Comment by colesantiago
10 hours ago
Why does everything you don't like need to be banned?
Downvoters:
I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned anything in the history of technology.
10 hours ago
Why does everything you don't like need to be banned?
Downvoters:
I really doubt that you actually successfully 100% banned anything in the history of technology.
Prediction markets on death are an assassination market. That's why they're against the rules even on Polymarket and Kalshi.
Prediction markets on terrorist attacks and wars are one step back from that, but similar negative side effects are possible. And, regardless of what people are betting on, the corruption incentive appears where it did not previously, resulting in things like this.
(I don't think there's literally an Iranian missile operator opening Polymarket, taking out a position for "missile lands on Israel", and then pressing the launch button, but ultimately that's what uncensored markets with uncensored movement of money would enable)
1. It's not something I don't like, it's something plain illegal in most of the world, including the US under the Dodd-Frank act, which the current executive has decided to not enforce.
2. The reason it is illegal it is beyond obvious: basic economics and game theory explain you how dangerous it is tying real world events with financial incentives.
Illegal or not, trying to ban it won't work.
You'll just push it underground and it will get even worse.
The cat is out of the bag.
I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the “it’ll just go underground” claim seems silly. The negative effects of driving a gambling market to the economic fringe are already happening in the mainstream market: fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.
What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?
You don't need to "try to ban it", you ban it.
If your argument is "people are going to bet and influence world events on the dark web", the argument ignores economics.
The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to access and liquidity is small.
E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to influence the events at the same time, let alone how complex would such a system be.
Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the only way paying out these bets at scale is possible.
"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.
2 replies →
Why is everything you like protected from being banned?
This is an argument against all laws, which probably deserves more than a couple sentences.
Why do you apparently like a system that lets people bet on atrocities and then take steps to make said atrocities more likely?
So you are saying that if business entity starts a pharma company that creates a drug for some kind of novel disease, but the disease does not currently exist, they will take steps to make an epidemic of it more likely?
And you think banning it would 100% work?
and where did I say I liked it?
I'm not responding to your gish gallop BS.
Why do you (obviously) think betting markets are good?