and tax it. (extreme example I realize, but I use it to illustrate a point)
Pushing it to black markets takes away the possibility of heavy regulation (which absolutely should be in place), and stigmatises victims (gamblers), making it harder to come clean to friends and family. I agree with your assesment that no one should even start to gamble, I just doubt that declaring it illegal will achieve that.
The US Supreme Court effectively legalizing sports betting overnight provided an almost perfect real-world experiment to test that argument. And the result?
"Prediction market" ads running constantly on both sports channels/websites like ESPN. Shortly followed by mainstream cable news like CNN featuring Polymarket stats as a routine part of their horserace polling coverage. Gambling is now an omnipresent temptation for anyone even casually interested in following sports/political news.
And now millions of young men who previously would have had to seek out niche illegal venues to gamble have several dozen different apps on their phone offering to light their disposable income on fire by clicking a couple buttons every paycheck.
Except, gambling isn't illegal here - in fact, it's very common. There are lots of casinos within a few mins walk in any city in Spain. All the prediction markets need to do is comply with existing laws.
For some reason, American companies have a really hard time following existing laws and regulations here. AirBnb and Uber both had the same approach of basically saying "Oops we didn't know" until the law (and others) cracked down on them, I'm sure someone could find older examples too, and surely tons of examples outside of Spain too.
Yup, totally nuanced comment coming from a completely sane person since "central planning regulatory hell" and "laissez faire economy without laws" are the two only options we have here, good job carrying the conversation forward with curious and interesting comments.
What? Maybe you visited a particularly casino-heavy area, but in general there aren't many casinos in Spain. In many regions (e.g. mine) they're restricted to one per province. My city (250K population in the core, metropolitan area about 500K) has one. Madrid (6M metropolitan area) has four, Barcelona (5M) has one.
Sports betting places on the other hand have multiplied like fungi in the last two decades, unfortunately.
You are incredibly naive. There is one on every street, they are just called "sports bars" instead of casinos.
You're probably talking about the big Vegas style entire-hotel casino that aren't so popular in Europe anyway outside a niche crowd. The average lower class Spanish person frequents these "sports bars" heavily
Prop betting on a transparent and equitable Exchange is a perfectly reasonable and egalitarian proposal - it's the Betfair Exchange vs Betfair Sportsbook model expanded outside of the scope of sports.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
When I see people making money on Iran attacks, and murder of heads of state - it shows clearly something is deeply wrong with Polymarket. Its a level worse than Vegas or Indian casinos. A literal ticket to hell. I'm all for banning these evil sites.
Not sure if Polymarket does the same. Also not sure if I really trust these people to be the arbiter of morality and adhere to their own rules when it doesn't benefit them.
> A registered entity shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any of the following:
> (1) An agreement, contract, transaction, or swap based upon an excluded commodity, as defined in Section 1a(19)(iv) of the Act, that *involves*, relates to, or references terrorism, *assassination*, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.
Polymarket is now two separate entities. Last year they were banned from the US and stopped taking on new US customers and made their site withdrawal only for anyone based in the US. You could bypass it with a VPN, but they did enough to at least look like they were complying.
They've now created a separate company that I believe is called Polymarket US which has it's own version of the site/app which they are using to re-enter the US market. This switched from invite only beta to open sign ups a few months ago.
Polymarket US is mainly just sports betting with a small number of crypto, commodities, and political election based markets, although they have said they plan to expand their market options. Their US based site almost certainly doesn't violate those rules. The version that is used outside the US is the one that has markets that violate that, but since they're not in the US, there's not much that can be done.
So if you kidnap them, hold them in a bunker for a month, then release them, it will pay out. That's probably a positive thing for the world somehow, right?
Sounds like this could easily be worked around by placing a bet on something that will definitely happen as a result of a death, i.e. "bet $X on whether Iran will close the strait".
Publicly traded stocks‘ reactions to a war are harder to predict and have way less leverage than a bet like "US will launch 527 missiles against Iran between 3 and 5 pm"
well I see more problematic the people actually doing the Iran attacks and murder of heads of state. Betting on those is distasteful, but doing those things is where the damage lies.
the entire point of the argument is that they're the same people. Military bets appear to have significantly higher rates of insider trading than baseline[1], which implies two things, both catastrophic. One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone) but the even worse scenario is causality in the other direction, that a bet leads someone to take a military decision.
> One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone)
It's not at all obvious that leaks of classified information are per se detrimental to _actual_ national security.
It's not because specifically with these markets there is an amplification effect where the one doing the bet creates incentives for what it's betting in favor or against to materialize in the world.
In other words the money spent on bets that involve killing directly foments more killing.
That they are virtually always replaced with other mass-murdering dictators, usually after a period of even worse mass murder known as a civil war. All at the low low cost of some billions of dollars taken away from useful work.
Ali Khamenei was recently murdered, at a price tag of several tens of billions of dollars, so far. His more radical son now occupies his former position. As a result, is the world a better place?
During COVID, I was working on an esports startup site that was a mix of social media karma + betting. The idea was you had more karma and your posts got more reach the more right you were.
We experimented with extending this to non-esports topics during the election, which led to a bunch of Trump-based predicting. Then Jan 6 happen and the whole site went to hell. I pivoted the product because I just didn't want to deal with running a site like that.
Seeing what is happening with these sites makes me feel good about my choices. If I were in charge of a product that enabled this I wouldn't sleep at night.
The other side of that argument could be something like: "Dude, Khomeini better not be killed, it'd suck for me, an average iranian dude. I'd probably bet he dies so I can hedge my personal financial wellbeing for that case"
There are several things about the "these are good because people can hedge" argument which bother me and I struggle to disentangle them, but one facet is this: These betting-markets may be an inferior form of hedging, especially for non-trivial scenarios that are intended to evoke sympathy. (Civilizations have a lot of prior art in risk-management.)
For example, our statistical Iranian Dude may be much better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on useful imported durable goods that may become unavailable, ideally ones that would have resale value even if nothing bad happens.
The convenient online casino doesn't require any more than a vague sense of anxiety to bet, but that generality also limits how well you can use the money to protect yourself. If you're specifically worried about famine, better to arrange a future result of food, versus a payout of cash when nobody is selling food. If you're a factory that uses X as a manufacturing input and worried about a geopolitical blockade, you may be better off investing in alternate supplies or futures contracts for X.
The average iranian dude is not going to send money to a company that has donald trump junior on its board of directors to 'hedge their bets' around the Iran war situation.
> to ban something we must be able to construct an argument that does not hinge on morality. For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it bad to deprive you of your possessions?
And given that the house always wins, is it not depriving the gamblers of their possessions?
Gambling creates addicts, and addicts are more likely to act in desperation. They might steal, default on debt, or kill themselves and are less productive members of society. I bet societies with lots of addicts are much less likely to thrive because they carry a ton of dead weight. Thus we should ban or at least curb gambling because it hurts us all in general.
We legalized online gambling, the end result is more and earlier addiction and the added tax does not outweigh the societal cost due to loss of jobs, added crime and secondary effects of broken families on monetary, let alone ethical grounds. And they had to change the law to have more bite due to gambling sites mostly ignoring the required checks on addicted and heavy usage players, because profits have to be made. At least they got rid of the insane commercials since that's what most normal people complained about.
> For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
This assertion also hinges on morality. Why is being deprived of your possessions bad. You ultimately have to reach for an ethical framework to justify it.
Funny how people take journalists as some sort of most moral form of human being. Meanwhile they are most likely to take bribes for editorializing, silencing, ads or completely making up stories. All while they are most likely to get earliest information on markets ergo most likely to rig markets themselves.
You've been so busy straw manning with the ridiculous and unstated claim that journalists are the "most moral form of human being" that you have conspicuously failed to answer my question.
Also the reason laws aren't overly specific, so these judges can make those judgement calls in the cases. Following the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law is something many judges care about as well.
Counterargument: Any "specific" wording of gambling would have condemned this activity. On average, vagueness in law generates more loopholes for corporate criminals to hide behind than it generates discretion for judges and juries to rule against them.
I wouldn't personally lose sleep on whichever way loot boxes were legislated. If their contents are easily converted into real-world cash, I would say the company bears some responsibility for the actions of any black markets, perhaps proportional to the volume traded. CS:GO has to crack down on its massive skins market, Kinder doesn't have to sweat its little toys.
Generally, I think the common-law notion of "consideration + chance + prize" augmented with the requirement of an "insurable interest" (in order to keep the insurance industry legal) discerns the truth well enough. Insisting that any "prize" not be monetary or monetarily-convertible keeps it from becoming a cyclical addiction, and evaluating infractions relative to volume keeps extremists from banning gumball machines and Kinder eggs.
You have an US-centric (an really naive) view of the judicial systems of the world. In many countries the judges have to follow the exact letter of the law. In others, this "spirit of the law" excuse makes way for enabling systemic corruption.
> You have an US-centric (an really naive) view of the judicial systems of the world.
Right, so because "judges have to follow the exact letter of the law" in the countries you have in mind, somehow my view is US-centric, although I'm from Sweden and I live in Spain, never visited US nor been in any US court ever? Both countries I'm familiar with, have purposive interpretation rules.
You can share that in other places it might be different, compared to how it works in the places I'm familiar with, without chucking insults around, especially insults you uninspiringly basically said in every recent comment of yours, at least make it unique.
To actually make this a somewhat interesting conversation instead of just pooping words, as I just tried that and didn't find it as fun as you did; what specific countries are you talking about, how does it work there, and how little corruption do those countries have compared to say Sweden?
funnily enough - "letter of the law" interpretations can be so general that many left US leaning people believe it is abused by the right for systemic corruption: https://youtu.be/l7To2evwGKs?si=i93YDCuqCl5PMPlY
I don't usually see advertisements, but I was in a position recently to see a real-life television stream, and I was quite surprised to see them run an advertisement for Kalshi. I was pretty surprised that something like this would be advertised to normal people. I'd half expect the next ad to be for a hitman, or for beating your wife, or something. Seems crazy that this is tolerated whatsoever.
You know how a clear sign of a “bad neighborhood” is when you see a large percentage of payday loan buildings, liquor stores, gun stores, etc?
I see the percentage of advertising devoted to gambling to be a similar bellwether to the decline of my whole country. And it’s getting worse all the time. I can’t turn on the tv, look at billboards on the freeway, watch a sporting event, or even walk down a supermarket checkout without getting constantly reminded of how far we’ve fallen.
Agreed, and also more and more emphasis on industries that try to make money off of moving money (gambling, trading etc.), as oppposed actaully creating value is probably also a contributing factor.
They need "normal people", or rather they need normal people's money to funnel to the small number of people who make most of the winnings on these sites. Gambling companies' profits rely largely on addicts who spend big and to get those addicts hooked you need a lot of people to have a go.
in Chicago near Wrigley Field (the Cubs stadium), the closest train stop (Addison) was basically wall to wall (some on the floor too) DraftKings advertisements until recently because they have a physical sports betting bar adjacent to Wrigley Field. After the latest round of elections they're closing that location so the ads came down.
Didn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...
They've discovered that it's more efficient if the money flows directly from the private enterprise to the politicians without going through tax revenue.
I cannot imagine the mental loopholes the creators go through in order to sleep at night. This is bottom of the barrel stuff, we don’t need it anywhere in Europe.
I’m surprised these haven’t already been banned tbh.
It doesn’t make sense that if I bet on the outcome of a football match then it’s gambling but if I bet on the outcome of the Ukraine war then it’s I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-gambling.
The only societally rational thing to do. Cheers to Spain for being a global humanitarian leader on this and many other global issues! (I am worried though by the extreme-right forces trying to throw over the government though.)
> Spain - like other European jurisdictions - considers prediction markets a form of gambling when bets are placed on uncertain outcomes.
What is the defense in the US for example that these are not gambling, "bets are placed on uncertain outcomes", it's that close to, if not the definition of gambling ?
The defense is that "Bets are placed on uncertain outcomes" also covers all kinds of insurance, the stock market, commodities markets, all kind of derivatives etc.
So where is the line drawn? In the US there has been a tremendous amount of money spent on lobbying to keep prediction markets on the not gambling side.
No because investment brokers, who you make your calls and puts with have a license.. Not the same thing. Nobody is asking the gamblers to have a licence, just the service provider.
Edit: not sure if you misspelt But for Bet, but a BET is certainly a gamble ?
Right, because it's not gambling, there are different regulations around gambling. All they need to do it GET their gambling license and they can continue, but in this case they will need to follow those regulations.
Such as (Italy in this case):
Offer self-exclusion tools for vulnerable players;
Implement identity and age verification procedures;
Comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and GDPR for data protection;
Pay online gaming taxes, which range between 20% and 25% of gross gaming revenue.
Ironically enough, sports players, in the NBA for example are not allowed place bets on their games etc, but they can bet on polymarket I suppose given it's not considered gambling ?
People wonder how bad prediction markets are going to get. I think it's going to get a lot worse. If left unchecked it'll en up like the 1997 paper "Assassination politics" describes:
Interesting comments here. I'd rather have prediction markets than casinos or sports betting services, because in the latter, you're playing again the house which can and will ban you for winning too much, while prediction markets are simply market makers taking a fee.
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
There is evidence that high-frequency, 50% accurate bot traders make most of the money on prediction markets simply due to being able to make bets faster.
It's only Cloudflare IPs, its only the most popular reverse proxy and CDN provider on the internet. Only a mere 20%+ of internet traffic traverses via Cloudflare.
It's wrong, but also: just stop centralizing on cloudflare. It's just a glorified proxy, do you really need it, or are you marking an enterprise compliance checkbox?
Can you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?
I think the term "market" comes from the fact that it uses stock market–like pricing and allows you to sell your bets at any time. Ie. you buy "shares" of some outcome for 0.3$ if the probability is 30%, and then if the probability at any point goes to 50%, you can sell the "shares" for 0.5$ each.
(Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
You can gamble on the stock exchange, just like you can "non-gamblingly" hedge certain risks by buying/selling certain financial products such as event futures. (Many insurance policies are structurally just that and are used for very boring non-gambling purposes!)
I don't think you'll find a simple/useful answer by slicing the problem on that axis.
Kalshi, Polymarket and every other prediction market should have been drowned at birth by regulators. They offer zero positive utility to the world. I hope that we follow Spain's example here in Australia; we have a hard enough time with legal gambling as it is.
The utility is a fairly robust signal about the probability of certain events occurring. It's pretty helpful for grounding your beliefs about the world (in certain domains).
For example, I had a lot of people ask me about the Hantavirus and if it was worth worrying about. I didn't have to do any research other than look at the various prediction markets and see them all at 5-10% to determine it was probably a nothingburger. Much quicker than having to parse a bunch of fearmongering news reports and such.
Even for that function, I think their benefits are overrated. Someone could easily manipulate that number if it fits their purposes (ie a health tech startup trying to peddle some cure). The numbers given to you are an illusion of understanding that does not replace actual research.
Smaller markets are easily swayed by not so much money. Arbitrage is difficult because there is an inherent threat that you're betting against insider information.
In this specific case it's clear that the market doesn't represent our collective knowledge about hantavirus at all. Twenty days ago the odds of a hantavirus pandemic being declared by the WHO were ~10% and now it's 5%. This is just a reflection of the news cycle, it would be nuts to say that this is a reliable estimate for the underlying scientific facts.
That is not surprising. If your point is that 10% is not 5% and the odds change over time then you have unreasonable expectations. It's not an oracle. Where did I say it was? I said it's a quick and robust signal. Of course there's plenty of ways to get alpha, but those require both effort and domain expertise.
Is this a standard you hold to any other single signal? Name it. What signal (a) predicted <3% over a month ago and (b) you believed prior to be a reliable signal?
There is no substitute for effort and domain expertise, that's my point. Polymarket would like you to believe that their odds represent some sort of collective knowledge, but they don't, it's not like the world's top experts in epidemiology are trading on this issue. Worse, as I explained someone might be trying to manipulate the odds to their benefit, which for the particular case you cited would be quite cheap to do.
These are sensible criticisms and things one should be mindful of when using prediction markets as a signal (I would also add an awareness of how discount rates affect the reliability of markets that trade at low probabilities), but none of them justify the original statement being contended with, which was: "They offer zero positive utility to the world."
> Spain's Consumer Rights Ministry temporarily banned so-called prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi [..]
Why a ministry has the authority to do so?
What I don't like about my country, and the whole UE, is the lack of democracy. And this is a good example.
A democracy needs to have real separations of powers. The legislative body creates a law, and the judiciary, based on that law, will decide on banning or not the online gambling site.
A ministry belongs to the executive branch of the Estate. It is not up to them to decide whether something is illegal or not.
The law was already there, a minister in Spain does not only propose or vote on laws, but has quite some executive influence. This has always been so and is nothing unusual.
You can't really operate this stuff in a vacuum, otherwise it would take years to take any actions against illegal gambling, way too late.
Again, assuming separation of powers: In a democracy, ministries are part of the executive branch. Their role is to follow and implement the law, not to judge violations.
If a law is violated, then a judge, and not a ministry, should be the one to enforce it.
When an administrative body blocks access to a service without prior judicial oversight, it blurs the line between the executive and the judiciary. And since separation of powers is a key component of any democracy, this raises legitimate concerns about the quality of democratic checks and balances.
Just to be clear: I’m not arguing that unlicensed online gambling sites should remain accessible. The issue is how the restriction is carried out, and whether it respects democratic principles and institutional roles.
It's simply not correct that a judge must always enforce a sentence before any executive action. This is the same everywhere in the world: the executive can take certain preventive or direct action without judiciary. Otherwise just nothing would work, criminals would have it very easy.
You may argue that blocking internet access should always go through judiciary, for some reason. But you can't claim that this was undemocratic, that's just spewing bullshit for the sake of it.
I find it humorous that these are simultaneously attacked as being gambling and attacked because some people know more than others and are "betting" on a sure thing.
Who would the charges be against? The person who violated some trust, or the market maker?
I could be pretty neutral on the market maker, really. The point of a prediction market is to put information to use.
There may be some line to be drawn on such markets, but that line really isn't drawn. There are just vague gestures that it is both gambling and not gambling due to insider information.
If you wanted to regulate it, legislate which markets can be made. Require notification that it is not gambling and is all about the trading of insider information and that gamblers have less than "fair" odds.
Well, that makes perfect sense. The whole world will eventually do the same. gambling with software is still gambling, just like accounting with software is still accounting.
> Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states
I mean Spain blocked these markets for now, to investigate how to deal with them, I don't think it's for sure they'll be classified as gambling and allowed, might very well be outlawed. Probably parent got confused you said "The whole world will eventually do the same" (about blocking/banning) but then seemingly you thought these were "classified as gambling" already.
It has been crazy seeing the explosion of Polymarket and Kalshi in comparison to Betfair.
Betfair doesn't present itself as anything other than what it is: a gambling exchange where the punters make the book. In my 10+ years time of using it they despite some occasionally shoddily worded markets they have only properly screwed up a market twice (The Australian Open in 2022 when Djokovic was denied entry to Australia and Betfair basically forgot the winners market was cross matched when they went to remove him and the 2020 Presidential election where they suspended the market when Trump went to hospital with Covid despite the fact the market rules said that the market would still settle if any participant died and obviously most people had been taking into account that both candidates being mega ancient whilst a global pandemic was happening might be a factor). Betfair is boring, staid and reliable.
Compare that to Kalshi and Polymarket who do everything they can to pretend they are not gambling platforms. It's kind of gross.
It's lunacy that you can create a gambling website, name it a 'prediction market' and somehow that skirts the law. It's a gambling website for nerds and high-ups in the USG.
I'm still astounded that Polymarket, as a feature, is embedded inside Substack. Not a third-party plugin but baked into the platform. YouTube is one thing. It's practically ubiquitous in terms of video sharing but Polymarket?
ETrade also started recently to include that disgusting thing in their News feed for watch lists -- as if it can really predict anything, with no way to turn it off (AFAICT). It's clear that it's being pushed in many directions.
I can understand them wanting to ban Polymarket et al but it's hard to implement unless you ban all use of cryptocurrency. Once you've done the converting fiat currency to some sort of crypto, all the other transaction can happen anonymously offshore. I've mucked about on Polymarket a bit including betting on Kamala to win of all things.
It never will be completely stopped, but IMO this still makes a massive difference. Gambling is one of those things where barriers make a massive difference. For decades, it was under control when you had to go to vegas to do it. But now, when its all over TV, you're enticing people way more.
Nobody is under the delusion that this ban will not be circumvented. The point is to make using these sites so inconvenient that the vast majority of their (potential) users won't bother jumping through the hoops.
Imagine your neighbour the alcoholic gambling addict having to learn to use cryptocurrency and VPNs and then having to file taxes in case any substantial winnings (from illegal gambling)...
Seems the blocks aren't in effect yet, I'm on Spanish ISP (Vodafone) here and can still access polymarket.com and kalshi.com. Traditionally, Spanish ISPs tend to do DNS blocks yeah, at least when it comes to long-lasting piracy and other "clearly illegal stuff" like Women's rights.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
Interesting, added my ISP to my previous comment (Vodafone). Do you have a lot of stuff you use daily that goes away during the games? Personally the only thing that seems to stop working is Docker Hub, everything else seems OK, trying to figure out if it's just my ISP that is lenient or what's going on...
It changes depending on the day. But yes, some days it's really a lot (affecting forums, news sites, etc.). I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason, in fact I've been seriously consider changing ISP for that reason but I'm too lazy (plus in 12 years with them I think I've had a single outage which was solved in an hour or two, so even if I oppose them morally, it's convenient to stay...)
Not bandwidth priority. It's just that our brilliant judges have let the football league implement IP blocks to combat piracy of football matches. These blocks affect CloudFlare IPs that host many websites and services unrelated to football, so we can't access them during matches via VPN. (And by the way, I'm not interested in football but people I know who are say that they still view pirate match broadcasts just fine).
If anyone from Kalshi or Polymarket is reading this: your advertising is reprehensible. Dumb bros bragging about getting rich betting on the weather. Cringey get-rich-quick influencers. No one believes for a second your claims that prediction markets serve the public good. I’ve never wanted an industry to fail so badly.
I see a lot of comments like this is the blocking of prediction markets about politics, war, etc.
It's important to remember that ~80% of activity Polymarket and ~90% of Kalshi, by volume, are sports. These are effectively sports betting websites with prediction markets on the side.
It ought to be illegal everywhere, the only reason it won't be in the US is the president is on the grift with his kids operating on the boards of them.
no they have a securities license. Also while a lot of stuff in stock markets are gambling like, the stock market is a positive sum game where very basic techniques (e.g. index investing) have positive expected values.
The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.
You need a license to operate in Spain. The license is fairly available (EU regulations enforce this). So, Polymarket is able to obtain a license if they wish to operate in Spain, if they follow the fair rules to obtain a license. Don't want to obtain a license? Don't want to follow the rules in Spain? No problem, but no business in Spain. Websites blocking works like that, too. Which makes sense: local law > remote law. Else I could host some websites selling LSD to Americans on the clearnet. No US government would accept that, zero chance.
Other countries such as USA work in a similar manner. Work permits such as green card, to name an example.
The people who complain about regulations and law either don't understand why they exist or how they work, or they have an interest in the abolishment of it because they benefit from that.
Then you get that BS about how USA is better off than EU. Well, if you're healthy, educated, and employed, sure. Otherwise? You can just use your eyes. Go drive through a rich and poor neighborhood in both. The poverty in USA is horrendous, and the effects are shown. We got poverty too, but not as severe. No need to go to that area between West and East coast. You can experience this right near the Bay Area. San Jose is supposedly a mess. I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
You can replace Spain in the article with any other jurisdiction and my comment would be unchanged.
This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great).
Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not?
Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in?
The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.
And you can replace Spain with any other country (including authoritarian regimes) and my comment would be unchanged. It is a matter of respecting local jurisdiction, local law.
I didn't expect you to agree either. I wanted to inform the reader and lurker, not convince you. Why you have to resort to 'you are exactly the kind of person' is beyond me.
Since you decided to edit your post, so have I:
Yes, a government can outsource/delegate such, if the quality is good, why not? For example, the audit has to be thorough and the outcome non-discriminatory.
As far as I am concerned it is a very sick platform because (well anything related to cryptocurrency is) some of the bets are about dark things, seemingly allowed. For example, imagine being able to bet when the next murder of the Zodiac is happening, and how it'd occur. Same with the missile example. Should we therefore ban or regulate it? I don't know what is wisdom. But I do know EU and Spain can decide on this for themselves. One thing of note: insider trading is illegal in EU, yet Trump's clan hobby (yes, in past presidency it occurred as well, but not as severe, nor as ridiculous).
Yeah, LSD, or Janet Jackson's nipples, or something else which is highly illegal in USA, such as opiates. Or copyright infringement. Or whatever else is on the darknet. Called hypothetic examples.
Without Spain everyone up from Po Valley would be pretty much bankrupt trying to spend cheap money on Holidays and half of South America woudn't be able to commerce well with the EU and ditto with cheap gas from Argelia and the like. Crap out Spain and Center Europe collapses tomorrow.
And not just the Lutheran Europe. South America, USA, and tangentially Russia and China too.
Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma...
Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
That works in a world where everyone has equal knowledge and ability all of the time. Unfortunately, when that is not the case, sometimes humans have been known to take advantage of others. Due to this, every society on earth has created rules against various types of these situations.
> That works in a world where everyone has equal knowledge and ability all of the time.
That ^ is mostly true today.
If you have access to Polymarket or Kalshi, you have internet access. If you have internet access, you have access to more public knowledge than any previous generation.
Whether you use the internet to educate yourself or to gamble should be your choice. But starting today, it is no longer your choice in Spain.
In 1997 that's the effect we thought the internet was going to have -- soon everyone would be smart and nobody would get scammed!
That didn't happen. The internet didn't solve disability, it didn't solve education, it didn't solve misinformation, didn't stop scams. In fact, it has made some of these things worse.
A robust and aggressive consumer protections bureau is a handy way for me to feel secure while doing basic economic operations, without having to handle a ton of one-off research on my own. For example I'm strongly in favor of medical licensure, it seems nuts to me to say like "if an adult consented to a surgery who's the state to quibble over whether the surgical tools were properly sterilized". Similarly gambling licenses seem like a reasonable regulation to ensure honest behavior in an industry with many avenues for corruption and double-dealing (or at least provide legal avenues for recompense in cases where the house deviates from the guidelines required by their licensure).
Pretty shocking to see all the replies you got though. Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
> Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
I haven't noticed an increase - roughly half the country tends to be in favor of this at any given time. Perhaps you've just widened your circles a little?
It could have something to do with the really bad evil and stupid ideas that people like Peter Thiel propagate with the immense wealth they've accumulated. If the Venn diagram of billionaire nerds and fascists were less of a circle you might have a point.
You do realize we are talking about Spain here. A place which is a case study in the staggering amount of damage too much government control can have. Both left and right wing governments over many decades have contributed to these problems. The thing in Spanish politics that the right and left have in common is a strong tendency towards authoritarianism.
PS If we are going to talk about Spain, calling Americans fascists doesn't really work. They have actual Fascists there and their government policies are far (far far far far far far far) closer to the blue team. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Spanish politics would know that.
As long as it's safely overseen and accessible to be administered as well as having treatments on standby, it would actually be much safer and kill far fewer people than today.
As someone that works large events on weekends, holy fuck alcohol should not be legal. Nearly every single problem we get is because of alcohol. Someone on heroin or weed or e is almost certainly less problematic.
Next time there is a fire at your house I will say "he's an adult who should have been careful playing with dangerous things like fire, we shouldnt waste society's money and resources on saving his house"
Sure! I can also be an adult, have fire detectors and insure my property against fires instead of hoping for the goodwill of the community or the government.
It's not goodwill though, I'm paying for public services like the fire department through my taxes. I like them to be owned by the government instead of a private entity because I don't want to pay the capitalist rent for borrowing their money; if we pool our resources we can cut out the middle-man and just fund it ourselves. Very typical human living arrangement I believe.
Just one thing: the government is a massive private entity and a middle man. The closest thing to the stated goal would be a contract between other insterested parties to pool resources for funding. The next one would be a local consumer co-op explicitly formed for that specific purpose.
There are entirely practical reasons that "private decisions of adults" can worsen society as a whole. We need laws and we can debate about nudging that line back and forth, the answers aren't easy. But acting like there shouldn't be a line is nonsensical.
Acting like taking action doesn't have negative consequences is also nonsensical. There is a reason why we consider (Alcohol) Prohibition bad public policy. It was a complete disaster. Somehow those that wish to control others always forget this. These are literally the situations for which the phrase, "the cure is worse than the disease" was coined.
By that logic market makers in the stock market are basically like a casino too. No one is of course guaranteed to win in anything but at least the stock market doesn't ban you for making too much money like a casino does.
I think we're running into the limitations of the English language. Things don't always neatly fit into categories. The stock market can be a casino, depending on how you interact with it.
If you regularly trade and constantly watch your stocks, then it's a casino.
If you buy some index funds and never look at them again until 10 years later, it's not a casino.
There's no clear delineation between an investment and a bet; it's a Venn diagram with a huge overlap. I don't think that means that there is any question about where on the Venn diagram sites like Kalshi and Polymarket belong.
There is an entire profession of Poker players that consistently make money in casinos but not from casinos. You simply don't understand how this all works.
Off-ramping to fiat would be criminalised and pursued beyond the wildest dreams of La Liga/Cloudflare. A gambling site you can't withdraw your winnings from is of no interest to anyone.
To be a bit more specific, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours a week as Cloudflare, compared to other CDNs, aren't responding or acting on legal requests from Spanish judges.
Correct, to be even more specific. Cloudlfare uses a reputation pooling technique to provide anonimities to their clients (providers, through reverse proxies, in this case). Since cloudflare does not comply with requests to selectively stop distributing the banned content in Spain, and since ISPs cannot perform that filter due to header encryption like encrypted HELO, then the Spanish courts opt to perform the least destructive block which is to block based on time.
"Least destructive"? I can't access many sites and services during matches, but my colleagues tell me their pirate sources have barely been affected. This "least destructive" path is not working but is definitely destroying.
Ok, besides avoiding the blocks altogether, you seem to know of a less destructive approach, please do share it, I'll share whatever you come up with to my representative as I've managed to have a dialogue about this with them before.
But it has to be something, and cannot be "Don't do the blocks" obviously since it's already ruled it should be blocked, but since you've managed to come up with a block so it doesn't have to affect even those Cloudflare IPs, could you please share the method you've come up with?
Why does the end justify the means here? Revising the ruling should be an option: The blocks clearly aren't working, everyone I know who pirates matches tells me their sources have barely been affected, and others share the same here. Meanwhile I, that don't care about football but pay for my ISP, can't visit during matches most of the sites I regularly visit. Why am I an acceptable casualty in the piracy wars?
> But it has to be something
I think you're falling for the politician's syllogism. Pressure to do "something" doesn't mean we should do anything, specially if this "something" has already proven worse than even doing nothing.
Just to clarify your position, Spain should allow US companies to not comply with court orders for US company operations within Spain jurisdiction? So Spain should just allow another country to do whatever, or to use some extra-legal judgment criteria to discern whether something is worth following the law for and what is not worth the hassle?
Please point out where in my comment it says that's my position.
If the courts decided Cloudflare has to be banned, let it be banned. But so far they haven't had a trial, much less a sentence. We're just enabling a private company to interfere with the services of another, which represents a huge part of the internet even if we don't like it, simply because the former claims the trade-off is necessary and acceptable.
And since the only actual evidence I can access (weak as it is) points to these blocks barely working, I claim that this trade-off is not worth it and we're just inflicting pain on people not watching the matches for a very slim benefit to LaLiga. Bring Cloudflare to the courts if you must, but leave us alone until they figure it out.
I apologize if this sounds rude, but it just sounds like you aren't familiar with the case or the subject matter at all, please perform some research if you want to make claims about what ought to be.
Bullshit, that sentence just enables LaLiga and Telefonica to interfere with hosts like Cloudflare, which I claim is an excessive measure before a trial against them. It does not claim that Cloudflare is breaking the law, and Ctrl+F "Cloudflare" just shows one hit about Encrypted Client Hello.
Here's the list of companies that actually were sued here, to let them block:
I apologize if this sounds rude, but it just sounds like you aren't familiar with the case or the subject matter at all, please perform some research if you want to make claims about what ought to be.
And now more seriously, I've got a right to think the court's decision is wrong even if it's legal, get over it.
>And now more seriously, I've got a right to think the court's decision is wrong even if it's legal, get over it.
I just feel my personal opinions on the subject matter almost zero, especially since I'm not involved in the dispute, nor a citizen of either country. If you are american you are somewhat compelled, but I think that jurisdictionally, they have sovereignity, which is much harder to deny. Like even if you think the case itself and the sentence are wrong, ok, I get it. But I think we should compartimentalize and respect the venue, I don't think even cloudflare is arguing against the venue, claiming somehow that the US courts are proper for the case. But I could be wrong.
> It does not claim that Cloudflare is breaking the law
Right, I read that there was no trial or sentence at all. The linked trial was not claimed against Cloudflare at all, but the sentence does compel CloudFlare and refers to other several summons for CloudFlare (I read somewhere that it totals more than 100).
Here's a recent story I found on the CEO being personally sued on criminal charges:
Can't speak a lot on this specific case, but I personally wouldn't want to step into a country that sues me criminally. This is somewhat permissible for CloudFlare since it is a security company, so it probably isn't the first time they have had such an issue. But still, this is definitely not nothing.
What seems correct is that Cloudflare itself has not yet been the defendant of a civil suit for damages yet. But to be fair, they went straight for criminal charges, which to my estimation is way more decisive (and appropriate).
EDIT: Cloudflare is a defendant along with the CEO. With some nuances on terminology due to the common/civil, but I believe defendant is an accurate translation of "investigado"
Because society at large has to be pragmatic, you and I aren't the only people living here, and generally we (Spaniards) all agree that laws are generally made to be followed, in most instances, hence if a judge/the courts order something, we generally feel like that should be followed. You don't like it? Fight it legally, like the system is setup to work.
> The blocks clearly aren't working, everyone I know who pirates matches tells me their sources have barely been affected, and others share the same here.
Based on anecdotes, which I too have plenty of it working/not working, or based on actual data? Not sure it is the most trustworthy data, I personally don't trust La Liga so much, but last they said was that it was reduced by 60%, and if the blocks weren't actually working, I think they'd say as much, as they'd want to find a "better" way to actually fight it. But unless you have some more trustworthy data to share, I think this is as close as we get to actual evidence and concrete proof: https://www.laliga.com/noticias/fastly-y-laliga-se-unen-para...
> Meanwhile I, that don't care about football but pay for my ISP, can't visit during matches most of the sites I regularly visit.
What exact websites and services can you not visit during the games? I'm with Vodafone, and nowadays during the games Docker Hub is the only service that isn't available, everything else seems to continue working as normal. A year ago the situation was very different.
Did you report the websites you rely on to be victims of the blocks via the forms that are available for precisely this? Seems to eventually unblock the sites you report, give that a try if you haven't already.
> I think you're falling for the politician's syllogism. Pressure to do "something" doesn't mean we should do anything, specially if this "something" has already proven worse than even doing nothing.
I'm not, me as a private individual, before even speaking with anyone, also think it's stupid that Cloudflare chose to do business in Spain yet aren't willing to follow the law.
The ones who feel like you are an acceptable casualty in these piracy wars is Cloudflare, everyone else is following the law, that's why you're not seeing Bunny CDN or Fastly being blocked in the same way as Cloudflare, as they actually respond to legal requests.
Tired of Cloudflare grouping in providing services to clearly illegal services with clearly legal services? Well, maybe ask them to consider following the laws in the countries they operate, or use the actual service meant for reporting "unintended casualties".
How do you defend these slimey companies? They’re actively running a mob casino and you still have people acting like government is the bad guys here. That doesn’t mean there can’t be better regulation of other markets, but comparing prediction markets to stock markets is a huge stretch.
Disagree, I find their product valuable and use them daily as a source of unusually high quality predictions. When used for this purpose insider trading is a feature that improves the quality of predictions. I see some fraud as in any market, but the overwhelming majority of transactions are voluntary, open and relatively informed within a highly transparent system.
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
A thought experiment: how would you feel about betting on a market that is an the outcome of a medical procedure? On a negative outcome? On a market for a negative outcome of your own procedure?
If the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
You lived all your life without these evil companies. Life will go on when they are banished. I don't think you will miss "unusually high quality predictions" after a week.
What predictions? Why is it useful to know what the odds are for Trump to the word “postage stamp” in a specific speech?
Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.
Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.
When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.
You can look at who is likely to become the next president for USA etc, it helps a lot to see what people who spent some effort looking into it thinks.
Bad example. Americans can only very recently even place trades on PM and even then its through other companies and most people don't know about this. Those markets are often very thin and manipulated by the campaigns themselves.
A better example is wagers on things like when the Iran war will end. That's actually useful 'wisdom of the crowds', and any insider trading is already illegal. Maybe someday those markets would get big enough to allow companies to hedge risks. That's an actual useful application of PMs.
Even if it was the same --I think it's not-- you'll need a "SIBE operator license", and cannot do it solo, you have to be an employee of an authorized firm (bank, broker or dealer).
I think it's fine. Here renting (or teaching) light sails (light catamaran) needs a different license than renting (or teaching) any sail cruiser, including catamarans, despite being basically the same object (boats with sails). Feels that the small differences are enough to justify a different regime.
Lol it could not possibly be the coincidence that there were bets on ex prime minister Zapatero going to jail before the 30th of June or other meme bets making the rounds in Spain in the last couple of days.
Not sure how you want me to respond to that. Are you getting that from a feel of yours or some statistical analysis of familiarity with polymarket in Spain? I don't think it matters much anyway, I bet most human beings don't know what polymarket is. But still, you think it warrants a conspiracy? To what end? None of this makes much sense to me.
I'd say based on vibes too, it seems to have gotten more common subject to talk about, also on TV, news and so on. It was virtually not talked about a year ago, compared to today.
It's not cut and dry to differentiate between the act and the wager.
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.
These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
Very close already. Death threats went to this journalist; seems someone bet on missile hits. https://factkeepers.com/polymarket-gamblers-vow-to-kill-jour...
It also incentivizes leaks from insiders, sometimes endangering others. A soldier was charged for betting on a military operation. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
And of course throwing pro sports, but that's been happening for ages. Sports has always been crooked: eg the Eupolus Scandal from 388 BCE.
I thought this one was the most interesting:
‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
Whoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel.
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
Also bad if such crucial information is based on a single sensor with barely any physical security
This logic is how we ended up with TSA.
"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"
It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
We ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.
I don't even think Karen got involved, it was just the Bush administration seizing the opportunity for more corruption, pork barrels, surveillance and harassment of the population at large full stop.
And the locked cockpits have been indirectly responsible for a huge number of deaths. Best intentions and all that
IIRC, there was one commercial passenger flight where the captain locked himself out of the cockpit that led to everyone dying.
Have there been multiple separate incidents?
The other side of the coin is that hijackings used to be a frequent and regular occurrence. Now they're not anymore.
You mean the incident where his copilot intentionally locked him out of the cockpit and crashed the plane into a mountain? Hardly seems like an indictment of locked doors to me.
There was also Helios 522 where one of the cabin attendants only managed to enter minutes before the engines flamed out, there is a strong argument if the door wasn't locked he could've entered earlier.
And my understanding is that the current theory for MH370 is that the pilot locked out the copilot and then depressurised the cabin.
There are non-fatal cases like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 where the copilot locked the captain out when we was in the restroom (though loss of life was still a possibility, one of the engines had flamed out and was on emergency fuel).
As with all incidents, there are many factors that lead to them, but in these cases the presence of locked and reinforced cockpit doors contributed to the incident (in malicious cases the fact the door was impenetrable was clearly part of the decision-making, and in accident cases it was obviously an impediment to any positive outcome once the incident occurred).
> It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons
It's impossible. No matter how good of a job you do, there will _always_ be people out to watch it all burn.
When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.
> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.
I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.
But it the long run we should maybe still attempt to solve it, before there are mandatory body scans everywhere and cars only start, if you do a mental examination first?
Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.
How do you stop the hijacker blowing up the TSA queue instead?
Well that's easy, just add metal detectors and a pat-down at the entrance of the airport, before people queue up for TSA!
Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.
If you need serious physical security for every little bit of infrastructure, then your society will be able to afford far, far fewer nice things.
[dead]
Well usually there isn’t an incentive to mess with this type of critical infrastructure, and yet, behold, the externalities.
Even foreign actors during war time wouldn’t go through the effort of messing with individual temperature sensors.
Oh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter.
That would have been perfect.
Because the picture already shows it is a hair dryer, now the prediction market would be what make and model...
It also substantially changes the definition of who's an insider. Polymarket has bets for random things like a particular word being used by an announcer. Suddenly the announcer is an insider on that bet.
I don't understand why people would want to bet on such an easily gamed outcome. I can understand that some people are compulsive gamblers, but it seems such a foolish thing to bet on. To me, it'd be like betting with someone about how many fingers they're going to hold up.
Life imitates art:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeKX99gZpYs
Throwing in pro sports is at least harmless for people who don't care about pro sports.
People sometimes do drastic things when they experience large gambling losses. They might embezzle, rob, scam, be unable to pay rent or debts. It has a significant effect on people who are not directly involved in gambling.
Enough people do care about pro sports that someone who doesn't still needs to worry about being caught in a riot should something like this happen. (they already worry about riots for real wins/losses)
There's also known relationship between sport betting and domestic violence.
The main relationship is to all gambling. Sports likely gets assumed to make it worse because people still believe the myth that the Super Bowl is the worst DV day of the year.
lost good money on the Eupolus Scandal.
Leaks from insiders are always good.
Yeah. You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home. For obvious reasons. But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
being pedantic here but
> You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home
This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.
I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Both of your examples are people protecting their insurable interest. Ownership is the most common insurable interest, but there are many other ways to have one.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
Even if you have an insurable interest, moral hazard may arise - acting recklessly or other abuse, while knowing you are insured/covered. Somewhat similar to friendly fraud in retail/ecommerce.
Insurance normally has fine print about those things. Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide. Fire insurance doesn't pay out if you intentionally burn your house down (the fire department also will investigate because even though it is their job they don't like risking their life fighting fires)
You can get insurance without the above provisions, but it will cost a lot more. Once in a while someone manages to collect on a claim for loss of their expensive cigars after they smoke them - but this is rare and usually not worth the cost.
> Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide.
This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
some life insurance policies pay out for suicide after an initial exclusion period. this is often six or twelve months. insurers can include it because suicide claims are relatively uncommon.
if there is evidence that someone took out the policy with the intention of creating a claim then the insurer may treat it as fraud and decline it.
> The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
Based on that logic, I can say I have a vested interest in the bet?
> This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen
But buying the insurance cancels exactly that. Insurance fraud is a thing.
Insurance doesn't exactly cancel that. Maybe in a theoretical world, perhaps.
For example, I have a decently-sized life-insurance policy. If buying insurance "exactly covered that", I would be indifferent to whether I lived or died. But I'm not. And I can't think of a policy-size that would make me so. Money is an imperfect substitute.
Less dramatically, I have really good auto coverage. The car itself is nothing special, and the coverage I have would make me whole (minus a very small deductible) But I am very much not indifferent to replacing the car with money, and it would take way more than the deductible to change my mind on that.
The hassle-value alone would go way over. And hassle-value is usually not insurable.
Insurance fraud is absolutely a thing--but the insurance company still wants you to prefer that the event doesn't happen. That it doesn't work perfectly doesn't really invalidate the point.
Unless you short the property. Essentially, sell it now on the bet that it will drop in value later. Then it burns down and you repurchase the vacant lot and return the property to the original owner.
Evil, but most everything in real estate is evil.
And that's exactly the problem with Polymarket and such, it gives an incentive to be destructive because that's easy. Entropy is easy.
With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing. Polymarket doesn't care.
> With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
I don't think any corporation "cares" about social issues, but, fwiw, polymarket isn't as ok with it as you imply. Polymarket reportedly detected the suspicious behavior, reported it, then worked with investigators to nab Gannon Ken Van Dyke.
To perhaps be a bit more pendantic.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
you cant take out life insurance on your spouse without them signing the paperwork in most cases
you dont take out cover on your business partner, the company itself does
True but you're still taking it out on another person.
No no I appreciate the pedantry, thank you for the correction
Yeah, you are being pedantic. The clear meaning is that you're not just allowed to insure arbitrary properties.
If you wanted to correct a misconception, you should provide a better, more complete understanding, not just express frustration about a misconception that doesn't even exist outside of an uncharitable reading.
In this case, that means refining the point to the more accurate model, that you need an insurable interest -- i.e. reason you don't want the event to happen, even knowing you'd get a payout[1]. Your counterexamples only work as such because that exists![2] If you want to fix all the people who don't have your superior understanding, that would have been a great way to help them out.
>I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It exists because it's approximately true: you can't get insurance on 99.99999% of buildings in the world because you have no insurable interest in them. And any time someone could correct that false premise, they probably just complain rather than providing the complete understanding -- exactly the choice you just made here.
[1] IMO, this is the natural dividing line between gambling and insurance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13916088
[2] Edit: And in your building collateral example, the policy would prevent you from double dipping -- getting both the building and the full payout.
> I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
Some of the prediction markets explicitly forbid payouts based on death. E.g., Kalshi refused to pay out "leaves office" when Khamenei was killed.
> Kalshi refused to pay out
To be clear they had explicitly written in the contract from the start that death didn't count. And they paid out the full amount - just not to the same betters they would have if he had left office alive.
There are a lot of things short of death that we don't want to encourage either. There is a huge grey zone here that I frankly don't want to entrust to private entities.
Sure, I'm not a fan of prediction markets in general either. Just responding to GP's specific claim about death incentives.
I've seen contracts on whether California will burn this summer.
Any bum defending these contracts is to me either a shill or way too dumb to understand the concept of incentives.
Oh and there was an Israeli journalist that got life threats because he reported that an Iranian missile struck some place in Israel, and apparently there was a huge bet on it on polymarket.
Funny how average HNer is opposing Flock cameras that solve real crimes by covering it up as a "freedom" yet completely fine regulating contracts with hypothetical incentives.
The incentives are not hypothetical.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Remember how things ended up when insurance policies on loans you didn't hold were allowed... I think there is quite a lot of good reasons to ban those sort of bets.
> But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
You can sell your life insurance policy to somebody else. It's a way of getting money to sick people to use while thy are still alive.
Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual. That is indeed legally fine, though potentially distasteful.
Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.
> Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual.
What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
Could you provide an example?
In German law, any contract, including bets, is void if it is “sittenwidrig”. For example, if your wager in a bet is to become one’ slave in case you lose, this bet is void.
I suppose they never specified the wager. But, given the topic is prediction markets and the topics of the bets, I thought it was implied that the wagers would be exclusively in money. With that in mind, is there any example of a law against specific topics being betted on?
Nope. "We're just an intermediary between people" is a 100+ year old yarn that casinos and bookies have been trying to spin. If you're presenting a point of entry to a betting line and taking a cut, congrats, you're the house. Doesn't matter if you adjust the betting line manually based on intuition or algorithmically based on betting volume. Sometimes it doesn't get enforced because of corruption, but if this was the case, then why aren't there tons of independent unregulated poker casinos where players just play against each other? If you facilitate and take a cut, you're the house.
Polymarket doesn't take a cut. Their profit comes in transaction fees.
The mob boss doesn't charge me interest on my loan - he just really likes receiving expensive gifts from me.
"We don't take a cut of your bet, we just charge you a transaction fee on your bet" is reaching a bit.
My phrasing was poor, but they do so generally in a very good faith fashion. It's not just a wink wink rake type thing. For instance there are no fees at all on the most popular and high-volume markets - geopolitics and world events. And not only are there are no fees even on smaller markets for market 'makers' - people who put up an offer, but they provide a percentage of all fees collected from market 'takers' back to the makers, as a means of encouraging liquidity.
What the hell are you talking about? You are absolutely not allowed to bet on whatever you'd like with another individual. Depending on what you're betting on (for example, the price of a stock or the throw of a card), it falls under varying different regimes. This is highly regulated and has been for most of the whole of human history.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
In Spain in elderly caring homes there was a tradition to bet on Bingo matches for simbolic prices (barely one or two euros, enough for a coffee and that's it). It was legalized on paper recently, but technically everyone turned a blind eye.
https://russpain.com/en/news-3/authorities-consider-legalizi...
>Rarely exceed 25 euros.
Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
It was, believe it still is, somewhat similar in Australia, where the game Two Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up), which was a wartime favorite among soldiers, was implicitly or allowed on Anzac Day despite being gambling.
That "facilitating" argument didn't work out for Silk Road.
Because what the Silk Road did was illegal whether in person or not.
What Polymarket and Kalshi are doing is also illegal in many places.
To me this is technicality.
A bet is a bet, whether it's against the house or other people it's a bet.
Can you name the individuals you are betting with on Polymarket? Can they name you?
Gannon Ken Van Dyke has entered the chat.
Murder and arson are illegal. Just because there is an event contract that doesn't make them legal to do.
It's also illegal to pay someone to do murder or arson, which is easy to obfuscate as an "event contract".
Very true. Someone could place a huge bet for "person X will NOT be assassinated in the next 24 hours" and some lowlife could see the opportunity.
There's many true crime cases where the spouse took out multiple life insurance policies then did the killing to earn money. It's a bounty. We should care about the effect in practice.
> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket.
No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.
They can already do this easily with the stock market.
Usually though people's pay/power directly correlates with how badly they can screw the company if they go (legally) rogue.
But anyone can get a job at XYZ, buy puts, and go and set the factory on fire the next day. Betting markets don't change the fact that you'll be arrested, except that you'll be arrested for a few thousand dollars rather than whatever you can squeeze out of options.
The difference is if someone sets fire to a factory that fire will be investigated and odds are that person will be caught (not always, but few people know how to set a fire that large and cover their tracks). By contracts someone who works in the factory is much more likely to be able to figure out how to "have an accident" doing something they normally do, everyone knows it is then but they just get a "do better next time" talking to, and the factory throws up some more guards.
Again, you can already do this with the stock market.
I am not rich enough to make a difference in the stock market. Some can but only a tiny minority.
>Some can but only a tiny minority.
Anyone who can figure out "how to have an accident" can do it. A fire at an aluminum plant last year tanked Ford stock 6%. For a relatively boring stock like Ford, the right options would have moved 1000%+.
> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.
The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.
What fair market price are you talking about? The price decided by the prediction market?
If you compare prediction market implied odds to the actual odds that ended up they match very closely
what are these "actual odds" and if you have the time machine that lets you observe the necessary outcomes to calculate them, why are you bothering with making money on betting markets?
The "actual odds" is that if you get, say, 100 bets that were at 10% yes when the bet was resolved, you'll see that around 10% closed yes and 90% closed No.
Do you have an example?
So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.
As long as he didn't place any bets, I think what he did is totally fine.
If I find out my friends placed bets on whether I'll say X tomorrow, I'm not obligated to act as if I didn't know.
> As long as he didn't place any bets, I think what he did is totally fine.
you might need to take your imagination and critical thinking out for a spin if you can't see where this leads.
So is it also okay if his friends placed a bet and shared the profits with them?
Don't quibble on details. The point is that as long as he didn't profit from the bets, he is free to mess around that way.
This isn't share price manipulation.
Him placing the bets or a co-conspirator placing the bets and sharing the profit is the same thing. He is effectively betting on himself saying those words which he then goes on to say.
I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
> Him placing the bets or a co-conspirator placing the bets and sharing the profit is the same thing.
So we're in agreement that if he is not profiting from saying it, then it's OK, correct?
> I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
If my friends make a bet that I will/won't do something, and I choose to make one side win, that is not match fixing. I'm sure match fixing only applies to regulated games. If people want to make bets on unregulated games, and lose their shirt, they have only themselves to blame.
Here's a paper on match fixing:
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol56/iss4/9/
For something to be match fixing, the government has to recognize the activity as a sport, and most state laws require the person to benefit from the fixing, which the CEO here is not and/or they require "rule tampering" - there was no rule broken here.
Depends how you count profiting from it, if you only count direct monetary profit, or if you count things such as favours to be profit.
There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
T hen again crypto isn't known for its bastion of legality and morality, therefore I would assume there are some deals going on in the background which are probably illegal, and if not that then unethical - not that they would care about that.
> or if you count things such as favours to be profit.
There needs to be evidence of such a thing, no?
> There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
I have motivation. If people are placing stupid bets on me, I sure as heck want them to suffer for it.
I'm sure some people view a CEO doing this as unethical, but I fully support it. Whoever lost money on that bet had it coming.
Of course, my preference is both sides losing money, but we can't have everything.
Speaking of ethics: There is a reason why betting and gambling are categorized under "vices". If you make any bet on things out of your control, the questionable ethics begins with you. Don't put it on a third party who was not involved in crafting the bet.
I believe in some jurisdictions, private bets are not legally enforceable (i.e. if I make a bet with you and lose, it is my legal right to refuse to pay). There's a good reason for that!
Downvotes on HN is always fascinating. Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/coinbase-ceo-s-bizar...
"I don't want to consider possibly living in a world in which this might be true" is definitely a specific genre of downvote.
> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket
They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical
Yeah, they unironically just attacked a strawman and sat of their laurels
They can take any position they want and do whatever they want, the point is that these oddball markets are very thin so there just isn't much money there to harvest. You can only bet $50M at your chosen risk if you can find enough people to take the other side, and these markets simply don't have many participants betting much money.
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
It seems like it's a huge assumption on your part that the bets you are describing are in the "0.89" range and not something significantly higher, even disregarding what others pointed out about this having already provably occurred.
I don't think the markets are thin, there are some bets that have made people many millions.
It depends on the market of course. In looking it up the only markets that have ever come even close to that sort of payout are things like presidential elections where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
Nobody's making millions betting on things like the weather.
>where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
So what's the point of polymarket, then? If at best we get "negligible" "insiderism", how is it that we are supposed to be benefitting from this as a society the way OP and others insist that revealing insider preferences "would"
Because it's the most effective tool we know of for surfacing the true odds of something (Which also includes the fact that insiders will place outsized bets to move the needle towards the truth.)
An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
>An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
Trump didn't win by a landslide and he barely won the popular vote...
>The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
Praying someone has an example besides the election, to which it seems to have made absolutely no difference at all
It's not supposed to make a difference but to provide information to people, which it does a great job of. Go browse Polymarket and the odds they lay on most of everything are about as close as one can get as to the "real" odds of that thing. They're essentially like a superhuman pollster. I'm a big fan of them but have not placed a single bet. It's simply that if you want to see what's happening in the world, a browse of their front page is way more informative than browsing a e.g. news website, especially in modern times.
As for the election, a Republican winning the popular vote by a couple million can't be called a landslide in nominal terms, but it is in terms of normal results. The DNC currently completely controls California and New York. After those 2 states alone Trump was down 7 million votes in 2020. The rest of the states tend to be either very small or relatively competitive. To make up the popular vote amongst them requires a very large edge. Polymarket had Trump as a 2:1 favorite the day before the election, and he would indeed go on to win every single swing state. The corporate media and their associated pollsters had Harris ahead.
If the information does not make a difference, what is the point of the information? White noise is "information". Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is "information". What is the point?
> As for the election, a Republican winning the popular vote by a couple million can't be called a landslide in nominal terms, but it is in terms of normal results. The DNC currently completely controls California and New York. After those 2 states alone Trump was down 7 million votes in 2020. The rest of the states tend to be either very small or relatively competitive. To make up the popular vote amongst them requires a very large edge. Polymarket had Trump as a 2:1 favorite the day before the election, and he would indeed go on to win every single swing state.
And the numbers were actually much more closer to what the national media outlets reported... so again, what is the value of the "information" on polymarket? All it reflected was that there were a couple of whales that were betting hard for Trump. The results did not remotely reflect the polymarket odds at all as you concede. I'm not sure how you think that doesn't end the conversation, but it seems to be more of a political point you are making that is divorced from the reality of the numbers reported.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "make a difference." But providing accurate odds on a wide array of topics isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds.
But you already conceded the odds were not accurate.
> But providing accurate odds on a wide array of topics isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds.
I didn't say they were. You are making the broad meaningless distinction of implying that the "information" provided by "prediction markets" has any value. If it does not have value, what is the point of having the markets?
>Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "make a difference."
If the availability of the information makes no difference societally, then what is the value of the information? I'm not sure if you are being so obtuse on purpose, or what. But you keep saying it provides information... so what? As I pointed out... white noise is information.
> and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds
No they did not. Trump did not win by twice as much and certainly did not in the popular vote.
Oh boy. You don't even know how prediction markets or even odds work, at all, yet are abnormally strongly opinionated on the topic, and just assume you know everything without bothering to even check once. Of course. Prediction markets are binary yes/no. When Polymarket prices Trump as a 2:1 favorite, that does not mean he's expected to win 66% of the vote, but that if you ran the election 3 times, he'd be expected to win twice.
Polymarket's accuracy (as defined by an event corresponding with the majority position) is 90% a month out from an event, and 94% 4 hours out from an event. I suspect a weighted analysis (e.g. a 90% event should happen 9 of 10 times, not 100%) would show even better results. That is dramatically higher than you get from things like pollsters, and it's all freely available to the public.
Correct, but there is a direct correlation between the size of the market, and the power of the people determining the outcome.
Then there is also the fact that the power of the people determining the outcome is inversely proportional to their care about betting markets.
Put this together and you get "The larger the size of the market, the less the people who can single handily swing it care about doing so".
If you are someone who can command hundreds of thousands of people to bet millions for or against you, you almost certainly lose more than you would gain by gaming it.
Mind you the market also naturally prices in this risk of the one person going rogue and taking them winnings for themselves. You will never find a market for "WarmWash will post nothing for 3 days straight on HN" because no one will take the other side of it.
When they're not thin they're popular (sports, awards), they favor insiders and/or various levels of manipulation (throwing dildos at a match), or both (military strikes, stock market, etc). They're full of natural or artificial drama, and people love to throw money at that.
I have a bot betting on a handful of what I consider (so far) markets that are impossible to cheat (bar UMA shenanigans): nobody has any control over the outcomes, previous knowledge is very limited. It makes some money, but looking at the depth, the volume, and my metrics, even being the fastest 100% of the time without worrying about bankroll, one of them would gimme roughly $1-2k a week.
There was a good Perun video on this topic which goes through the various ways in which a betting market can distort or affect a war effort (and can be applied to a larger organisation like a company)
https://youtu.be/6lz3vTUbClc?si=_zLD1wI3TJ_ozbQZ
Half this board makes way more than the head of the federal reserve or the CIA director (225k/year).
There's plenty of people able to influence events to whom these barely liquid bets can still amount to huge pay offs.
That includes many CEOs whose compensation is tied to stock performance.
Donald Trump made a fake school where he was telling single moms to max out their credit cards so that they could eventually take a photo in front of a cardboard cutout. This would be for like $5-10 grand
Single moms historically don't have tons of extra money, and Trump was ostensibly a billionaire.
> I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
I think they are illegal already in most places under the insurable interest doctrine.
Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.
Guns should be illegal because they can be used to kill people.
Is there any difference in practice between placing a large bounty on some known person dying in the next week and just straight up ordering a hit on them for that amount?
Maybe we should ban the stock market too.
In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
You raise a good point: There's nothing intrinsically good about betting and trading venues, and the sane default option might well be to prohibit it. We allow stock and bond trading as it fulfils important functions [1].
What you describe (profiting from creating havoc by some "short" bet) is indeed problematic and is regulated.
This is also one more reason why trading should not be unconditionally anonymous. Another reason: proper trading venues have rules against "squeezing", namely that no entity may hold more than some threshold ratio of the open interest. That's obviously impossible to enforce with anonymous markets.
[1] Tradings allows individuals to time-shift consumption, it funds productive enterprises, it incentivises convergence of market price with fundamental value, which in turn is what enables efficient investment allocation, and it allows the emergence of an economy-wide equilibrium of savings and investments. Note though that all of these functions might well be fulfilled by having, say, one minute of trading a day.
Or maybe we should somewhat regulate the stock market, require identification of traders, have a regulatory body that can retroactively investigate suspicious trade patterns and determine the identity of who's behind them?
At least the stock market is supposed to have a purpose besides gambling, to raise investment for companies. (Whether it's actually successful at that is a separate matter.) And anyways, your scenario would probably be considered insider trading, and that's already banned.
You're not that wrong - look at e.g. Tesla. Back in the day, the point of the stock market was not to make money off stock price changes, but to make money of the dividends, which was much more stable (but has a different set of issues associated with it)
KYC helps here. Crypto based gambling markets bypass this.
That's literally the plot of the first act of Casino Royale. I'm just now realizing the irony of the title.
Historically similar services have also been used to try to manipulate the real world by using bets for creating opinions. Like if you get to vote between candidate x and y and x leads by 75% to 25% on Polymarket maybe you don't vote for y even if the real numbers may be way closer.
That opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)
It is marketing money so it is not even for arbitrage. And you don't need to provide all the liquidity. Just enough to tilt the result.
> manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet
This happens on the stock market on a scale 100x larger than Polymarket.
c.f. manipulated earnings reports, taco trades, strait of hummus nonsense
> they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
stock markets have very strict KYC
Have you ever looked at securities laws?
Well, this is what's happening in the stock market with the insider trading, pump and dump schemes, shorting and many more algorithms that utilize power imbalance to extract more capital for decades.
Polymarket is quite tame in comparison, in my opinion.
Sounds like a solution structured the wrong way, the world should leave alone people who don’t commit crimes and take care of the people who manipulate the world in horribly destructive ways instead of limiting what law abiding citizens can do. These people who use their power to manipulate bets are almost always not corrupted by polymarket, but they were already criminals.
Someone should place a bet on the lifespan of the polymarket founders.
Users can't create markets on Polymarket, they're all created by Polymarket itself.
Which is another reason why they should be regulated as a gambling operation. It’s akin to odds making.
They play no role whatsoever in defining the odds, those are completely driven by users on the markets in question.
This is very naive. Many people have incentives to manipulate the financial markets, also with real world consequences. Should we ban financial markets as a result?
Do you really think that there are no people, who have bet on the price of something in one direction or the other, who enact real world consequences on people or other entities in order to ensure their bet? This is par for the course.
Financial markets serve a worthwhile purpose and can’t be gamed to the same degree as Polymarket. Polymarket enables completely absurd levels of dangerous manipulation, with significantly worse potential real world outcomes.
Purpose and meaning are ultimately subjective.
These people committed crimes, such as the catch all 'securities fraud'. Polymarket is unregulated and lots of ways to commit ethical fraud without committing legal fraud.
And with many orders of magnitude greater liquidity available than on something like polymarket.
Financial markets serve a worthwhile purpose.
I would have expected it to be illegal in the U.S by now but we live in a strange reality where the current administration's family is literally profiting off of it.
> I would have expected it to be illegal in the U.S by now but we live in a strange reality where the current administration's family is literally profiting off of it
Legislation by who is willing to "donate" the most; law of the jungle capitalism.
Can someone give a more concrete example around all this?
How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught? Didn't they catch someone that had pre-knowledge of the Venezuela campaign?
(I'm not asking because I want to do this, I'm asking because it's not clear to me how this is realistically possible.) Also, given that you can't just create a market on either platform, it's not like I can just say "XXX has 3 months to live".
If a criminal wants to make money on crime, they have better ways to do it than put 10k of their own money to make 50k by killing someone.
I just don't get this whole argument. If you're a contract killer, why put yourself and the contractee up in the feds sights?
> How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught?
Assuming you get away with the murder, guessing that's not the part you're asking about, a concrete example: https://polymarket.com/event/next-french-presidential-electi..., bunch of people on that list, surely many of them are like the typical European politician, mostly without assassination protection most of the time. Place a "No" bet on one of them, then hire someone to assassinate, and Polymarket indirectly drove someone to murder another person, as they could profit from it.
As a contract killer, I don't think you'd put yourself or your client more up in the fed sights than without Polymarket, it'd just look like another bet.
Its just stochastic terrorism is the thing. Betting markets on a a negative outcome are ginning up a big "you could make money if the bad thing actually happens" and over enough scale you'll get that idea into the head of someone who concludes they should try and make it happen.
This is the same reason it is generally illegal to make public statements lamenting that someone hasn't killed a person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
The problem is if you are a criminal you need to cover your tracks and your client tracks. Someone can meet with an assassin to kill so and so on a street corner. However how do you get a large amount of cash to the assassin if they pull the murder off. Large amounts of cash are too often tracked, and most other electronic payments are as well. Bitcoin has a public ledger that is not as anonymous as advocates like to claim (and the police are presumably getting better at understanding it)
I don't know if a contract is a good way, but it gives some deniability.
Unfortunately there are ways for people to spend money on these sites. That's why the Netherlands has legalised gambling because the bad websites couldn't be stopped.
They are easy to stop - follow the money. A few sting operations where you lose a bet and then the courts agree to enforce your reverse change and they will shut most of this down. Bitcoin payments are a little harder to shutdown, but the friction makes it much harder.
You can also follow people. Tax fraud is how a lot of criminals are caught - we don't know what you did but we can prove you didn't get the money legally and that is enough.
Yup, that idea has been around for a while: https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
They'll be illegal anywhere democracy wants to properly function. How can I bet on this ripe assumption? Is there a market somewhere?
That happens already at a much larger scale, without prediction markets.
These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
There is no such thing as global laws though, and harm reduction is good enough for now
They become hyperstition engines.
"hyperstition," TIL.
Thanks, stranger!
> should be illegal globally
Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
Is there something specific you're getting at?
>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
Maybe a bit out of scope for this article, but seems like in every country “Younger millenials and Gen-Zers” are turning to gambling online while traditional gambling (like Vegas) dies.
I feel like this might be a net negative from the pure speed and access in which you can lose money online vs real life, but idk.
In practice La Quiniela works more like a lottery than betting, though. No immediacy, no lights and sounds, no adrenalin rush. I don't think there's much risk of people falling into severe addiction by playing that.
For some people it becomes more like a ritual, some groups of friends do it together as something social to talk about football, I think it leads in some degree to people paying attention and talking about lower rank matches :D
I've played a couple of times solo and in group but never sticked to me.
No related to the point, but what it did stick to me for one season was La Liga Fantástica from Marca ( a fantasy league on paper) when I was a child, because it had the data component, you had a budget to pick players etc, This was before we had internet broadly, if I remember correctly the paper would publish huge lists with the teams ranking or the players stats. But what I do remember was some of my best players like Zalazar :D
Ludopaths often try to put on the same level national lotteries with sports betting and other means of information based betting.
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.
Sadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.
> illegal globally
I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
Manifold tried real money markets for a while and quickly bailed out (I don't know any details on why).
From their FAQ on the front page.
> Play money means it's much easier for anyone anywhere in the world to get started and try out forecasting without any risk. It also means there's more freedom to create and bet on any type of question.
Their investors/lawyers probably did not want to back the risk using real currency adds.
That market it's real my brother or is real to make some money
I would go further than this: all forms of online gambling should be banned, globally. It's probably sufficient to remove them from app stores and to remove their access to the international financial system, which is very doable.
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
I strongly disagree and think all forms of gambling should be legal.
Sadly, from my point of view, you're right that right now going after the on/off crypto ramps would be enough to dissuade most people from using crypto gambling sites. I hope for a more educated populace that can bypass these laws and engage in whatever consensual activities they want to, as long as they're not directly harming anyone.
YC just funded one of these.
Oh no, gambling bad!
And don't forget about the kids and what possibly could happen maybe someday!
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>We are adults, and we should be able to gamble on whatever the hell we want - even if you don't like it.
No. That's not how society works. Prediction markets have externalities that affect all of us.
If you want to gamble, you should be allow to do it in a small setting, on games that have no effect on the greater society.
Again, you are imposing your world view onto others. You should be able to do it however the hell you want. I don’t like gambling, and I don’t like many other things, but that is why we are all different and have agency. Accountability is a different argument, but gambling? Please.
I'm sure you've be entirely fine with me and a few friends placing wagers whether or not your house burns down next month. Nothing illegal of course, just hundreds of thousands of dollars wagered on whether or not your specific house burns to the ground for any reason.
Unregulated gambling has very obvious externalities. Don't insult our intelligence by suggesting it doesn't.
Relatedly, is it OK with you if somebody bets a few million dollars on your early demise?
People short stocks for billions of dollars every day the time.
You understand there's a difference between human lives and the value of a stock, right?
Because otherwise, I don't think this conversation is going to lead anywhere.
These derivatives openly violate the Frank Dodds act, but the head of the FTC has said they won't act.
in what way do they violate Dodd-Frank?
The DF clearly states that there cannot be contracts on topics of war, terrorism, assassination, gaming and unlawful activity and in general anything that:
- incentivize harmful acts - create manipulation risks - are "contrary to the public interest"
So, all these contracts on the topics of US attacks, sports, whether California will burn due to fires, openly violate it.
But CFTC's head has publicly stated that they won't act on them.
Dodd-Frank does not clearly state there cannot be those contracts. Dodd-Frank grants the CFTC jurisdiction to govern those contracts. what you are saying was struck down in court in September 2024 where the judge ruled those contracts are legal but the content, fairness, and quality of such contracts are CFTC jurisdiction.
Insider trading is already illegal. What needs to be regulated is not markets, it is politicians. Once that is done, markets can peacefully continue the way they are.
Hard disagree. In the prediction market case, we're seeing many categories of people being incentivised to act on markets: soldiers, diplomats, staffers, journalists, businesses, sports and esports teams, as a quick, non-exhaustive list.
Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?
Those markets are pretty much designed to facilitate insider trading
They are certainly critically flawed at the moment, but I still feel that with proper traceability, KYC, etc. it would be a much fairer system than the current betting companies. It’s one of those use-cases where blockchain technology actually makes sense.
The genie is out of the bottle. Crypto-only underground prediction markets will always exist. I think it is better to heavily regulate legal options instead of pushing them underground. That didnt work for drugs or prostitution, and it wont work for gambling.
Except it generally worked for gambling for a very very long time. The existence of a black market does not mean something should be legal. Human trafficking happens, but that doesn't mean we should legalize and tax it. (extreme example I realize, but I use it to illustrate a point)
Pushing it to black markets takes away the possibility of heavy regulation (which absolutely should be in place), and stigmatises victims (gamblers), making it harder to come clean to friends and family. I agree with your assesment that no one should even start to gamble, I just doubt that declaring it illegal will achieve that.
The US Supreme Court effectively legalizing sports betting overnight provided an almost perfect real-world experiment to test that argument. And the result?
"Prediction market" ads running constantly on both sports channels/websites like ESPN. Shortly followed by mainstream cable news like CNN featuring Polymarket stats as a routine part of their horserace polling coverage. Gambling is now an omnipresent temptation for anyone even casually interested in following sports/political news.
And now millions of young men who previously would have had to seek out niche illegal venues to gamble have several dozen different apps on their phone offering to light their disposable income on fire by clicking a couple buttons every paycheck.
Except, gambling isn't illegal here - in fact, it's very common. There are lots of casinos within a few mins walk in any city in Spain. All the prediction markets need to do is comply with existing laws.
For some reason, American companies have a really hard time following existing laws and regulations here. AirBnb and Uber both had the same approach of basically saying "Oops we didn't know" until the law (and others) cracked down on them, I'm sure someone could find older examples too, and surely tons of examples outside of Spain too.
The reason is self evident: central planning regulatory hell is incompatible with inovation.
> central planning regulatory hell
Yup, totally nuanced comment coming from a completely sane person since "central planning regulatory hell" and "laissez faire economy without laws" are the two only options we have here, good job carrying the conversation forward with curious and interesting comments.
What? Maybe you visited a particularly casino-heavy area, but in general there aren't many casinos in Spain. In many regions (e.g. mine) they're restricted to one per province. My city (250K population in the core, metropolitan area about 500K) has one. Madrid (6M metropolitan area) has four, Barcelona (5M) has one.
Sports betting places on the other hand have multiplied like fungi in the last two decades, unfortunately.
You are incredibly naive. There is one on every street, they are just called "sports bars" instead of casinos.
You're probably talking about the big Vegas style entire-hotel casino that aren't so popular in Europe anyway outside a niche crowd. The average lower class Spanish person frequents these "sports bars" heavily
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Prop betting on a transparent and equitable Exchange is a perfectly reasonable and egalitarian proposal - it's the Betfair Exchange vs Betfair Sportsbook model expanded outside of the scope of sports.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
> Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem
What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years.
It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.
When I see people making money on Iran attacks, and murder of heads of state - it shows clearly something is deeply wrong with Polymarket. Its a level worse than Vegas or Indian casinos. A literal ticket to hell. I'm all for banning these evil sites.
I don’t think they allow bets regarding if someone is going to die or not?
All of these "politican out" markets will resolve to true if the politician dies: https://polymarket.com/predictions/out.
The language is usually "This market will resolve to “Yes” if <politician> ceases to be <Prime Minister/President/whatever>".
Or for another example: https://polymarket.com/event/will-neymar-play-in-the-2026-fi.... Will Neymar play in the world cup? Not if he's dead. Any kind of "will celebrity appear in X in the future" can be reduced to an assassination market.
Kalshi supposedly does not pay out if a death is involved
https://xcancel.com/mansourtarek_/status/2029996077554815268
Not sure if Polymarket does the same. Also not sure if I really trust these people to be the arbiter of morality and adhere to their own rules when it doesn't benefit them.
Yeah, Kalshi can't pay. 17 CFR § 40.11
> A registered entity shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any of the following:
> (1) An agreement, contract, transaction, or swap based upon an excluded commodity, as defined in Section 1a(19)(iv) of the Act, that *involves*, relates to, or references terrorism, *assassination*, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.
Polymarket doesn't seem to care too much.
> Polymarket doesn't seem to care too much
Polymarket is now two separate entities. Last year they were banned from the US and stopped taking on new US customers and made their site withdrawal only for anyone based in the US. You could bypass it with a VPN, but they did enough to at least look like they were complying.
They've now created a separate company that I believe is called Polymarket US which has it's own version of the site/app which they are using to re-enter the US market. This switched from invite only beta to open sign ups a few months ago.
Polymarket US is mainly just sports betting with a small number of crypto, commodities, and political election based markets, although they have said they plan to expand their market options. Their US based site almost certainly doesn't violate those rules. The version that is used outside the US is the one that has markets that violate that, but since they're not in the US, there's not much that can be done.
I can't find any evidence that Polymarket has a rule like this, and they have paid out for assassinations in the past: https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...
So if you kidnap them, hold them in a bunker for a month, then release them, it will pay out. That's probably a positive thing for the world somehow, right?
I can't see how that can ever backfire /s
Sure but so does any political betting.
Sounds like this could easily be worked around by placing a bet on something that will definitely happen as a result of a death, i.e. "bet $X on whether Iran will close the strait".
Or that JD Vance will be president on x date.
A lot of people made money off the Iran war, through regular old publicly traded stocks.
Publicly traded stocks‘ reactions to a war are harder to predict and have way less leverage than a bet like "US will launch 527 missiles against Iran between 3 and 5 pm"
well I see more problematic the people actually doing the Iran attacks and murder of heads of state. Betting on those is distasteful, but doing those things is where the damage lies.
the entire point of the argument is that they're the same people. Military bets appear to have significantly higher rates of insider trading than baseline[1], which implies two things, both catastrophic. One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone) but the even worse scenario is causality in the other direction, that a bet leads someone to take a military decision.
[1]https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/30/polymarket-s-mil...
> One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone)
It's not at all obvious that leaks of classified information are per se detrimental to _actual_ national security.
It's not because specifically with these markets there is an amplification effect where the one doing the bet creates incentives for what it's betting in favor or against to materialize in the world.
In other words the money spent on bets that involve killing directly foments more killing.
Military insiders can also buy oil futures...
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That they are virtually always replaced with other mass-murdering dictators, usually after a period of even worse mass murder known as a civil war. All at the low low cost of some billions of dollars taken away from useful work.
Ali Khamenei was recently murdered, at a price tag of several tens of billions of dollars, so far. His more radical son now occupies his former position. As a result, is the world a better place?
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Maybe drop the obviously bad faith loaded responses.
Ask yourself what's wrong with Iran knocking out Donald Trump or Joe Biden?
Or is it only America that gets to knock out other countries' dictators?
During COVID, I was working on an esports startup site that was a mix of social media karma + betting. The idea was you had more karma and your posts got more reach the more right you were.
We experimented with extending this to non-esports topics during the election, which led to a bunch of Trump-based predicting. Then Jan 6 happen and the whole site went to hell. I pivoted the product because I just didn't want to deal with running a site like that.
Seeing what is happening with these sites makes me feel good about my choices. If I were in charge of a product that enabled this I wouldn't sleep at night.
something is deeply wrong with some humans
Its just a dark mirror episode. I can't imagine waking up and thinking "boy I'll really make some money if we kill Ayatollah Khomeini today"
It’s worse.
There are the people from the kill command who bet on what they are ordered to do.
There could even be a bet by someone with direct influence on the government who convinces them to do it to make some money.
…bounty hunting?
The other side of that argument could be something like: "Dude, Khomeini better not be killed, it'd suck for me, an average iranian dude. I'd probably bet he dies so I can hedge my personal financial wellbeing for that case"
> so I can hedge
There are several things about the "these are good because people can hedge" argument which bother me and I struggle to disentangle them, but one facet is this: These betting-markets may be an inferior form of hedging, especially for non-trivial scenarios that are intended to evoke sympathy. (Civilizations have a lot of prior art in risk-management.)
For example, our statistical Iranian Dude may be much better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on useful imported durable goods that may become unavailable, ideally ones that would have resale value even if nothing bad happens.
The convenient online casino doesn't require any more than a vague sense of anxiety to bet, but that generality also limits how well you can use the money to protect yourself. If you're specifically worried about famine, better to arrange a future result of food, versus a payout of cash when nobody is selling food. If you're a factory that uses X as a manufacturing input and worried about a geopolitical blockade, you may be better off investing in alternate supplies or futures contracts for X.
The average iranian dude is not going to send money to a company that has donald trump junior on its board of directors to 'hedge their bets' around the Iran war situation.
Which is also hardly imaginable.
> I'm all for banning these evil sites
Fortunately we have big beautiful crypto that separates us.
See also: How Insider Trading Destroys Armies (Perun): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lz3vTUbClc
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So I take it you have a problem with laws against murder, fraud, theft, etc.
Aside from the government, who is it that you prefer to do judgment and enforcement?
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> to ban something we must be able to construct an argument that does not hinge on morality. For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it bad to deprive you of your possessions?
And given that the house always wins, is it not depriving the gamblers of their possessions?
Gambling creates addicts, and addicts are more likely to act in desperation. They might steal, default on debt, or kill themselves and are less productive members of society. I bet societies with lots of addicts are much less likely to thrive because they carry a ton of dead weight. Thus we should ban or at least curb gambling because it hurts us all in general.
We legalized online gambling, the end result is more and earlier addiction and the added tax does not outweigh the societal cost due to loss of jobs, added crime and secondary effects of broken families on monetary, let alone ethical grounds. And they had to change the law to have more bite due to gambling sites mostly ignoring the required checks on addicted and heavy usage players, because profits have to be made. At least they got rid of the insane commercials since that's what most normal people complained about.
> For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
This assertion also hinges on morality. Why is being deprived of your possessions bad. You ultimately have to reach for an ethical framework to justify it.
To deeply simplify - why do we ban things?
I'd say, because we as a group decide they are "bad".
Not sure how you can remove moral judgments from any discussion of banning
Which human law does not ultimately hinge on morality?
That literally is a type of morality, utilitarianism. Kantian deontology is not the only form of morality structure there is.
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If your argument supports "murder for hire should be legal," then the problem is your argument.
>It’s icky to see someone make a moral argument to have something banned
Which are valid arguments in your opinion?
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Which is more likely: CNN commits murder to increase viewership; or any one of billions of people commits murder to win a bet?
Funny how people take journalists as some sort of most moral form of human being. Meanwhile they are most likely to take bribes for editorializing, silencing, ads or completely making up stories. All while they are most likely to get earliest information on markets ergo most likely to rig markets themselves.
You've been so busy straw manning with the ridiculous and unstated claim that journalists are the "most moral form of human being" that you have conspicuously failed to answer my question.
Taking bets, long odds on CNN committing murder
I'm against state intervention on the internet of all kinds, including banning these sorts of sites but...
Yes, of course CNN is evil. Is this still even a matter of debate?
Good.
Just naming things differently does not work in other countries.
If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
This is a big part of the reason we have judges, and why we should not replace them with LLMs.
Also the reason laws aren't overly specific, so these judges can make those judgement calls in the cases. Following the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law is something many judges care about as well.
Counterargument: Any "specific" wording of gambling would have condemned this activity. On average, vagueness in law generates more loopholes for corporate criminals to hide behind than it generates discretion for judges and juries to rule against them.
What is your stance on loot boxes in video games then? Is that akin to a poker/slot machine or is it more like a kinder surprise?
I wouldn't personally lose sleep on whichever way loot boxes were legislated. If their contents are easily converted into real-world cash, I would say the company bears some responsibility for the actions of any black markets, perhaps proportional to the volume traded. CS:GO has to crack down on its massive skins market, Kinder doesn't have to sweat its little toys.
Generally, I think the common-law notion of "consideration + chance + prize" augmented with the requirement of an "insurable interest" (in order to keep the insurance industry legal) discerns the truth well enough. Insisting that any "prize" not be monetary or monetarily-convertible keeps it from becoming a cyclical addiction, and evaluating infractions relative to volume keeps extremists from banning gumball machines and Kinder eggs.
You have an US-centric (an really naive) view of the judicial systems of the world. In many countries the judges have to follow the exact letter of the law. In others, this "spirit of the law" excuse makes way for enabling systemic corruption.
> You have an US-centric (an really naive) view of the judicial systems of the world.
Right, so because "judges have to follow the exact letter of the law" in the countries you have in mind, somehow my view is US-centric, although I'm from Sweden and I live in Spain, never visited US nor been in any US court ever? Both countries I'm familiar with, have purposive interpretation rules.
You can share that in other places it might be different, compared to how it works in the places I'm familiar with, without chucking insults around, especially insults you uninspiringly basically said in every recent comment of yours, at least make it unique.
To actually make this a somewhat interesting conversation instead of just pooping words, as I just tried that and didn't find it as fun as you did; what specific countries are you talking about, how does it work there, and how little corruption do those countries have compared to say Sweden?
You have ni idea what you're talking about if you think there's such a thing as "the exact letter of the law".
funnily enough - "letter of the law" interpretations can be so general that many left US leaning people believe it is abused by the right for systemic corruption: https://youtu.be/l7To2evwGKs?si=i93YDCuqCl5PMPlY
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I don't usually see advertisements, but I was in a position recently to see a real-life television stream, and I was quite surprised to see them run an advertisement for Kalshi. I was pretty surprised that something like this would be advertised to normal people. I'd half expect the next ad to be for a hitman, or for beating your wife, or something. Seems crazy that this is tolerated whatsoever.
In the early 2000s major sports didn't even want to run "enjoy a vacation to Las Vegas" ads because of the loose connection to gambling.
Now they encourage users to bet as part of the commentary.
You know how a clear sign of a “bad neighborhood” is when you see a large percentage of payday loan buildings, liquor stores, gun stores, etc?
I see the percentage of advertising devoted to gambling to be a similar bellwether to the decline of my whole country. And it’s getting worse all the time. I can’t turn on the tv, look at billboards on the freeway, watch a sporting event, or even walk down a supermarket checkout without getting constantly reminded of how far we’ve fallen.
Agreed, and also more and more emphasis on industries that try to make money off of moving money (gambling, trading etc.), as oppposed actaully creating value is probably also a contributing factor.
250 years is the average empire's age of death
They need "normal people", or rather they need normal people's money to funnel to the small number of people who make most of the winnings on these sites. Gambling companies' profits rely largely on addicts who spend big and to get those addicts hooked you need a lot of people to have a go.
It is mostly just sports betting
https://closingline.substack.com/p/the-takeaway-kalshi-non-s...
in Chicago near Wrigley Field (the Cubs stadium), the closest train stop (Addison) was basically wall to wall (some on the floor too) DraftKings advertisements until recently because they have a physical sports betting bar adjacent to Wrigley Field. After the latest round of elections they're closing that location so the ads came down.
How is it any worse than ads for beer or sugar water?
Until recently, gambling was illegal in most of the United States.
And it is regulated in many (most?) other countries and requires a licence to be a bookmaker. Hence the ban
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Didn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...
You have to complete the cycle to make sense.
gambling happens, tax comes in, crime goes up, police get hired, politicians get the police vote
They've discovered that it's more efficient if the money flows directly from the private enterprise to the politicians without going through tax revenue.
U.S. citizens still need to pay taxes on their winnings.
Kalshi and Polymarket require you to provide your SSN.
I sincerely hope these abominations made to either enrich the corrupt/immoral or prey on the addicted are made illegal during my lifetime.
I cannot imagine the mental loopholes the creators go through in order to sleep at night. This is bottom of the barrel stuff, we don’t need it anywhere in Europe.
I’m surprised these haven’t already been banned tbh.
It doesn’t make sense that if I bet on the outcome of a football match then it’s gambling but if I bet on the outcome of the Ukraine war then it’s I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-gambling.
Better would be for polymarket to block the purchase from countries where it doesnt have a license.
The only societally rational thing to do. Cheers to Spain for being a global humanitarian leader on this and many other global issues! (I am worried though by the extreme-right forces trying to throw over the government though.)
> Spain - like other European jurisdictions - considers prediction markets a form of gambling when bets are placed on uncertain outcomes.
What is the defense in the US for example that these are not gambling, "bets are placed on uncertain outcomes", it's that close to, if not the definition of gambling ?
There is no difference. Spain just got the right answer before the US
The defense is that "Bets are placed on uncertain outcomes" also covers all kinds of insurance, the stock market, commodities markets, all kind of derivatives etc.
So where is the line drawn? In the US there has been a tremendous amount of money spent on lobbying to keep prediction markets on the not gambling side.
> insurance, the stock market, commodities markets, all kind of derivative
I'm sure you need a license to become an insurance broker, stock broker, commodoties broker.
Gambling license is all they need to get.
Will spain ban calls and puts as well?
No because investment brokers, who you make your calls and puts with have a license.. Not the same thing. Nobody is asking the gamblers to have a licence, just the service provider.
Bet it's not a gambling licence though, and not under the same restrictions.
Edit: not sure if you misspelt But for Bet, but a BET is certainly a gamble ?
Right, because it's not gambling, there are different regulations around gambling. All they need to do it GET their gambling license and they can continue, but in this case they will need to follow those regulations. Such as (Italy in this case):
Offer self-exclusion tools for vulnerable players;
Implement identity and age verification procedures;
Comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and GDPR for data protection;
Pay online gaming taxes, which range between 20% and 25% of gross gaming revenue.
Will the SEC or CFTC do anything about the blatant insider trading?
Money?
"It's not gambling when I can effect the outcome!"
Ironically enough, sports players, in the NBA for example are not allowed place bets on their games etc, but they can bet on polymarket I suppose given it's not considered gambling ?
People wonder how bad prediction markets are going to get. I think it's going to get a lot worse. If left unchecked it'll en up like the 1997 paper "Assassination politics" describes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Poli...
Interesting comments here. I'd rather have prediction markets than casinos or sports betting services, because in the latter, you're playing again the house which can and will ban you for winning too much, while prediction markets are simply market makers taking a fee.
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
There is evidence that high-frequency, 50% accurate bot traders make most of the money on prediction markets simply due to being able to make bets faster.
Seems like you're still betting against the house, you just can't be banned for winning too much
Yet blocks the internet completely decimating all necessary services for a couple hours for La Liga futbol. Spain is a backwards country
> blocks the internet completely decimating all necessary services
Not really how it works in practice here, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours, everything mostly keeps working as it always is.
It's only Cloudflare IPs, its only the most popular reverse proxy and CDN provider on the internet. Only a mere 20%+ of internet traffic traverses via Cloudflare.
some Cloudflare IPs, not every IP, nor does 20% of what you typically do on the internet go away during these few hours.
Those companies chose to accept cloudflare downtime and blocking as their own downtime.
It's wrong, but also: just stop centralizing on cloudflare. It's just a glorified proxy, do you really need it, or are you marking an enterprise compliance checkbox?
You talk like it's the government who is blocking those ips. It's a stupid right wing judge, friend of La Liga's owner who is allowing such a scheme.
Spanish congress approved recently a way to stop such a thing.
please stop calling them prediction markets. It's not even accurate, you do not buy a prediciton
Can you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?
polymarket is selling bets, not predictions and other people are buying them. they are not being sold by people.
It's like calling the casino a probability market.
I think the term "market" comes from the fact that it uses stock market–like pricing and allows you to sell your bets at any time. Ie. you buy "shares" of some outcome for 0.3$ if the probability is 30%, and then if the probability at any point goes to 50%, you can sell the "shares" for 0.5$ each.
(Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
That already had a name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betting_exchange
sure, a bet market which is gambling, not a 'prediction market'. those are not predictions
You can gamble on the stock exchange, just like you can "non-gamblingly" hedge certain risks by buying/selling certain financial products such as event futures. (Many insurance policies are structurally just that and are used for very boring non-gambling purposes!)
I don't think you'll find a simple/useful answer by slicing the problem on that axis.
At least when I put money in the stock market, I own a piece of the companies I'm invested in. I get some small amount of voting rights.
You don't get anything outside of winnings or losses from your bets on a "prediction market".
Sure, but most retail shareholders don’t make use of that right, and it’s severely diluted compared to preferred shares to boot.
That’s what I mean: Many things can be used in very different ways. These incentives usually matter more than the underlying things in finance.
That's just gambling with frills.
> they are not being sold by people.
I think you might be mistaken about how Polymarket works. They are indeed only a platform operator; all trades are directly between participants.
You don't literally buy the future on a futures exchange either. What name would you suggest instead?
The futures market is essentially about selling now but delivering in the future, so the naming kind of works.
For commodities futures, sure. But what about e.g. index futures or weather futures?
Could they be called that if they sold fortune cookies?
fortune cookie vendor would be more accurate
Kalshi, Polymarket and every other prediction market should have been drowned at birth by regulators. They offer zero positive utility to the world. I hope that we follow Spain's example here in Australia; we have a hard enough time with legal gambling as it is.
The utility is a fairly robust signal about the probability of certain events occurring. It's pretty helpful for grounding your beliefs about the world (in certain domains).
For example, I had a lot of people ask me about the Hantavirus and if it was worth worrying about. I didn't have to do any research other than look at the various prediction markets and see them all at 5-10% to determine it was probably a nothingburger. Much quicker than having to parse a bunch of fearmongering news reports and such.
Even for that function, I think their benefits are overrated. Someone could easily manipulate that number if it fits their purposes (ie a health tech startup trying to peddle some cure). The numbers given to you are an illusion of understanding that does not replace actual research.
I don't think it's as easy to manipulate as you say.
Smaller markets are easily swayed by not so much money. Arbitrage is difficult because there is an inherent threat that you're betting against insider information.
In this specific case it's clear that the market doesn't represent our collective knowledge about hantavirus at all. Twenty days ago the odds of a hantavirus pandemic being declared by the WHO were ~10% and now it's 5%. This is just a reflection of the news cycle, it would be nuts to say that this is a reliable estimate for the underlying scientific facts.
That is not surprising. If your point is that 10% is not 5% and the odds change over time then you have unreasonable expectations. It's not an oracle. Where did I say it was? I said it's a quick and robust signal. Of course there's plenty of ways to get alpha, but those require both effort and domain expertise.
Is this a standard you hold to any other single signal? Name it. What signal (a) predicted <3% over a month ago and (b) you believed prior to be a reliable signal?
There is no substitute for effort and domain expertise, that's my point. Polymarket would like you to believe that their odds represent some sort of collective knowledge, but they don't, it's not like the world's top experts in epidemiology are trading on this issue. Worse, as I explained someone might be trying to manipulate the odds to their benefit, which for the particular case you cited would be quite cheap to do.
These are sensible criticisms and things one should be mindful of when using prediction markets as a signal (I would also add an awareness of how discount rates affect the reliability of markets that trade at low probabilities), but none of them justify the original statement being contended with, which was: "They offer zero positive utility to the world."
Maybe you're right, but your main argument above is circular.
> Spain's Consumer Rights Ministry temporarily banned so-called prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi [..]
Why a ministry has the authority to do so? What I don't like about my country, and the whole UE, is the lack of democracy. And this is a good example.
A democracy needs to have real separations of powers. The legislative body creates a law, and the judiciary, based on that law, will decide on banning or not the online gambling site.
A ministry belongs to the executive branch of the Estate. It is not up to them to decide whether something is illegal or not.
There is nothing undemocratic about this.
The law was already there, a minister in Spain does not only propose or vote on laws, but has quite some executive influence. This has always been so and is nothing unusual.
You can't really operate this stuff in a vacuum, otherwise it would take years to take any actions against illegal gambling, way too late.
Agree, the ministry just applied the existing law. Simple.
Again, assuming separation of powers: In a democracy, ministries are part of the executive branch. Their role is to follow and implement the law, not to judge violations.
If a law is violated, then a judge, and not a ministry, should be the one to enforce it.
When an administrative body blocks access to a service without prior judicial oversight, it blurs the line between the executive and the judiciary. And since separation of powers is a key component of any democracy, this raises legitimate concerns about the quality of democratic checks and balances.
Just to be clear: I’m not arguing that unlicensed online gambling sites should remain accessible. The issue is how the restriction is carried out, and whether it respects democratic principles and institutional roles.
It's simply not correct that a judge must always enforce a sentence before any executive action. This is the same everywhere in the world: the executive can take certain preventive or direct action without judiciary. Otherwise just nothing would work, criminals would have it very easy.
You may argue that blocking internet access should always go through judiciary, for some reason. But you can't claim that this was undemocratic, that's just spewing bullshit for the sake of it.
I find it humorous that these are simultaneously attacked as being gambling and attacked because some people know more than others and are "betting" on a sure thing.
Both can be true: insiders bet on a sure thing, outsiders naively gamble, the house gets a cut no matter what.
Not sure I get the joke. Should "we're crooked" be a defense against illegal gambling charges?
Who would the charges be against? The person who violated some trust, or the market maker?
I could be pretty neutral on the market maker, really. The point of a prediction market is to put information to use.
There may be some line to be drawn on such markets, but that line really isn't drawn. There are just vague gestures that it is both gambling and not gambling due to insider information.
If you wanted to regulate it, legislate which markets can be made. Require notification that it is not gambling and is all about the trading of insider information and that gamblers have less than "fair" odds.
>not gambling due to insider information.
I can't make this argument work at all. Gambling with some cheating is still gambling.
Well, that makes perfect sense. The whole world will eventually do the same. gambling with software is still gambling, just like accounting with software is still accounting.
You are stunningly more optimistic than I.
I thought I was being cynical. Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states.
> Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states
I mean Spain blocked these markets for now, to investigate how to deal with them, I don't think it's for sure they'll be classified as gambling and allowed, might very well be outlawed. Probably parent got confused you said "The whole world will eventually do the same" (about blocking/banning) but then seemingly you thought these were "classified as gambling" already.
It has been crazy seeing the explosion of Polymarket and Kalshi in comparison to Betfair.
Betfair doesn't present itself as anything other than what it is: a gambling exchange where the punters make the book. In my 10+ years time of using it they despite some occasionally shoddily worded markets they have only properly screwed up a market twice (The Australian Open in 2022 when Djokovic was denied entry to Australia and Betfair basically forgot the winners market was cross matched when they went to remove him and the 2020 Presidential election where they suspended the market when Trump went to hospital with Covid despite the fact the market rules said that the market would still settle if any participant died and obviously most people had been taking into account that both candidates being mega ancient whilst a global pandemic was happening might be a factor). Betfair is boring, staid and reliable.
Compare that to Kalshi and Polymarket who do everything they can to pretend they are not gambling platforms. It's kind of gross.
It's lunacy that you can create a gambling website, name it a 'prediction market' and somehow that skirts the law. It's a gambling website for nerds and high-ups in the USG.
I'm still astounded that Polymarket, as a feature, is embedded inside Substack. Not a third-party plugin but baked into the platform. YouTube is one thing. It's practically ubiquitous in terms of video sharing but Polymarket?
ETrade also started recently to include that disgusting thing in their News feed for watch lists -- as if it can really predict anything, with no way to turn it off (AFAICT). It's clear that it's being pushed in many directions.
Complete shamelessness all around.
I can understand them wanting to ban Polymarket et al but it's hard to implement unless you ban all use of cryptocurrency. Once you've done the converting fiat currency to some sort of crypto, all the other transaction can happen anonymously offshore. I've mucked about on Polymarket a bit including betting on Kamala to win of all things.
It never will be completely stopped, but IMO this still makes a massive difference. Gambling is one of those things where barriers make a massive difference. For decades, it was under control when you had to go to vegas to do it. But now, when its all over TV, you're enticing people way more.
Nobody is under the delusion that this ban will not be circumvented. The point is to make using these sites so inconvenient that the vast majority of their (potential) users won't bother jumping through the hoops.
Imagine your neighbour the alcoholic gambling addict having to learn to use cryptocurrency and VPNs and then having to file taxes in case any substantial winnings (from illegal gambling)...
The main way betting markets can increase accuracy is by making it profitable for insiders to leak secret information.
Oh so finally someone is calling a spade a spade.
Are they still doing blocks so configuring either Google's DNS or Cloudflare DNS will still unblock the sites?
Seems the blocks aren't in effect yet, I'm on Spanish ISP (Vodafone) here and can still access polymarket.com and kalshi.com. Traditionally, Spanish ISPs tend to do DNS blocks yeah, at least when it comes to long-lasting piracy and other "clearly illegal stuff" like Women's rights.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
I'm on Movistar and can't access it without my trusty VPN that I have for football match times :)
Interesting, added my ISP to my previous comment (Vodafone). Do you have a lot of stuff you use daily that goes away during the games? Personally the only thing that seems to stop working is Docker Hub, everything else seems OK, trying to figure out if it's just my ISP that is lenient or what's going on...
It changes depending on the day. But yes, some days it's really a lot (affecting forums, news sites, etc.). I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason, in fact I've been seriously consider changing ISP for that reason but I'm too lazy (plus in 12 years with them I think I've had a single outage which was solved in an hour or two, so even if I oppose them morally, it's convenient to stay...)
> I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason
They've got a license to stream LaLiga on Movistar Plus so they're particularly interested in blocking piracy.
am i understanding correctly that Docker Hub is inaccessible in Spain during football matches? do sports get bandwidth priority?
Not bandwidth priority. It's just that our brilliant judges have let the football league implement IP blocks to combat piracy of football matches. These blocks affect CloudFlare IPs that host many websites and services unrelated to football, so we can't access them during matches via VPN. (And by the way, I'm not interested in football but people I know who are say that they still view pirate match broadcasts just fine).
If anyone from Kalshi or Polymarket is reading this: your advertising is reprehensible. Dumb bros bragging about getting rich betting on the weather. Cringey get-rich-quick influencers. No one believes for a second your claims that prediction markets serve the public good. I’ve never wanted an industry to fail so badly.
I see a lot of comments like this is the blocking of prediction markets about politics, war, etc.
It's important to remember that ~80% of activity Polymarket and ~90% of Kalshi, by volume, are sports. These are effectively sports betting websites with prediction markets on the side.
Good
Good. Now ban sports betting.
Do you want to ban sports in the same fell swoop?
It's not my fault the entire industry is propped up by advertising and betting
Greece does the same.
Interesting!
It ought to be illegal everywhere, the only reason it won't be in the US is the president is on the grift with his kids operating on the boards of them.
good
Good. Now take the next step and ban them outright.
well, it's gambling.
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no they have a securities license. Also while a lot of stuff in stock markets are gambling like, the stock market is a positive sum game where very basic techniques (e.g. index investing) have positive expected values.
The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.
No because they're not gabling. They also don't have an alcohol license too.
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You need a license to operate in Spain. The license is fairly available (EU regulations enforce this). So, Polymarket is able to obtain a license if they wish to operate in Spain, if they follow the fair rules to obtain a license. Don't want to obtain a license? Don't want to follow the rules in Spain? No problem, but no business in Spain. Websites blocking works like that, too. Which makes sense: local law > remote law. Else I could host some websites selling LSD to Americans on the clearnet. No US government would accept that, zero chance.
Other countries such as USA work in a similar manner. Work permits such as green card, to name an example.
The people who complain about regulations and law either don't understand why they exist or how they work, or they have an interest in the abolishment of it because they benefit from that.
Then you get that BS about how USA is better off than EU. Well, if you're healthy, educated, and employed, sure. Otherwise? You can just use your eyes. Go drive through a rich and poor neighborhood in both. The poverty in USA is horrendous, and the effects are shown. We got poverty too, but not as severe. No need to go to that area between West and East coast. You can experience this right near the Bay Area. San Jose is supposedly a mess. I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
You can replace Spain in the article with any other jurisdiction and my comment would be unchanged.
This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great).
Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not?
Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in?
The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.
And you can replace Spain with any other country (including authoritarian regimes) and my comment would be unchanged. It is a matter of respecting local jurisdiction, local law.
I didn't expect you to agree either. I wanted to inform the reader and lurker, not convince you. Why you have to resort to 'you are exactly the kind of person' is beyond me.
Since you decided to edit your post, so have I:
Yes, a government can outsource/delegate such, if the quality is good, why not? For example, the audit has to be thorough and the outcome non-discriminatory.
As far as I am concerned it is a very sick platform because (well anything related to cryptocurrency is) some of the bets are about dark things, seemingly allowed. For example, imagine being able to bet when the next murder of the Zodiac is happening, and how it'd occur. Same with the missile example. Should we therefore ban or regulate it? I don't know what is wisdom. But I do know EU and Spain can decide on this for themselves. One thing of note: insider trading is illegal in EU, yet Trump's clan hobby (yes, in past presidency it occurred as well, but not as severe, nor as ridiculous).
> I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
Fry's closed in 2021.
There you have it.
Regulation is good because somebody might buy LSD. Nice.
Yeah, LSD, or Janet Jackson's nipples, or something else which is highly illegal in USA, such as opiates. Or copyright infringement. Or whatever else is on the darknet. Called hypothetic examples.
On makework compliance:
"I really ought to throw this umbrella away. I know we're in a rainstorm, but I haven't gotten wet yet!"
The chance of preventing gambling is exactly zero, at least let them pay so there is some money to pay for the damage they do.
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Watch your words soon Spain and Morocco will put a toll both for ships passing strait of Gibraltar.
The cruise industry collapsing isn't going to have as big an effect as you think ;-)
They are not fighters.
Who asked you, you are irrelevant to anything.
True, just like you. But it doesn't make Spain more relevant.
So why did you write a comment
Without Spain everyone up from Po Valley would be pretty much bankrupt trying to spend cheap money on Holidays and half of South America woudn't be able to commerce well with the EU and ditto with cheap gas from Argelia and the like. Crap out Spain and Center Europe collapses tomorrow. And not just the Lutheran Europe. South America, USA, and tangentially Russia and China too.
Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma...
Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
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That works in a world where everyone has equal knowledge and ability all of the time. Unfortunately, when that is not the case, sometimes humans have been known to take advantage of others. Due to this, every society on earth has created rules against various types of these situations.
> That works in a world where everyone has equal knowledge and ability all of the time.
That ^ is mostly true today.
If you have access to Polymarket or Kalshi, you have internet access. If you have internet access, you have access to more public knowledge than any previous generation.
Whether you use the internet to educate yourself or to gamble should be your choice. But starting today, it is no longer your choice in Spain.
In 1997 that's the effect we thought the internet was going to have -- soon everyone would be smart and nobody would get scammed!
That didn't happen. The internet didn't solve disability, it didn't solve education, it didn't solve misinformation, didn't stop scams. In fact, it has made some of these things worse.
A robust and aggressive consumer protections bureau is a handy way for me to feel secure while doing basic economic operations, without having to handle a ton of one-off research on my own. For example I'm strongly in favor of medical licensure, it seems nuts to me to say like "if an adult consented to a surgery who's the state to quibble over whether the surgical tools were properly sterilized". Similarly gambling licenses seem like a reasonable regulation to ensure honest behavior in an industry with many avenues for corruption and double-dealing (or at least provide legal avenues for recompense in cases where the house deviates from the guidelines required by their licensure).
I agree with this.
Pretty shocking to see all the replies you got though. Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
> Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
I haven't noticed an increase - roughly half the country tends to be in favor of this at any given time. Perhaps you've just widened your circles a little?
100%. It's sad to see that this attitude has spread to HN
It could have something to do with the really bad evil and stupid ideas that people like Peter Thiel propagate with the immense wealth they've accumulated. If the Venn diagram of billionaire nerds and fascists were less of a circle you might have a point.
If Spain hadn't been blocking critical internet infrastructure whenever a LaLiga game is played you might have a point.
You do realize we are talking about Spain here. A place which is a case study in the staggering amount of damage too much government control can have. Both left and right wing governments over many decades have contributed to these problems. The thing in Spanish politics that the right and left have in common is a strong tendency towards authoritarianism.
PS If we are going to talk about Spain, calling Americans fascists doesn't really work. They have actual Fascists there and their government policies are far (far far far far far far far) closer to the blue team. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Spanish politics would know that.
Yeah great idea! Let’s also just legalise recreational fentanyl while we’re at it
As long as it's safely overseen and accessible to be administered as well as having treatments on standby, it would actually be much safer and kill far fewer people than today.
Yes
You can see this idea in action right now if you search “usa drug zombies” or similar thing on the internet.
Drugs are very well known for being deregulated. How's the "War on Drugs" going?
Should there be taxes on alcohol and cigarettes? Should there be warnings on them? What about on heroin?
As someone that works large events on weekends, holy fuck alcohol should not be legal. Nearly every single problem we get is because of alcohol. Someone on heroin or weed or e is almost certainly less problematic.
Next time there is a fire at your house I will say "he's an adult who should have been careful playing with dangerous things like fire, we shouldnt waste society's money and resources on saving his house"
Sure! I can also be an adult, have fire detectors and insure my property against fires instead of hoping for the goodwill of the community or the government.
Fire insurance doesn't do anything for your house regarding it being on fire.
Fire departments are good for the community at large as well so the fire at your house doesn't become the fire at my house.
It's not goodwill though, I'm paying for public services like the fire department through my taxes. I like them to be owned by the government instead of a private entity because I don't want to pay the capitalist rent for borrowing their money; if we pool our resources we can cut out the middle-man and just fund it ourselves. Very typical human living arrangement I believe.
Just one thing: the government is a massive private entity and a middle man. The closest thing to the stated goal would be a contract between other insterested parties to pool resources for funding. The next one would be a local consumer co-op explicitly formed for that specific purpose.
Besides fire detectors you might also want some fire putter-outers as well. Oh, wait...
There are entirely practical reasons that "private decisions of adults" can worsen society as a whole. We need laws and we can debate about nudging that line back and forth, the answers aren't easy. But acting like there shouldn't be a line is nonsensical.
Acting like taking action doesn't have negative consequences is also nonsensical. There is a reason why we consider (Alcohol) Prohibition bad public policy. It was a complete disaster. Somehow those that wish to control others always forget this. These are literally the situations for which the phrase, "the cure is worse than the disease" was coined.
yeah, lets make a government to enforce that.
Polymarket is a casino. A roulette wheel is not a "market". You can't beat the house.
There is no house? Betting is against other players
The service is the house, and they take fees on bets, so they are the only ones guaranteed to win.
By that logic market makers in the stock market are basically like a casino too. No one is of course guaranteed to win in anything but at least the stock market doesn't ban you for making too much money like a casino does.
The casinos won't ban you if you take too much from other players. They ban you because you take to much from the casino itself.
If you somehow caused some exchange to consistently lose money, I'm sure they'd cut you off.
I mean, yeah, pretty much.
I can actually consistently make money in the stock market, not so in a casino.
I think we're running into the limitations of the English language. Things don't always neatly fit into categories. The stock market can be a casino, depending on how you interact with it.
If you regularly trade and constantly watch your stocks, then it's a casino.
If you buy some index funds and never look at them again until 10 years later, it's not a casino.
There's no clear delineation between an investment and a bet; it's a Venn diagram with a huge overlap. I don't think that means that there is any question about where on the Venn diagram sites like Kalshi and Polymarket belong.
There is an entire profession of Poker players that consistently make money in casinos but not from casinos. You simply don't understand how this all works.
Difference is average people can make money in the stock market on a consistent basis, while even the best poker players still get banned.
Meanwhile a lot of people don't make consistent money on the stock market.
If it was "that simple" everyone would be making money on the stock market, but its not.
It is that simple, invest in broad market index funds.
You're not betting against "other players," your betting against institutional players that have an edge... A house edge, like a casino.
There is a house and the house takes a rake just like a poker room. And a poker room is clearly not a securities exchange.
You are betting against insiders, or rather giving money to insiders...
Ok, who are insiders for these bets:
* What price will Bitcoin hit in May?
* SpaceX IPO closing market cap above ___ ?
* Highest temperature in Amsterdam on May 26?
* Presidential Election Winner 2028
1) Anyone at a company trading in bitcoin.
2) SpaceX employee or board member.
3) Anyone with a blow drier that knows which weather monitoring station is used.
4) Campaign insider that can sabotage their candidate's chances of winning.
You are absolutely clueless.
> What price will Bitcoin hit in May?
Quick reminder that POTUS has power to strongly influence Bitcoin price [1]
> SpaceX IPO closing market cap above ___ ?
Quick reminder that SpaceX gets most of its money from the US government [2]
To say nothing of oil and other commodities affected by war [3]
In short, an insider is literally anyone who knows what the president is going to say tomorrow.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/20/five-times-presi...
[2] https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-2-29-billion-space-force-c...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/betting-on-iran-war-insider-tra...
That's not the definition of a casino. If it were, Poker wouldn't be played in casinos.
You're not betting against "other players," your betting against institutional players that have an edge... A house edge, like a casino.
These services run on the blockchain, right? So in effect, there is no blocking them.
Off-ramping to fiat would be criminalised and pursued beyond the wildest dreams of La Liga/Cloudflare. A gambling site you can't withdraw your winnings from is of no interest to anyone.
how's it related to the Cloudflare ?
spain also blocks cloudflare for copyright infringement
To be a bit more specific, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours a week as Cloudflare, compared to other CDNs, aren't responding or acting on legal requests from Spanish judges.
Correct, to be even more specific. Cloudlfare uses a reputation pooling technique to provide anonimities to their clients (providers, through reverse proxies, in this case). Since cloudflare does not comply with requests to selectively stop distributing the banned content in Spain, and since ISPs cannot perform that filter due to header encryption like encrypted HELO, then the Spanish courts opt to perform the least destructive block which is to block based on time.
"Least destructive"? I can't access many sites and services during matches, but my colleagues tell me their pirate sources have barely been affected. This "least destructive" path is not working but is definitely destroying.
Ok, besides avoiding the blocks altogether, you seem to know of a less destructive approach, please do share it, I'll share whatever you come up with to my representative as I've managed to have a dialogue about this with them before.
But it has to be something, and cannot be "Don't do the blocks" obviously since it's already ruled it should be blocked, but since you've managed to come up with a block so it doesn't have to affect even those Cloudflare IPs, could you please share the method you've come up with?
Why does the end justify the means here? Revising the ruling should be an option: The blocks clearly aren't working, everyone I know who pirates matches tells me their sources have barely been affected, and others share the same here. Meanwhile I, that don't care about football but pay for my ISP, can't visit during matches most of the sites I regularly visit. Why am I an acceptable casualty in the piracy wars?
> But it has to be something
I think you're falling for the politician's syllogism. Pressure to do "something" doesn't mean we should do anything, specially if this "something" has already proven worse than even doing nothing.
Just to clarify your position, Spain should allow US companies to not comply with court orders for US company operations within Spain jurisdiction? So Spain should just allow another country to do whatever, or to use some extra-legal judgment criteria to discern whether something is worth following the law for and what is not worth the hassle?
Please point out where in my comment it says that's my position.
If the courts decided Cloudflare has to be banned, let it be banned. But so far they haven't had a trial, much less a sentence. We're just enabling a private company to interfere with the services of another, which represents a huge part of the internet even if we don't like it, simply because the former claims the trade-off is necessary and acceptable.
And since the only actual evidence I can access (weak as it is) points to these blocks barely working, I claim that this trade-off is not worth it and we're just inflicting pain on people not watching the matches for a very slim benefit to LaLiga. Bring Cloudflare to the courts if you must, but leave us alone until they figure it out.
>But so far they haven't had a trial, much less a sentence.
Wrong, here's a sentence with reference to the original case.
https://www.iberley.es/jurisprudencia/sentencia-civil-juzgad...
I apologize if this sounds rude, but it just sounds like you aren't familiar with the case or the subject matter at all, please perform some research if you want to make claims about what ought to be.
Bullshit, that sentence just enables LaLiga and Telefonica to interfere with hosts like Cloudflare, which I claim is an excessive measure before a trial against them. It does not claim that Cloudflare is breaking the law, and Ctrl+F "Cloudflare" just shows one hit about Encrypted Client Hello.
Here's the list of companies that actually were sued here, to let them block:
> 1.Vodafone España, S.A.U. 2. Vodafone ONO, S.A.U. 3. MASORANGE Orange Espagne, S.A.U. 4. DIGI SPAIN TELECOM, S.L.U. 5. TELEFÓNICA ESPAÑA, S.A.U. 6. TELEFÓNICA MÓVILES ESPAÑA,S.A.U.
I apologize if this sounds rude, but it just sounds like you aren't familiar with the case or the subject matter at all, please perform some research if you want to make claims about what ought to be.
And now more seriously, I've got a right to think the court's decision is wrong even if it's legal, get over it.
>And now more seriously, I've got a right to think the court's decision is wrong even if it's legal, get over it.
I just feel my personal opinions on the subject matter almost zero, especially since I'm not involved in the dispute, nor a citizen of either country. If you are american you are somewhat compelled, but I think that jurisdictionally, they have sovereignity, which is much harder to deny. Like even if you think the case itself and the sentence are wrong, ok, I get it. But I think we should compartimentalize and respect the venue, I don't think even cloudflare is arguing against the venue, claiming somehow that the US courts are proper for the case. But I could be wrong.
> It does not claim that Cloudflare is breaking the law
Right, I read that there was no trial or sentence at all. The linked trial was not claimed against Cloudflare at all, but the sentence does compel CloudFlare and refers to other several summons for CloudFlare (I read somewhere that it totals more than 100).
Here's a recent story I found on the CEO being personally sued on criminal charges:
>https://www.advanced-television.com/2026/03/04/spain-court-s...
Can't speak a lot on this specific case, but I personally wouldn't want to step into a country that sues me criminally. This is somewhat permissible for CloudFlare since it is a security company, so it probably isn't the first time they have had such an issue. But still, this is definitely not nothing.
What seems correct is that Cloudflare itself has not yet been the defendant of a civil suit for damages yet. But to be fair, they went straight for criminal charges, which to my estimation is way more decisive (and appropriate).
EDIT: Cloudflare is a defendant along with the CEO. With some nuances on terminology due to the common/civil, but I believe defendant is an accurate translation of "investigado"
> Why does the end justify the means here?
Because society at large has to be pragmatic, you and I aren't the only people living here, and generally we (Spaniards) all agree that laws are generally made to be followed, in most instances, hence if a judge/the courts order something, we generally feel like that should be followed. You don't like it? Fight it legally, like the system is setup to work.
> The blocks clearly aren't working, everyone I know who pirates matches tells me their sources have barely been affected, and others share the same here.
Based on anecdotes, which I too have plenty of it working/not working, or based on actual data? Not sure it is the most trustworthy data, I personally don't trust La Liga so much, but last they said was that it was reduced by 60%, and if the blocks weren't actually working, I think they'd say as much, as they'd want to find a "better" way to actually fight it. But unless you have some more trustworthy data to share, I think this is as close as we get to actual evidence and concrete proof: https://www.laliga.com/noticias/fastly-y-laliga-se-unen-para...
> Meanwhile I, that don't care about football but pay for my ISP, can't visit during matches most of the sites I regularly visit.
What exact websites and services can you not visit during the games? I'm with Vodafone, and nowadays during the games Docker Hub is the only service that isn't available, everything else seems to continue working as normal. A year ago the situation was very different.
Did you report the websites you rely on to be victims of the blocks via the forms that are available for precisely this? Seems to eventually unblock the sites you report, give that a try if you haven't already.
> I think you're falling for the politician's syllogism. Pressure to do "something" doesn't mean we should do anything, specially if this "something" has already proven worse than even doing nothing.
I'm not, me as a private individual, before even speaking with anyone, also think it's stupid that Cloudflare chose to do business in Spain yet aren't willing to follow the law.
The ones who feel like you are an acceptable casualty in these piracy wars is Cloudflare, everyone else is following the law, that's why you're not seeing Bunny CDN or Fastly being blocked in the same way as Cloudflare, as they actually respond to legal requests.
Tired of Cloudflare grouping in providing services to clearly illegal services with clearly legal services? Well, maybe ask them to consider following the laws in the countries they operate, or use the actual service meant for reporting "unintended casualties".
What other measure do you propose?
bitcoin
You can block the web user interface and effectively block Polymarket for 99.9% of users. No ban is ever 100% effective.
Prison bars are an unpatched DoS vulnerability that affects all blockchains.
https://xkcd.com/538/
They require no gambling license to be a stock broker on the Bolsa de Madrid stock exchange.
How do you defend these slimey companies? They’re actively running a mob casino and you still have people acting like government is the bad guys here. That doesn’t mean there can’t be better regulation of other markets, but comparing prediction markets to stock markets is a huge stretch.
Disagree, I find their product valuable and use them daily as a source of unusually high quality predictions. When used for this purpose insider trading is a feature that improves the quality of predictions. I see some fraud as in any market, but the overwhelming majority of transactions are voluntary, open and relatively informed within a highly transparent system.
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
A thought experiment: how would you feel about betting on a market that is an the outcome of a medical procedure? On a negative outcome? On a market for a negative outcome of your own procedure?
Is it bad to take out a life insurance policy right before you have a medical procedure?
If the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
This is why people who work in sports can't bet on sports. This is literally a solved problem. The current laws outlaw your examples already.
Not if it's your own procedure.
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
But killing someone is a crime, and fraud is a crime, the insurance in itself isn't.
You lived all your life without these evil companies. Life will go on when they are banished. I don't think you will miss "unusually high quality predictions" after a week.
What predictions? Why is it useful to know what the odds are for Trump to the word “postage stamp” in a specific speech?
Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.
Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.
When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.
You can look at who is likely to become the next president for USA etc, it helps a lot to see what people who spent some effort looking into it thinks.
Bad example. Americans can only very recently even place trades on PM and even then its through other companies and most people don't know about this. Those markets are often very thin and manipulated by the campaigns themselves.
A better example is wagers on things like when the Iran war will end. That's actually useful 'wisdom of the crowds', and any insider trading is already illegal. Maybe someday those markets would get big enough to allow companies to hedge risks. That's an actual useful application of PMs.
Show me the insider trading on polymarket that is providing you with this crucial info. Show it to me now.
It's not a casino. You aren't betting against the house with polymarket, unlike with gambling sites. You're betting against other players.
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Equities are underlying collateral. Prediction markets are literally just betting on an outcome, no underlying asset exists.
Prediction Markets act the same way as Gambling Exchange - the assets are denominated as both sides of the book minus the spread.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/
What collateral is underlying the massive, state-sponsored, Spanish lottery ticket and scratch off racket?
I don't think you'd find anyone arguing that the lottery isn't gambling, so I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
A casino is by definition a house that takes rake and is not the government or one of its subsidiaries ...
Collateral is not uncommon in gambling (e.g. pink slips). That does not seem to distinguish gambling from speculating.
That's not collateral, that's the thing being wagered.
Even if it was the same --I think it's not-- you'll need a "SIBE operator license", and cannot do it solo, you have to be an employee of an authorized firm (bank, broker or dealer).
It seems redundant to have two different regulatory systems for slightly different kinds of speculation.
I think it's fine. Here renting (or teaching) light sails (light catamaran) needs a different license than renting (or teaching) any sail cruiser, including catamarans, despite being basically the same object (boats with sails). Feels that the small differences are enough to justify a different regime.
There are all sorts of different regulatory systems for all sorts of slightly different kinds of things.
It's not like equities markets are unregulated, be serious.
Right they require a brokerage license instead because it's a different industry. Not sure what your comment is trying to say here.
Your comment explains long queues to lottery ticket offices every time I visit Spain:)
Lol it could not possibly be the coincidence that there were bets on ex prime minister Zapatero going to jail before the 30th of June or other meme bets making the rounds in Spain in the last couple of days.
There are bets everyday, so no matter when the ban is announced, you can always attach a conspiracy to it.
Most of Spain did not even know polymarket existed until a couple of days ago.
Also, most of Spain can walk to a functioning casino which will be more than willing to take all sorts of odd prop bets.
Not sure how you want me to respond to that. Are you getting that from a feel of yours or some statistical analysis of familiarity with polymarket in Spain? I don't think it matters much anyway, I bet most human beings don't know what polymarket is. But still, you think it warrants a conspiracy? To what end? None of this makes much sense to me.
I'd say based on vibes too, it seems to have gotten more common subject to talk about, also on TV, news and so on. It was virtually not talked about a year ago, compared to today.
Google Trends seems to agree too: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=polymarket&date=today%20...
It's not cut and dry to differentiate between the act and the wager.
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.
It's a roulette that you can actually manipulate. that 's why it's worse.