Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few days[1].
[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-revenue-2025-263-1...
[1]: https://gamingamerica.com/news/polymarket-free-ride-over-int...
This was just on the news:
"A reservist suspected of using classified information to place bets on the Polymarket prediction site served as a major in the Israeli Air Force, a Tel Aviv Court reveals.
The defendant was indicted alongside his alleged accomplice last month on severe security offenses, as well as bribery and obstruction of justice, after they allegedly bet on the timing of Israel’s opening strikes that kicked off the 12-day war with Iran last June.
The case was subject to a court-issued gag order, which was partially lifted this evening following a petition from several Hebrew-language outlets. The details of the case were cleared for publication, but the defendants’ names are still under wraps.
According to the indictment, the soldier was briefed on the June operation in a confidential meeting a day before it was carried out, then notified his civilian accomplice about the offensive. When Israeli warplanes were on their way to attack Iran, the reservist let the civilian know, and the latter placed a bet on the war’s timing.
The pair allegedly made $162,663 after winning the bet, which they agreed to split evenly between themselves."
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
Here's one story about gambling in the UK: the TV advertising is relentless and out of control after 9pm due to legislation passed in the early 00s. Gambling can quite literally lose you your house, friends and family. But apparently it's totally fine to advertise as long as HMRC get ££££. On some TV channels, every second advert, or worse, most adverts, are gambling. Bingo? Slots? Poker? Sports? All of the above.
The biggest UK tax payer for several years was Denise Coates.
Tobacco advertising, on the other hand, is totally banned in the UK, but won't lose you your house or family and friends (unless of course you die).
Mine has a pub, a butcher, a baker, a sandwich shop, 3 coffee shops and 5 bookmakers.
I think most people before the age of information found meaning in life in these non-monetary "beliefs"... religion, community engagement, etc. Mostly to the benefit of the wealthy class.
I think people are finally waking up to the fact that the wealthy (parasite) class have been using these non-monetary values as a smokescreen for generations to extract more and more wealth out of the lower classes, and the internet has allowed this zeitgeist to forment.
Anecdotally, I've experienced this in the company i work at. For years and years and years, we would complain about low salaries, with respect to peer companies. And they would always throw distractions at us instead of just... raising salaries. "More happy hours, more team building activites, more company benefits that didnt actually cost anything". Anything but raise salaries.
Lower-income families have traditionally had community institutions to support them. You could be a church member for free, hang out at the union hall, or participate in any number of IRL activities that let you quit thinking about cashflow for a few blessed hours.
Replacing community engagement with an obsession over cash isn't healthy, either for individuals or communities.
We are approaching the first couple years of this country where investing knowledge has actually proliferated out of the country club. It is a huge shift in the tide but no one wants to talk about it, if only to make a jab at robinhood perhaps.
So I expect your solution would fix all of it, as a second order effect, in that running one would stop being a viable business model.
I think in practice the volume of sharp money in the prediction markets is a small fraction and the majority would be better served with the limits you’re proposing
Or just shut down the whole thing. Bets on bombing is truly immoral and downright despicable.
Every new financial medium gets its moment in the sun when all the crooks extract everything they can, before eventually market governance steps in. Crypto's been in scammer phase for a while. It needs decentralized governance to solve it this time though, since obviously classic governance is a dumpster fire and couldn't enforce anything on crypto even if it tried.
No there is not.
That's as damaging a statement as "soft" drugs or "problem" gambling.
Statements usured by corporate PR to set up a fake middle ground and delegate responsibility to the consumer for any "bad" behaviour.
“When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.”
I'm with Matt Levine here[2]:
"There is something particularly dystopian about the idea that:
a) Some countries will bomb other countries.
b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.
c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarke... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lev...
Anonymous trading on prediction markets leads to unpredictable chaos in the end. And as destruction is easier than creation that’s what we will see more of.
Example: a fake German market for train punctuality was announced to make a point recently. If it had been real, train staff and passengers could trivially have profited by betting against any expected punctual train and blocking a door for a few minutes. Or betting against many trains and throwing a hopefully fake body onto a busy line.
Having nice things in society is fragile and not a given. They mostly exist through mutual consent and mild disincentives to destroy the common good. Allow people to profit by destroying them and enough of them will.
An adding bonus would be nations tilting prediction odds to get people sleeping in vulnerable places and then bomb those place - ideally the nation also reversing their deceptive bets at the last minute.
Like if someone managed to figure out a way to make slightly cheaper bombs but with the tradeoff that the cheaper bombs gave a few hours of eary warning to the people being bombed, I think I would prefer you used those bombs.
(There are many other cases where insiders may change the outcome to align with their bet. That is bad if the outcome is bad.)
That disaster causes $10,000,000 of harm, but only causes you $90 of harm individually.
You've gained $10, but your $10 gain is a millionth of the harm caused.
Generally-speaking, there's an enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy. So now we have a mechanism by which individuals have a financial incentive to cause harm...
Don't these markets create a mechanism for society to race to self-destruction?
United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO was killed.
Realistically, they'd have to be far more connected to the event, and as such, far more exposed to some kind of risk.
Today, we are building the Torment Nexus. But yesterday, we were building the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, etc. etc. Things can get worse, but they can also get better - we just have to do our small part in making them better.
Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ..."The real evil is when someone ensures the famine occurs so they can profit from an outside betting position.
I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity. I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.
Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?
It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.
Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.
The only reason I found out was because she had a HUGE obnoxious gorgeous flower arrangement delivered to her at work and I asked her what they were for and she started crying and then told me they were his apology flowers - that he put on her credit card!
She doesn't want to divorce because their kids but I'm encouraging her to think about protecting herself and I sent her some attorney recommendation links. He's never had a decent job it's majority her income so divorcing isn't even that favorable for her now afaik. Sad situation.
Can't say I agree with that specific take (and find it a bit naive to be honest), unless you're also not hiring anyone from companies like Amazon, Meta, and all the other tech companies that have also ruined/preyed on society in their own way just as much as any gambling app has.
It depends on the role. If you were doing something deeply technical, or facing customers who loved your work, I think you get a pass. If you were building features nobody outside your company is thankful for, you need to do a convincing repentance act. If you worked on Instagram for Kids or whale optimization, fuck off.
It's one thing to acknowledge that any for profit company in some way behaves badly, but you can't change the world. You can choose not to sell poison.
This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties.
It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of friends that enjoy drinking and tons of good experiences drinking with them (wine/beer/cocktails) in all kinds of situations (bars/sports-bars/pubs/parties/bbqs). I don't want that taken away because some people can't control their intake.
Similarly the USA is obese so you could spin every company making fattening foods (chips/dips/bacon/cheese/cookies/sodas/...) as taking advantage (most of my family is obese (T_T)) but at the same time, I enjoy all of those things in moderation and I don't want them taken away because some people can't handle them.
You can try to claim gambling is different, but it is? Should Magic the Gathering be banned (and Yugioh Card,Pokemon Cards, etc..)? Baseball cards? I don't like that video games like Candy Crush apparently make money on "whales" but I also don't want people that can control their spending and have some fun to be banned from having that fun because a few people can't control themselves.
I don't have a solution, but at the moment I'd choose personal liberties over nannying everyone.
I'd like to propose not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I accept this argument about gambling might be slippery-slope-able but I think it's pretty obvious to everyone without a vested interest that it's causing extreme societal harm.
Would you be opening to banning just this one thing and then calling it a day and opening the floor back up to such arguments? I think modern politics is too caught up in the bureaucracies of maybe to let good ideas be carried out - honestly, this thought line could easily be written up into an argument that parallels strong-towns. Local bureaucracy is rarely created for a downright malicious reason - here we have a change that could cause an outsized positive outcome so why should we get caught up in philosophical debates about how similar decisions might be less positive and let that cast doubt on our original problem?
Is severely restricting the marketing of those things not a valid step in between having or not having liberties? For an adult to be free to engage in gambling, does insidious advertising also need to be permitted everywhere? If say 25% of people engaging with a highly addictive activity can't responsibly regulate their behavior with it, is it important that we allow a contingent of everyone else to abuse them?
I think about it like property rights and others. If we want everyone to respect the idea of private property ownership, then policy should act to contain abuse of those rights and somewhat fairly distribute access to them. If only an older richer generation benefits, and everyone else pays rent and effectively has to give up those rights, then eventually opposition to them should accumulate. I'm much more interested now in seeing bans on the ownership of multiple residential properties within the same municipality at present, and sympathizing with people seeking a market crash, than I am to actually try and buy a house, because the ratio is so wildly in favor of one group over another.
If only 25% of people didn't know someone who ruined their life gambling—and it's only a matter of time—then it would be potentially acted upon much more severely.
https://www.mlb.com/press-release/press-release-mlb-names-po...
Physical cards don't have the same 'whale' issue as electronic gambling/games on a phone that are designed to get you exactly to the point where you go 'ok, $20 more', that always is your pocket ready to feed that itch. No physical game/liquor store is using that kind of psychology or instant gratification (my understanding is addictiveness tied to action/reward length, with the most addictive things the ones with the most instant grattification?).
Just try to entertain any alternatives. Any at all.
There could be public option to opt-in to have your specific “personal liberties” curtailed, like for alcohol. Doesn’t affect you at all. Completely opt-in. Only for those who want it.
No solutions? Or no corporate-backed solutions?
it lessens the need (or signal) to improve education, or does it not?
Not talking about the theory part of education, more the parts that are not handled well in schools like e.g. (!) habits and understanding better what is behind your daily actions (often “Glaubenssätze” are the reason). Many important parts of education is assumed to happen at home, and only very much later I saw through close friendships to what and what extent (!) some people have to go through… not having grown up in a household permitting learning essentially important life skills (or usually worse… grew up with mindsets that make it very much harder to tackle problems in a helpful way).
TLDR: More banning can result in a weaker signal to improve aforementioned (!) classical education weaknesses, which can spiral into more problems, more need and calling for banning/micro-managing adults, more resistance, more damaging/self-damaging adult actions, … spiral (and bigger threatening fights over the different approaches and the very real felt need to restrict others to feel safe).
That is a topic that I think AND care a lot (!!) about, so very happy for comments pros and cons (but please in a constructive manner). Also very happy about private messages/new insights/blindspots/…
It'd actually be quite easy to set certain sane limits on gambling like you can't gamble more than 1% of your annual income per year, but I bet gambling platforms would fight that like the plague because those are their whales, the true addicts.
I appreciate your approach, but I wonder: would you hire somebody with a past in Meta, or ByteDance (to just name two)? They are at least as bad in pushing addiction to people, maybe worse if you think about the scale.
Working in sports bettings is like working on an online casino.
A casino is optimized to take your rent money.
The broader move, "you don't like X? so Y is good?," can extend forever. Defense contractors, payday loan apps, ad-tech...
On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a small positive impact on the world.
I do not like gambling or the prevalence of gambling products, but this is not a good thing for you to do.
You should not ban people from your job for reasons that are not relevant to the job you're hiring for. People take jobs for many reasons, including some times simply needing to take the first job they can get in order to pay the bills.
People also change their minds. Working for a gambling product company doesn't mean the person is still pro-gambling.
I encourage this concept but also to expand it further, including the ones who work on other evil schemes like the ones used to violate your privacy, sell your data, and participate in sketchy business and/or contracts. Just like how I don’t want to work with someone who develops a gambling platform, I don’t want to work with someone who’s building a cameras spying on public, an app that use facial recognition against strangers, an app that track people, an AI to automate killing, a cloud that host and process such systems. There should be an open source database that has lists of all people who worked/working in such companies, categorized by industry (gambling, privacy, etc.), where anyone can look up potential employees, getting the names is easy when you have the best OSINT goldmine out there (LinkedIn), plus manual submission. Some people have no morals or intrinsic values to prevent them from working in legal yet shady businesses, those however will double think their decision when they know there will be a consequences and they won’t be hired anywhere else.
I'm not sure your virtue signalling has the effect you want it to have. In fact I think it has the exact opposite effect
What this tends to largely accomplish is ensure that those who come from non-traditional backgrounds are further locked out of mainstream high-end tech jobs. If you grew up in a rough area with shitty parents, didn’t go to college, and came into the industry entirely self-taught there aren’t that may decently paying jobs in the field willing to hire you. The “vice industries” are some of the few typically willing to take a chance, while also allowing such a person to level up on relevant cutting edge tech. It’s generally that or working for a small company on 25 year old IT gear and often getting pigeon holed in those (low paying) roles.
And I’m not even saying that it justifies working for such places to many. That’s a personal choice of course. Just saying that it’s mostly a class signal vs moral one.
That's a bit cruel. Sometimes tech workers don't have the luxury of choosing their workplaces. Also companies pivot. So, say, a cryptocurrency startup might have later become a gambling website.
If the output doesn't work, roll the dice again and spend more tokens.
Respect for that. Everybody seems to give up to all-powerful corporations and greed for short term profits seem to blind many otherwise brilliant folks into amoral and/or outright stupid shortsighted behavior and moral 'flexibility'. Nice to see good reason to keep some hope for humanity.
I do myself just a sliver of this via purchasing choices for me and my family, its a drop in the ocean but ocean is formed by many drops, nothing more.
It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.
AFAIK Australia is most gambling addicted western country, loosing the most money per capita at the pokies.
>It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.
I remember how Henry Ford was giving his employee great benefits to attract the best workers so the Dodge brothers bought Ford shares to become shareholders, then sued Henry Ford and won because he wasn't doing what's good for the shareholders.
Similarly, I feel like if you'd try to regulate these anti humane businesses and practices you'd get sued because you're doing something that hurts shareholders.
thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
The real nail in the coffin was watching the Sears in the mall turn into a casino about a decade ago. Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures, politicians turn to the last grift in their arsenal and roll out legalized gambling before packing up and leaving town or retiring.
having failed the digital future, ransacked it for every last penny, politicians again in 2025 turned to the supreme court to legalize online gambling and in doing so obliterate a generation of young adults. in another decade i expect a political movement to "hold these scoundrels to account" similar to Facebook, long after any meaningful reform or regulation could have been made and the industry itself is on the decline. just one last grift for the government that enabled it in the first place.
As in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..
Not everyone gets addicted, but many do. Harms your own health/assets. Can destroy lives. Has spillover effects into general society.
The libertarian/authoritarian argument is much the same.
You can ban drugs/gambling, but some people are unfortunately just wired to seek them out and will do so regardless. So a ban results in fewer people using them in total, but all of the revenue going to the black market.
In an extreme scenario (for example, you ban a drug used by a large % of the population), that black market revenue becomes a real problem and you get Al Capone driving around Chicago with a Tommy gun shooting at people, massive corruption etc.
I wouldn't put gambling in that bracket but a significant minority of people are wired to enjoy it and historically when it was illegal it was a significant fraction of the revenue stream of organised crime, so completely banning it is not cost free - you will get a slice of violence and political corruption to go with it.
Having said that I agree there should be restrictions on advertising especially anywhere kids might be exposed to it
EDIT: Due to the downvotes without comments, here is my point: As an employee, you manage someone elses money in that position. As such, you have to holdup morals of the company and follow the companies interest, not your own - unless you are the 100% owner of that company. If you are not, and impose your own morals using someone elses money, you shouldn't be taking the moral highground here.
Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
Creating a fake Indian cricket league - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580599 - Sept 2023 (10 comments)
BUT, I stopped on the day that the PHL airport preliminary report said the low of the day was 17 and then later than day the low was raised to 18. The way the market was behaving, insiders knew the low would be retracted because normally the markets clear out a tranche of bets that are no longer possible and that wasn't happening that day.
So I don't do that. The whole game seems to be based on a group of insiders that know when and what temperature reports will say seconds or minutes before the general public and they have the capacity to play with validation on the back-end (I suspect).
I built a few models to predict weather 6+ hours out using blended model forecast data, but that didn't do better than break-even.
I don't know my point. It is the wild west, caveat emptor, you need thick skin and ridiculous attention to detail to beat the game, and even then the deck is probably stacked against you.
People are gambling on the "low of the day?"
Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.
I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets where people are dying (and not weather).
The key was they were local and person to person in person - not online.
You and I sitting at the bar get into an argument/bet about what the low today will be, and the bartender bookies the bet before he checks what the low actually was - that makes a certain amount of sense.
Putting it online and making it accessible over TCP/IP opens it up to all sorts of scams and manipulation.
My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict the temperature better than forecast vs. market implied probability rather than attempt to respond very quickly to published information. I learned (with my skills) the latter was a losing proposition, but the former isn't impossible (although also possibly beyond my skills it seems).
Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
But once they get big enough to attract the attention of people that directly affect the outcomes they will eventually become useless because people will realize the only options are to have inside information or be willing to hand money over with inside info.
The only “fair” outcomes will be things outside human control, like betting on the weather.
Um, exactly?
You don't have a legal system to hold the companies accountable for any payout. You don't have published odds with a regulator ensuring those odds are enforced. You have zero transparency whatsoever. You have systems where if you start winning, they will effectively cut you off.
Everything about online betting screams "SCAM!" from the rooftops. Everything about online betting has always screamed "SCAM!" from the rooftops.
What part of this aren't people getting? The house always wins.
If you want Polymarket to no longer exist, then simply create a pool for "Polymarket will no longer exist by Jan 1st 2027" on Kalshi, pump the price, and wait for one of these whales to do the job of making it come true for you. When done right, you get the satisfaction of the thing happening, and all of the ROI for entering on the ground floor.
Rinse and repeat and you no longer have to sit by the sidelines and view world events as things that unfold without your input. You can be an active participant in making history the way you want it.
After traditions and religion become less important, virtue wasn't replaced by money and market but by status seeking. We are all now comparatively rich to how we were 50 years ago or to people from third world countries. So money doesn't make a big difference, but status does. Followers, approvals, being highly viewed in a particular niche is much more valuable for many people than money.
And even money, when they are important, they aren't important because one can buy good and service, money are important because they can confer status.
So my conjecture is that it's status seeking what might be the end goal for many people in the West and what is provoking big issues for societies, like severely declining birth rates.
Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
It'll be bets collected (or "lost" bets which are actually payments) by other parties that have an interest in an outcome which involves whether you lose your house.
The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling scourge years later.
If I had the connections Polymarket does, well, then we can just place bets on when people will die, everything will work out just fine and the President will invest in me.
And they aren't predictions, they are more like "outcome-shaping" markets, since the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome, and at a certain point it will just always happen if it is billions of dollars.
The higher the liquidity involved, the less likely the real world outcome ends up being the same as it would have been if the prediction market had never existed. Very messy.
This only works if there are enough people betting on the other side. It's not some kind of magical money multiplication machine. As more stuff like the one-day Iran bet or the 64:56 minute press conference happen, people will avoid taking bets on highly specific outcomes.
On more reasonable bets like "war with Iran in the next 6 months", if there is some kind of shadowy cabal putting billions of dollars on the yes side, they just aren't going to have much upside if there isn't the same amount on the no side.
I watch kids squeezing the polybags trying to find an identifying bump or edge, hoping to either get the one they want, or at least not get one they already have.
And yeah, baseball cards are/were no different, going back decades.
But at least the financial loss here is constrained to a few dollars. I don't think these are the gateway drugs to gambling problems, but they are definitely exploitative.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=...
Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.
When gambling companies make markets on Oscars, for example, they make those markets knowing 100% that people who know the outcome will bet on it. It is inherent to the product, they put protections in place. Equally, with some sports markets (i.e. transfers), they put in place protections to identify activity that IS a legal breach of player's agreements with sports leagues.
But on prediction markets, there is inherent insider knowledge and people should have the sense not to trade on markets where you are trading with insiders. It should be obvious. Financial markets are different, they are supposed to be open. Prediction markets are not.
There has been a strong drive to apply the concept of insider trading. In the UK, people were actually charged under a law intended to protect bookmakers...to be clear, this is happening whilst people close to central bankers and Treasury civil servants are being paid 7 figure sums to leak information, and all the stuff that happens with transfer/TV show markets. As ever, it is only when politics appears that these rules get invented (and to be very clear, politics markets have always had insider action too...it is inherent to the market, bookmakers know this, they did not ask for these people to be charged).
Btw, the Gambling Act has also been used to prevent payments to gamblers who exploited casinos that failed to ensure their games were fair. If you told the people saying "insider trading" that there was a law whose only purpose was to protect casino's margins, they wouldn't lose their mind...these same laws are being used to prevent "insider trading".
Prediction markets by definition always resolve to one side being completely wiped out and losing everything. Stocks going to zero happens pretty seldomly, in prediction markets it's guaranteed to happen every single time.
The CFTC is granting "no-action" exemptions on the basis of....nothing, really.
The "educational" value of these markets.
That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30163868
> We give users a little bit of money each week to play with ($0.50 right now) and if they can run it up past a certain point we'll pay them out in cash. If they lose the money, we put another $0.50 in the next week. It's legal in the US since the users aren't allowed to deposit and mainly for entertainment purposes.
Even more unpleasantly, this does not happen to everyone every time. Quite many people can have a glass of wine here and there without becoming alcoholics. A ton of people can play a game like Bejeweled out of boredom, and happily switch to more interesting activities, given a chance. Some people can voluntarily stop even taking heroin and subject themselves to therapy. Etc, etc.
But a relatively small minority gets hooked badly. They cannot quit. They do not want to stop. The addiction becomes a primary life activity. Many more who could be hooked to physiologically brutal addictions like nicotine or heroin are wise enough to never approach those, understanding how badly it might end. But again, a relative minority cannot resist the lure.
A less tolerant society would stigmatize such outcomes, adding strong social pressure that might keep potential addicts from getting into the habit. A society could also consider addiction a medical condition that requires intervention and treatment, like poisoning or a dangerous infection. Even modern Western societies are capable of that when sufficiently frightened, see COVID-19.
Another approach, which I'd call "extremist libertarian", would just let addictions form, proclaiming that this is what people do exercising their free will. It would not be different from a complete lack of civilization, and leaving the problem to the evolution to solve. In either case the addicts would suffer, in worst cases going destitute and die. That would remove the addicts from the gene pool, probably lowering the risk of addiction in future generations, slowly. Slowly, and painfully, often not only to addicts but also to people around them.
We struggle with addressing addictions because we struggle to admit that addictions exist, and that in bad cases they affect the sufferer's agency quite a bit. I'm afraid that without admitting this property of heavy addiction we won't be able to act in an efficacious way.
To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
Disrupt being a traitor…
The uber of spying…
Something tells me China has better opsec around such leaks than we do.
They do have their place however - one I find particularly interesting is weather prediction markets, primary because they end up having a net benefit. Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models and are duking it out. Over time these models get better, and the rest of us benefit.
I think these markets could be a net good, but right now they're just enabling insider trading on a scale we've never seen before.
Humans already control the weather: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding.
We already have an example of humans sabotaging the measurement of weather: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684440. Two ranchers sabotaged weather monitoring stations in order to fraudulently collect millions in drought insurance. One of the farmhands involved ended up dead.
And we have an example of prediction markets attempting to manipulate reporting of events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397822.
I have a hard time believing weather prediction markets will be net beneficial. The incentive for sabotage & manipulation up and down the chain seems likely to lead to worse weather predictions overall.
A NY Times reporter was the target of a pressure and threat campaign to change their reporting over whether a rocket in the middle east was intercepted or not before it hit the ground.
Prediction markets are not going to end well full stop IMHO.
Prediction markets create incentives to predict the outcome of an event, which can be done in one of three ways: develop better models to predict the event, affect the event, or affect the reporting on the event.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
Humans can, and do, manipulate the weather. There's actually international treaties against doing it.
> Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models
Weather is chaotic. You don't run a model once and use the result. You run it hundreds of times and average the results. You also need really high quality real time data to be fed into the system to achieve any sort of accuracy, which, is not something any of these hundreds could do on their own.
> markets could be a net good
You can already sell weather predictions. You can just hang a shingle and do it directly. Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?
Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms, also a market solution actually would work in this case imo. Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get, and there aren't really any negative externalities.
Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
One data point of many: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/politics/iran-war-bets-predic...
Fact: Donald Trump Jump Jr is an advisor of polymarket
Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.
The real problem is centralization of power.
Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes.
That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies.
My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.
You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
Maybe it's the separation of powers that's not working...
That’s how far we have fallen. We are all painfully aware how corrupted all sorts of people are but instead of actual action we give each other likes on social media under carefully crafted anger bait.
So much everything online is fake that it is tempting to just throw your phone away.
The genuineness is the highest luxury
I try to make sure to get truly downvoted to hell every other week on social media. It resets the addicted brain and stops hive mind progress bar for a little while at least. Also get banned - this is good for you too precisely because it feels slightly uncomfortable.
That’s how I try to survive online landscapes anyway.
What?! Beg I your pardon, but I think sport is a very different thing to me.
We do not live in a world where policy decisions are based on what's best for the people, we live in a world where policy decisions are almost exclusively made according to what will further enrich the wealthy elites, so there's effectively a 0% chance we will see any meaningful regulatory action here, as it doesn't' matter if gambling is destroying the fabric of society as long as some bastards are getting rich off of it, as that's literally all that matters these days.
I can place a bet that by 2027 we will have 1 bet and a payout on a bet that predicts a horrible catastrophe.
For instance, I'm in favor of bets that a certain astroid will strike the earth at a certain time and place. A signal from the prediction markets might cause somebody to evacuate in a scenario where they'd otherwise cry "fake news."
Let's not bet on whether the water will remain drinkable, because the last thing we need is for somebody to have an incentive to poison it.
Prediction markets exist within the laws and institutions of society to be able to function, and the public should debate and discuss how they're regulated. Problem gamblers do present a negative externality where third parties can bear the cost, especially when they have dependents.
This puts plenty of people who shouldn't gamble into debt and lowers their societal fitness.
The other side of the gamble is probably losing on average too. Only the house and infrequent insiders win.
These private companies are fleecing our economy's dynamicity without reinvesting it in aligned positive externalities.
It's a cancer.
At least the lottery goes to education, in theory. My college was subsidized by the lotto, so there's that.
Kalshi and PolyMarket aren't doing anything positive.
Kalshi and PolyMarket are doing something absolutely wonderful for those people (i.e. the only people who should care about these "prediction markets" at all): they actually make betting fair, which was impossible before. It is not impossible now, because in fact there are much better decentralized markets than these (basically all you need to make a completely decentralized betting platform are Ethereum contracts), but they are handier to use and hence more popular. But it was impossible with traditional gambling, where a bookmaker can set any odds and reject any bets.
Yes, there were a few fixes when in-game betting and exchanges first came in in the UK, but by and large most problems are solved now.
Maybe a less parochial view would help them get a sense of proportion?
SC made a mistake in the Draft King/Fan duel saga and has unleashed the worst kind of market, takes up may too much money and time especially from young people.
That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.
A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true" in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.
Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.
For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate outcome, too.
That's why it's hard to beat Vegas at sports betting--they set the correct odds way too often.
When regular folks make up their own odds, they're not very good at it, but in theory the market just buys up any +EV position, even if it's a longshot.
He certainly isn't going to be thrown out of office (unfortunately) but those 16% of bettors also win if he dies this year, and he's 80, fat, still gobbling burgers and shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far.
On the other hand he has access to the best medical care, but even still a 16% chance he drops dead before the end of the year isn't that outrageous.
But maybe I'm wrong. If so, you could always take the opposite side of the bet. For sure, the correct probability is not zero!
People that place bets on the political outcomes on PolyMarket are from one of three groups: 1) Insiders who think they have an edge (but probably don't), 2) fools that believe what their media of choice tells them and 3) People who make money on the first 2 groups.
We both know that that the Trump market and people who believe everything they see on MSNBC (or whatever it is called now) have a big overlap. Its basically a way to print money because there are always people who are out of touch enough to believe their side is right 100% of the time and a <insert color here> wave is coming in the next election. Is this taking advantage of them? Maybe, but they are a walking negative externality in every other way in life so why not. Consider it a tax on political extremism and partisanship which I think it a good thing. Prove me wrong...
I mean, insurance is basically basically betting that bad things happen to you.
And by the way, shame on all the podcasters and VCs who advertised those abominable 'platforms'. To name one, the cast of the All-in podcast
How many individual podcast hosts actually control those advertising slots?
https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN
See: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-mar...
The president and any other shitcoin operator know this and are playing the game on the field.
Every country has the same challenge. Some ban crypto, which pushes it to the grey market in those jurisdictions.
Hopefully that helps explain why there weren’t and wont be any consequences.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
In a free market system, wealth is created, not concentrated.
At least in the book/movie(s) Harry Wormwood faces consequences. The enablement top down is the problem. The system is rotten and no one faces any real consequence only a slap on the wrist at a fraction of revenue many years later.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/opinion/scams-trust-insti...
Things have gotten dramatically worse since then.
Think back decades ago and you had a single person or a family supported by a single income who could afford the rent or to buy their house and put their kids through college.
By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
And the last 10+ years has taken this further where we now have "side gigs" or "side hustles" or people who are desperate to be "influencers" or "Youtubers" or whatever. Any hobby you have needs to be monetized to get by. You have to sell something, even if it's advice on how to do the thing.
That's what's meant by "hobbies are a luxury". It means you're earning enough not to need to monetize some portion of your life. And the number of people who can do that is continually decreasing.
The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Every aspect of our lives is getting financialized so somebody else can get wealthier. Every second of your time and thing you do needs to be monetized and exploited.
Gambling isn't a net negative for society. It's just a negative. There are no positive aspects to it. Gambling addicts are incredibly likely to commit suicide. It's incredibly destructive.
True, but somewhat misleading. This includes parents that work part-time. If we only include full-time work then it's never been over 50%. Largely this reflects the second wave of feminism and women being able to get jobs they want!
> Then people started having multiple jobs. This was in part because employers didn't want to employ people full-time as they'd have to offer benefits, most notably health insurance.
Employers tend to prefer full-time employees because they are more efficient. There are a lot of fixed costs for each employee and you'd rather get the max number of hours out of them. It's actually quite hard to get a part-time job in many fields. It's true that part-time employment has gone up but again I think this is largely good! And in any case the ratio of part-time employees has barely changed since the 1960s: ~17% today vs ~13% back then. So it's hardly the typical case.
> The problem is capitalism. If you have a hobby, the capital owners haven't loaded you with enough debt (student, medical, housing). You're too independent. You may do unacceptable things like demand raises and better working conditions or, worse yet, withhold your labor. You're spending at least some of your time not creating value for some capital owner to exploit.
Silly Marxist voodoo economics. Most people work in services where there aren't really "capital owners". ~50% of Americans work for small businesses that hardly fit that model either.
Capitalist countries build walls to keep people out.
Socialist countries build walls to keep people in.
This is caused by the government sucking up ever larger portions of the economy, while also constricting it with ever more onerous regulations. It has to be paid for somehow.
I think you would be hard pressed to find a country that didn’t get involved in some war that had nothing to do with defense.
Some dude was willing to resort to more depraved measures than his rivals, and made enough people do what he wanted in order to become the leader.
The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.
“Not even pretending to care about the people they elect.”
There, I fixed it for you.
Europe: freedom from
eg. someone will bet $1M that Elon Musk will be assassinated in 2026.
But these don't themselves even have to be legal. Second order wagers will be placed on SpaceX and Tesla stock prices, bets that "a hundred billionaire will die in 2026", etc.
A bet that Putin will be assassinated could be encoded in, "there will be regime change in Russia."
A country leader seeing someone suddenly take out a $50 million position on them not being assassinated is not the $50 million vote of confidence a naive read on the market might indicate, it's a $50 million payout to the assassin. Albeit inefficiently so, since others can take the other side of the bet and do nothing. But the deniability may be worth it.
We also have people under the age of 20 drinking alcohol.
I am not suggesting in any way that gambling is good - but it wasnt invented last week in america
People who write vacuous "America bad" comments online without understanding the topic may be shocked to learn that America has also had gambling for a long time.
The debate now is about the current changes to regulations and proliferation of apps and ads. Gambling now is objectively more accessible and less regulated than in the past.
What really is scaring me is how transparently the current US executive branch has been basically running a Black Sox scam for the last year or so. This is not something that I think is really happening with eg. Ladbrokes. Seems more like an even more insidious form of insider trading which is already disgustingly prevalent across the whole US political system; except now it's even less traceable, and even easier to exploit for things like military actions.
edit: Like is this kind of stuff already prevalent in places where gambling is legal? https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket/
Plus, prediction markets going from a harmless novelty where people would bet a few bucks on an election into a massive offshoot of gambling industry incentivizing manipulating outcomes/insider trading, once again leaving the average gambler left holding the bag and poorer.
You honestly couldn't design a better experiment to test the theory of whether open and legal vs. banned but underground gambling leads to better outcomes. So I'm not sure why it matters that other countries have different laws (that likely were more thoughtfully designed than basically just saying "it's legal now" out of the blue).
You've had online gambling for centuries? With phones, and apps?
Wherever you are from should really have tried selling this technology. While the US was still rolling out steam engines, you could have really cornered the cell phone market.
I don't get why people make such a big deal betting on sports; if you want to waste your money go for it.
A much bigger problem might be when these markets bet on a meatspace event and then a bunch go out and try to influence innocents in meatspace, to great detriment of society. Like this journalist https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket
How about you let people decide what they do with THEIR own money?
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It's just bringing to public visibility exactly what happens across the stock market. Public companies do this all the time -- engineer their performance end earnings to influence <strike>shareholder</strike> gambler expectations on earnings day.
gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8
“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”
given that the crypto anarchist papers from the 90s that these markets are built on are very well thought out instruction manuals about how bad it could get, this title implies users are gullible idiots as opposed to the creators and power users
An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem. So I take issue with all the flippant comments about this being a "gambling loophole", like, who cares? I don't think any financial game should be seen as a different category than the other.
Even the "positive expected value" framework masquaraded as a distinction between trading and a casino game is completely false and entirely a cultural distinction. There are many equities and bond trades that have lower expected value than a casino game, even this forum is populated by people that receive shares and derivatives as compensation, who will earn nothing - even lose money - under positive outcomes. Exhibit A. Not everyone needs to care how a particular financial game is perceived. Not all cultures need any social segregation of gambling versus another way of making money from money. I'd rather be part of those cultures. And in the US/Western gambling regulatory frameworks and prohibitions, prediction markets don't fit, that isn't a loophole to me. They are structurally different and I'm not entirely sure what people want to happen and how it is supposed to be enforced. I don't get the impression they've looked at all, and are just operating on a feeling that I find irrelevant.
And on the insiders, yes, that's the point of prediction markets. They are intended to be distributed bounties with plausible deniability. That's literally what Jim Bell's 1995 crypto-anarchist paper was about.
In the natural course of finance, every asset, including information, should be tradable, as long as improvements in liquidity continue to come.
Maybe if you're Tom Hanks in Castaway. In real life, people contract lung damage from secondhand smoke; homes are mortgaged to fund gambling habits; families are destroyed by drunk drivers.
That's not to say that people can't partake in their vices responsibly. But the idea that any harms are limited to the person with the problem is just not true.
all the protective frameworks out there do not prevent someone from becoming a debt serf or excluded from the credit markets if they want to
That ignore the societal influence on an individual. If everyone around you gambles, you are more inclined to take up gambling.
I don't really understand why sports leagues require faith in their institution. Is the economy overleveraged on collateral debt swaps on league merchandise sells? Is our economy built on preteens in Nebraska believing their only way out of there is a worthwhile pursuit?
I'm not sure why I am supposed to care about the sanctity of that market, what are the consequences of it feeling rigged? and the FBI was on those insider trades instantly, so the sports side seems tightly regulated already whether I understand why a segment of that market needs certain assurances.
And the non-sporting trades I recognize the danger of, the liquidity in the market altering the outcome as someone in control of the outcome does something selfish. I say do what we can to avoid the death markets and the nuclear ones, but distributed bounties otherwise are very transparent and efficient wealth distribution mechanisms that fulfill other goals of compensating labor more correctly.
libertarianism is a cancer
It would be a site where folks could start auctions based on stuff they want from other folks. So Bob wants Janes jumper. He goes onto the site, creates an auction with an initial offer of $5. Jane is informed that Bob wants to buy her jumper. She turns down the offer. Bob raises his offer to $10. She declines the offer. Then Cane joins the auction and makes an offer for $15. Jane refuses that too.
One see where this is going. The point is that Jane cannot shutdown the auction and anyone can make a bid. The trajectory is that Jane will reach a point where she is forced to make a moral choice (much like in the film). Everyone has their price, even Jane in this case.
It is easy enough to imagine what besides jumpers will be placed on the site. It is an highly immoral idea and something akin to cyber mobbing or AI fake porn. So does the site exist already? Asking for a friend.