> And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion.
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].
I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.
With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
Also, I really feel like so many of the people defending prediction markets don't understand the very basics of economy and behavioral science: incentives.
You're creating a legalized system with the incentives to influence events to make terrible stuff happen.
We've already seen huge bets on the deadline of US attack to Venezuela spike few hours/days before the actual aggression.
Which means that insiders not only hold information, but have the incentives to make stuff happen.
And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price.
Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit in terms of offering political protection. For example if you're a DEI NGO it might have been worth making bets on Trump winning so you have enough funds to ride out measures that target your traditional funding sources from gov/corps/edu.
There's three kinds of players on Polymarket & others
* The insider trading ones that will never lose money
* The wallstreetbets degenerates with enough money that it's a fun game even if you lose money
* People that have seen every chance they have at becoming moderately wealthy disappear under the current economic state of their country, where overwhelming debt is likely. The era of making it wealthy from a job is gone, an enormous part of the population is stuck going from small job to ubering, while being showered with videos of wealth from social media. The only way to make it out is gambling. Whether that's polymarket, sports betting, etc.
When you're already in a shit situation with no hope, "it's a zero sum game" isn't a good counterargument.
Buy a movie ticket and that money is gone. Throw $20 on a parlay for the weekend sportsball and thats actually interesting, something off script might happen. And that money might not actually be gone.
Typo. It's obvious it can't be a revenue. Previous paragraph is dealing with the size of online gambling industry, next paragraph is about the same but for prediction market.
Well, the previous paragraph compares how much people bet online with how much people spend on airfare, which also isn't quite right. It assumes 100% of what people bet is lost. For sure, the house always wins, but the amount lost is probably closer to 50-60% of what is quoted.
The final conclusion about the evolving and rising focus on "money" as a core value is interesting, and one that seems to make sense to me.
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.
I assure you that poor people have always been focused on money. Every time the rent is due, they are very aware. It's the wealthier folks who have historically had the privilege of being Bogleheads and ignore having to think about the financial implications of every decision they make.
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.
Yeah everyone likes to throw a stupid little comment at Robinhood but come on. My parents did not invest outside their 401k. My grandparents actually stuffed 20k in their mattress, must have been pretty good money when they put it under there.
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.
The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.
"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."
In addition to this article, I've recently read this one [1], where the reported received numerous violence and death threats from people who wanted him to change the a story he published to match what they bet on Polymarket.
Yeah this is a much more likely outcome of unregulated gambling... I expect to hear a LOT more of this. Also plan for a swift, complete erosion of trust in sports officiating.
I’d love to read about their Opsec failures. It seems like an offline conversation or Signal chat with disappearing messages could’ve saved these two. Any links to details on the case?
> Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.
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).
My local highstreet also had several betting shops where none previously existed. It's quite depressing really, and gambling invariably targets the poorest in the community.
We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.
Whenever I think to myself "how did things get this bad?", I also force myself to think, "how did they get good, in the first place?"
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.
The left is focused not on the correct thing (albeit a thing worthy of support), and the right refuse to acknowledge the benefit of regulation / legislation and are totally disenchanted with the possibility of politics while they just just blame the left for all their problems.
I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
"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. ..."
There is a class of prediction markets that are useful and seem immune to most of these problems : play money prediction markets. I've been enjoying them for years; I feel they provide a useful service to understand what is going on in the world, and they don't seem to provide the perverse incentives that we are seeing here. Oh, and they seem to work just as well.
Indeed. I also want to give a recommendation in favour of forecast aggregation platforms like Metaculus and GJOpen. Aggregating forecasts works well even without phrasing it as gambling, because you can still have users compete to be the most accurate.
Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading and perverse incentives. This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
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.
> Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading
Why?
If a prediction market is supposed to predict it makes no sense to exclude the best informed people. If I want to know the risk of a Boeing airliner crashing this year, Boeing insiders have much more to contribute than armchair observers.
And if a Boeing insider sabotages a plane to profit on a prediction market - that's illegal. If they're willing to break the law on sabotaging planes, they're surely also willing to break the law on insider trading at the same time. If we think this is a realistic risk, prediction markets should be banned entirely.
Only reason to exclude insiders is if the real purpose of a prediction market is recreational gambling.
> This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
Just because a rule was created after something bad happened doesn't mean that the rule is effective to prevent it from happening again. The most common result when they try to ban something without removing the incentive for it to happen is to cause it to happen less obviously. Then the rule (and all its unfortunate costs) gets credited with not observing the bad thing anymore, even though that's not the same as actually preventing it.
Notice that you can use the stock market in the same way as a prediction market. After that healthcare CEO got murdered the company's stock took a hit, as anyone could reasonably have predicted it would. That's a perverse incentive in line with betting that someone will kill the CEO. We don't really have a great way of preventing stock trading from creating that incentive, we mostly just rely on the fact that if you do the murder then murder is very illegal. But if that works for the stock market then why doesn't it work for prediction markets?
How much of this is fixed if a person is only able to bet token amounts on each outcome? Let's get crazy and make it $20. A few crazy people might run Sybil attacks but it'll be a lot more limited and obvious. Not that I'm opposed to consigning all these gambling apps back to the fiery depths from which they came, but if you do want to preserve the ability of healthy people to have a little bit of fun, limiting the bet size has almost no effect on that while drastically reducing the damage. It seems like a good compromise, if anyone is looking for one of those.
PredictIt operated with $850 limits for years, and overall this seemed fine. Limits of various sizes might make sense depending on the subject, where the risk of penalty greater outweighs the potential profits.
Part of the argument of prediction markets is that it incentivizes good forecasting. Theoretically if you wanted to concoct a novel political polling technique or rent some compute for a new hyper local weather model, you could recoup your costs via the prediction market.
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
We're seeing high bets the day before, such that the bet goes through without too many people noticing and adjusting. Maybe forbidding bets X days before deadline would help to reduce chance of insider trading?
Or just shut down the whole thing. Bets on bombing is truly immoral and downright despicable.
You sound like the people proposing how a social network could operate without making people addicted to doomscrolling. Anyone can make a worse service like that but it won't stop the superior service from operating, which is the problem.
I guess I wasn't clear that I'm proposing a statutory limit on gambling amounts, not a voluntary limit by the service, as an alternative to banning it entirely.
Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]:
“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."
This is naive. The people deciding about the bombing will profit most by taking a very large and unlikely position against the market’s predictions and then carrying it out immediately.
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.
I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is the early warning, which is a good thing in this case.
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.)
The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'.
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.
I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.
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.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
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.
My friend's idiot loser husband got addicted to sports betting and day trading and lost their life savings and even spent kids college funds. She found out because he had started to apply for a home equity loan to catch up on some of his debts and they called her to verify some paperwork.
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.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
> 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.
Or the young person who needs a job and doesn't yet have OP's fully formed understanding of exactly where the line is - apparently gambling bad/ ad tech OK.
I don't like Amazon personally. But how is it like gambling or social media? I guess shopping can be an addiction but wouldn't that condemn the entire retail sector?
Naive? I think it shows a higher than average level of awareness. Gambling is rent-seeking that targets vulnerable individuals. It's really only a small step away from dealing in addicting drugs; and is in some ways worse, because it addicts not just individuals, but also cities and countries who get used to the tax output.
Morals start and stop somewhere, please don't attack people when they actually show some proper morals on this forum despite the employment of many members here.
this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.
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.
I'd be ok with the rule only if the candidate liked the field. I respect anyone who is willing to have a bad time in order to put food on the table, and be upfront about it. There's plenty of psychopathic candidates where I won't get that datapoint simply because they were luckier with the job market.
> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity
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.
> It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics.
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?
I agree, to a point, but it seems like this is the false dilemma that comes up every time, meanwhile there are achohol, fast food, and gambling ads imbued in nearly all popular entertainment and everywhere in public.
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.
Personal liberties are overrated, and a functioning society is underrated. OnlyFans, sports betting, and junk food appeal to some people with low impulse control and high time preference in the short term, but have massive negative consequences on everyone in the long run.
It's just not going to be a clear hard line. Would it be ok for alcohol companies to sneak in an additive that makes those who consume their product ten times as likely to develop alcoholism? I think that's a different scenario than just selling a product, and I think that there is a lot of corporate activity just like the former.
What you're arguing for is more or less what the status quo has been for gambling. Like gambling? Cool! You can go to Vegas or a casino on native lands to do it. We have geofencing for mobile apps as well if you don't want to sit next to a smoker pulling a slot machine. Curbing it like this -- but not making it entirely unavailable -- acts as a buffer against the social malaise described in the article.
an added negative aspect of going further down the banning path is:
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/…
25% is too low, I think it's more like 80% of alcohol sales to drinkers that consume unhealthy amounts (whether that makes you an "alcoholic" or not is rather subject).
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?).
Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"
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.
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.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
> have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
Or an AI company acting as a casino with offers, boosted usage and limits to get you addicted into spending more tokens + credits on their digital slot machine which accepts 'tokens' as an exchange for 'promises of productivity' and 'intelligence'.
If the output doesn't work, roll the dice again and spend more tokens.
Anyone who worked in it? Like someone who needed a salary took a job, and now due to your grandstanding they're locked in to keep working in that industry because they can't get a job elsewhere?
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
The intended effect is to feel good about oneself, so I’m sure it’s working fine.
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.
Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.
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.
It has been going on in the US for years - even when it was illegal, there was still illegal gambling and more then one person has been caught throwing games. Sports beet was always legal in Law Vegas though (at least from what I can tell), but most states banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose#Betting_scandal,_per...
Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!
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.
what do you mean legal "for many years"? it was never illegal. we have had telephone betting for decades, gambling for centuries...the reason online gambling was banned in the US was because the biggest donors to both parties requested it...there is no other reason because banning is a proven way to maximise harm (and even overly restrictive regulation has been proven to be very poor, as in Hong Kong).
thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
Super surprised to see Ireland mentioned at the top comment here. I've always thought it catastrophic that betting companies could advertise on TV here, but never really considered how other countries compared to us. Is it really the case that we're outliers? Would love to see laws change here.
i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.
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.
> and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
> anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
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.
Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working at one of these places had other options & chose to sell their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire them.
Here in the Netherlands we have a big building housing a pro gambling lobbyist organization. Their sole goal is to bribe politicians and spread misinformation on public tv channels. A typical example of rottenness inside the western society.
Gambling is the only vice where the store doesn't close. Even the prostitutes go to sleep for a while. But you can drive to the casino and gamble it all away anytime.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. It's exactly the same problem.
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
Care to disclose the company you work for? Is that the stakeholders stance too, or just your own? Did you disclose this policy to your bosses if any?
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.
It's tough, because I think outlawing 'vices' like gambling is an infringement on your individual freedom - but when it's done with an enterprise it's so much more problematic. Thinking about for instance tobacco companies vs locally grown in the backyard.
We also outlaw vices like physical violence and property theft.
Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.
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.
I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.
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).
There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.
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.
Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute.
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).
Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
If you wager in a prediction market, isn't it expected that there will be some insider trading or thrown results? Because there are clearly people who know when and where bombs will land, and financial incentive to throw results.
Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
I think we got “lucky” for a while when prediction markets were a small niche interest and they provided a weird novel way of making predictions.
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.
> Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
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.
The real power in prediction markets is creating a market for what you want to occur - it's a tangible method to leverage hyperstition.
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.
How? Some guy wants Polymarket gone so he bets $1 billion that it will be gone. Since this is absurd, everybody bets against him and makes a tidy profit. Whatever this is you’re proposing it doesn’t work.
MAGA gets rich on bombing Iran? The "Uno reverse card" of millions of dollar paid out if you assassinate Trump came into play recently. This one regime is not trying for plausible deniability, though, which is not quite a reverse of just using the prediction market tool, too.
Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets predicted), people could soon literally lose their house on a bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
Worse: It won't even be your own bet that does the damage.
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.
Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society.
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.
'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling. Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not fighting tooth and nail on this.
If I made a platform like that, I'd be RICO'd after the FBI kicked down my door and confiscated everything I own.
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.
If you don't mind not having US customers, it's easy enough to get an online gambling license in a few jurisdictions, maybe $20-50k all in (Nevis and Anjouan are a couple of the more notable ones), at which point you can serve a large portion of the world. This was basically the scenario polymarket was in for awhile until they started making inroads into US regulatory apparatus.
Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions.
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.
> the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome
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.
Those predictions are just market data, market data is often very expensive (my data usage at work is probably about $100k a year and i'm not even a trader), I imagine polymarket will be too when they are more established.
I have mixed feelings being a parent now. It can be fun to get a mystery box or pack. But it does feed on the anticipation and rush of surprise. Kids seem to lack the self control to stop. Video games seem the worst to me since they're so intangible it's easier to get carried away before others notice.
LEGO does it too, with "mystery minifigure" packages.
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.
I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.
Except there is still adverse selection, just like there is in the stock market. People who have inside information are going to bet more, and you will take the other side of that bet not realizing that has happened.
Insider trading does not (and should not) apply to prediction markets.
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".
I've heard people say this but it really only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than 10 or 20 seconds.
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.
Prediction markets are nothing like stock markets. Maybe they are more like binary options markets. In the UK for example, these were for a long time regulated as a gambling product, and for the past 7 years have been banned to retail consumers.
> 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.
The problem is that these markets allow to translate political power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a vested interest in causing destruction.
Just game-theoretically, suppose you bet $100 on some disaster.
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?
Search for "assassination markets", which is a longish treatment of this idea. Specifically, people collectively can bet large sums of money that X will not be killed Thursday at 5pm. And anyone can take the other side at insanely good odds...
Pessimistically, i imagine that's what they meant by "enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy". Like its a lot easier to destroy an art piece in a museum than to create one.
>I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.
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.
These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations where humans can control the outcome.
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.
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.
Who is to say if it rained or not? Well now they are a target.
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.
That was a Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian [1] but your point stands.
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.
You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
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?
> 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.
"where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position"
To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
Or heck, with the amount of $$$ on the line, cash-strapped nation states could even finance their warfare this way. Like that $14M bet on when an attack would land in Israel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401044 -- that could buy a lot of drones!
Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of people who know things we want to know.
>A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.
That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
The big issue underlying gambling, betting, alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive stuff all the way to fentanyl, is that people may literally lose their mind over it, at least party. A heavy addict ceases to be a responsible adult who can act reasonably and autonomously, and becomes driven by impulses they cannot control, like a schizophrenic who cannot control the voices in their head.
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.
Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for.
It's something without any consequence or meaning.
The Author mixing that with the dictator and his cronies making buck from their position is offensive.
We have the 'official' stock (prediction) market regulated by the SEC, FINRA, CFTC, ... , yet (allegedly) insider trading isn't unheard of. We have the more recent crypto (prediction) markets with (allegedly) complete market manipulation where those same regulators stepped in after being woken up late to the party. Now we have these 'open range' prediction markets with the CFTC wrestling for getting a toe in without stepping on those of the casino, sports betting, Native American gaming, lotteries ... interests?
Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.[1]
Not really commenting on the politics side, but do Americans realise sports betting has been legal in other countries for decades? (Since 1960 in the UK at least).
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?
Actually complex math under the scene is harder than you think. If a billionaire tries to pump a "bad" policy, every smart trader sees the arbitrage and bets against them. They’d eventually donate their net worth to anyone who knows the truth. It's the ultimate tax on being wrong.
Today Integrity is merely means to score more views and likes
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.
I agree with Thompson about these kinds of prediction markets, but predicting horrible catastrophes is one of the prosocial early use cases of these things.
Agreed, as long as it's a catastrophe that the bettors can't cause, but for which advance warning can mitigate harms.
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.
Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause.
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.
All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
I've been active and profitably trading in prediction markets for a long time now, but I think this perspective is also not helpful.
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.
It's also a bit overblown. If you could rig a war, you would stand to make a lot more money playing the stock market than small potatoes prediction markets. A lot of money has been on the line based on which party wins elections even before prediction markets existed (see fracking or pipeline project approval as obvious examples).
Gambling outside of equities and securities is a negative externality. (Investment in startups, goods, etc. makes the economy spin. Investing in what hoop a ball goes through does no good at all.)
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.
It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do. Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.
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.
I agree that this is bad but the libertarian in me says "the market will resolve this because who in their right mind would be a counterparty to these bets knowing that there is so much insider trading?". But then again, many people are not in their right mind.
Prediction market creators making the case that their existing is some sort of a market efficiency play is the most laughable thing I have ever heard.
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.
Gambling is flourishing not because we're in a low-trust world, as the article says, but because the living conditions of an increasingly large part of the population as such that they cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life. We're returning to the social dynamics that dominated much of history (if you consider how much gambling was a scourge, from ancient Rome to thousands of years of history in China).
Still, yes. I can trust that if I were in an accident, people passing by would be decent enough to try to help me. To see a place where you'd have the rational expectation of being robbed by passers-by, see Russia.
Yes, they have. They’ve made tons of great products and services that you use every day without even thinking about it, in contrast to Russia for example. It’s a shame you don’t see how much they've improved our quality of life.
You must be confused. Most of the products that end in your hands were made by hard working folks from the Global South. All Westerers do is own the companies, the labour and the politicians from those countries. But don't worry, sooner rather than later, even Westerners will have to relearn what working truly means.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you also craft an Etherium contract to do the same thing as these prediction markets. So even without a company "framing all the markets" you could still have gambling based on base eth?
I like prediction markets because they offer much more diverse markets compared to stocks/options and sports betting, which are far more limited. The downsides are limited liquidity and fraud, but this is endemic to other markets too.
An argument not mentioned here and which I didn’t appreciate until I actually took part in these markets myself, is that you need a supply of stupid/uninformed people to take the other side of the informed people’s bets.(In economic terms, no-trade theorems apply.) That suggests to me that the dream of perfect information revelation isn’t going to come true. Instead, the liquid markets will be those with a large supply of marks, who bet for identity reasons or who are simply ignorant and naive. (Currently polymarket gives a 16% ish probability that Trump will lose office this year. Sounds like wishful thinking to me?)
Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract * 100 right?
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.
If the odds are set correctly, you should have the same EV on either side of a bet.
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.
I agree with you overall but I'm not sure the Trump bet is the best example.
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.
So for example "shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far" sounds like the kind of "information" that has not yet made it into a mainstream news outlet, probably for good reason. And indeed when I searched, I found it on The Daily Beast, whose reliability I doubt.
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!
Checks annuity tables for an 80 year old making it to 81...you giving 1:6 odds? Sure I will take that bet because the actual odds are only a small fraction. If I spread out the risk on multiple positions, I can make a very good return taking those types of bets.
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...
Attaching payouts to events skews the incentives. A baseball player gets the incentive to fuck up on purpose. Fortunately politicians are much more honest and would never make a decision to profit from a bet in a similar dishonest way.
Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make their stocks go up.
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.
While many of us try to stay true as possible to be Libertarian when we say we are, this, like smoking in public, are not hills I’m willing to die on if someone decides to restrict.
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest office will scam their own supporters
The US government and private interests are clearly incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime and the US’s ability to project power as the world leading reserve currency.
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.
Forget pumping. He set free a high profile white collar criminal, who in return deposited 2 billion real dollars into Trump shitcoin exchange. And NO ONE bat the eye, not a single congressman or regulator body. Check and balances, my ass. More like cheeks and obeisances.
No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and we’re gonna take ‘em for all they got” - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
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.
Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.
This sounds like everyone is not perfect therefore no one should be singled out as a bad guy, everyone is equally shady. Which is objectively not true. Even the shit IT practices like stealing private information or stealing copyrighted property can be "rationalized" to benefit better targeted advertisement or better LLM generators and so on. Gambling on the other hand is pure 100% social damage with zero redeeming qualities. Even drugs have some positive aspects to them, unlike gambling.
This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.
Reminds me of what Frank Sobotka says in The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country, build shit here. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit. We're terrible at using law to manage the negative externalities.
I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
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.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
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.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
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.
Trump and his Tech Bros enable this to make money for themselves its like Trump is turning the whole of America into Alternate reality Hill Valley of 1985 in Back to the Future
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."
Ah, you beat me to it. I learned about assassination markets in a previous post about the overall gambling/prediction markets topic a few weeks ago; the concept is so coherent that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
If someone want him dead, someone have to bet that million on the target being alive at a specific date. Unless someone plan to do the execution themselves, the bet must be lost for the target to be unalive !
In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net result is that if one of the people who bet on it happening makes it happen, they are being paid by the people betting against it, in a plausibly deniable way.
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.
I am not sure, but you don’t have to technically bet on assassination. You can bet on an event which would happen as a result of said assassination. X won’t get re-elected. Company Y CEO will change in 2027. This is artist Z last tour. Athlete K won’t participate in this event etc.
> Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries
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.
Can't speak for everyone here, but I (as a US citizen) am way less bothered by sports gambling specifically than I am by generalized Kalshi-type gambling being abused by powerful insiders in the federal government (or other institutions). Like yeah I don't think it's great that we've enabled yet another route for young men to completely ruin their lives, but civil liberties, personal responsibility, etc. etc. etc.
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.
Well, we were able to observe in the impact of legalization of online betting in real time, watching every other ad slot during sports games turning into gambling app ads designed to hook 20 something men into lighting their paycheck on fire for a brief dopamine hit.
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).
Americans would definitely not be shocked at the idea of gambling being legal, and I don't know why you'd think they would be. The US has gambling tourist destinations.
"Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries."
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.
> If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly gambling.
The issue is the combined risk of insider trading coupled with the bias of disaster-centric betting, or at least event-centric betting. This means if you have the means to create an “out of the ordinary” event you have a strong incentive to make it happen and to bet on it. These must be controllable events, so not natural or complex systems. On the gentler side it would be sports fixing, which has always existed. On the worse side it would be causing war, making economic decisions that will impact many, betting on people death and so on. These kind of things are seemingly already happening to a certain degree.
You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app. This isn't like the stock market which is a vehicle for wealth for hundreds of millions. Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
> Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes.
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.
> I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
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.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
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.
You put your own case powerfully, but you don’t seem to have reacted to Derek Thompson‘s case, except to say that you’re not bothered about gambling addiction. (And why not? If people predictably do things that are bad for themselves, that damages the efficiency case for free markets and everything.)
I did read his article, and there are the geopolitical events and the sporting events he talks about.
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.
That seems to imply concern for the gambler, who at least has chosen to play.
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
Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.
Americans coming to the realisation that much of the rest of the world came to decades ago and acting like it’s a massive revelation is…absolutely par for the course for the US. Just hurry up and implode already.
the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the species seems more like bait than the article
Is there a site which implements the ideas behind the file Indecent Proposal[1]?
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.
Why? I find Polymarket and these gambling sites just as bad. Is AI with it's fake porn is any better? And just yesterday, Meta and Google was found responsible for addiction[1].
How is this worse? I guess I forgot to say that a site like that would be simply be a poke in the eye of how stupid the internet has become. It's ridiculous to see folks not liking this idea yet finding the idea of betting on wars to be ok.
> And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion.
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...
I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.
With proper constraints, there is a major positive externality in aggregating public and private information through market mechanisms. Robin Hanson wrote about this subject extensively. Dismissing it outright as a zero-sum game is a bit naive.
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Also, I really feel like so many of the people defending prediction markets don't understand the very basics of economy and behavioral science: incentives.
You're creating a legalized system with the incentives to influence events to make terrible stuff happen.
We've already seen huge bets on the deadline of US attack to Venezuela spike few hours/days before the actual aggression.
Which means that insiders not only hold information, but have the incentives to make stuff happen.
And naysayers (which seem to be dropping from the same basket of NFT/crypto cultists) will tell you that this is about probability and information discovery.
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It can be useful for insurance/hedging purposes.
For example if you're a European farmer it might be rational to protect yourself from fertiliser price swings by buying/shorting natural gas futures, derivates or long dated delivery contracts. Polymarket bets on specific geopolitical events are just another option for this, which can be attractive depending on the price.
Prediction markets have a pretty unique benefit in terms of offering political protection. For example if you're a DEI NGO it might have been worth making bets on Trump winning so you have enough funds to ride out measures that target your traditional funding sources from gov/corps/edu.
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There's three kinds of players on Polymarket & others
* The insider trading ones that will never lose money
* The wallstreetbets degenerates with enough money that it's a fun game even if you lose money
* People that have seen every chance they have at becoming moderately wealthy disappear under the current economic state of their country, where overwhelming debt is likely. The era of making it wealthy from a job is gone, an enormous part of the population is stuck going from small job to ubering, while being showered with videos of wealth from social media. The only way to make it out is gambling. Whether that's polymarket, sports betting, etc.
When you're already in a shit situation with no hope, "it's a zero sum game" isn't a good counterargument.
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Buy a movie ticket and that money is gone. Throw $20 on a parlay for the weekend sportsball and thats actually interesting, something off script might happen. And that money might not actually be gone.
There is genuine value in a wisdom of the crowds assessment of future events that is only sharpened up by the requirement to put money on the line.
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Thank you for this call out. I was blown away by that number because it would have meant volume was maybe pushing 1T.
It's DT, don't expect honesty from his posts (unless he is bashing unions or workers, he's very honest about that).
Typo. It's obvious it can't be a revenue. Previous paragraph is dealing with the size of online gambling industry, next paragraph is about the same but for prediction market.
Well, the previous paragraph compares how much people bet online with how much people spend on airfare, which also isn't quite right. It assumes 100% of what people bet is lost. For sure, the house always wins, but the amount lost is probably closer to 50-60% of what is quoted.
Same as Block booking crypto trades as revenue.
Are the referenced companies referring to their volume as revenue?
The final conclusion about the evolving and rising focus on "money" as a core value is interesting, and one that seems to make sense to me.
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.
I assure you that poor people have always been focused on money. Every time the rent is due, they are very aware. It's the wealthier folks who have historically had the privilege of being Bogleheads and ignore having to think about the financial implications of every decision they make.
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.
But now the desire for earthly riches took a role similar to religion and it is being weaponized to extract even more wealth from the working class.
Yeah everyone likes to throw a stupid little comment at Robinhood but come on. My parents did not invest outside their 401k. My grandparents actually stuffed 20k in their mattress, must have been pretty good money when they put it under there.
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.
The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/court-idf-reser...
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."
In addition to this article, I've recently read this one [1], where the reported received numerous violence and death threats from people who wanted him to change the a story he published to match what they bet on Polymarket.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
Yeah this is a much more likely outcome of unregulated gambling... I expect to hear a LOT more of this. Also plan for a swift, complete erosion of trust in sports officiating.
This is the literally the only use of prediction markets in the real world - insider trading leaks information
Hey, that's not fair! It's also used for degenerate gambling.
I’d love to read about their Opsec failures. It seems like an offline conversation or Signal chat with disappearing messages could’ve saved these two. Any links to details on the case?
If you thought that was bad look at spx futures before trump iran announcement. $1.5b placement made 5 mins before trump spoke.
> Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Coates
You forgot to mention the high street ...
Mine has a pub, a butcher, a baker, a sandwich shop, 3 coffee shops and 5 bookmakers.
No candlestick maker? I'm disappointed ;)
My local highstreet also had several betting shops where none previously existed. It's quite depressing really, and gambling invariably targets the poorest in the community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub-a-dub-dub
South Park had the most honest alcohol ad, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJWEJuKXZyk
Most addictions will ruin your life - whether it is gambling, drugs or alcohol.
Right, so why advertise gambling or any other of them?
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We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.
Whenever I think to myself "how did things get this bad?", I also force myself to think, "how did they get good, in the first place?"
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.
They got good through legislation.
The left is focused not on the correct thing (albeit a thing worthy of support), and the right refuse to acknowledge the benefit of regulation / legislation and are totally disenchanted with the possibility of politics while they just just blame the left for all their problems.
I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai...
There is a class of prediction markets that are useful and seem immune to most of these problems : play money prediction markets. I've been enjoying them for years; I feel they provide a useful service to understand what is going on in the world, and they don't seem to provide the perverse incentives that we are seeing here. Oh, and they seem to work just as well.
Indeed. I also want to give a recommendation in favour of forecast aggregation platforms like Metaculus and GJOpen. Aggregating forecasts works well even without phrasing it as gambling, because you can still have users compete to be the most accurate.
Do you have a recommendation for a service? I'd like to try it out.
Is it specifically the financial maneuvering you like? Or do you want to test your prediction skills?
If you like financial maneuvering, Manifold is a popular play-money prediction market.
If you want to test your forecasting skill, treat the current Spring Cup on Metaculus as a warmup and then compete properly in the next seasonal cup.
These "competitive forecasting" platforms seem very interesting. What do you need to be good at this sort of skill?
Strong beliefs that
- things rarely change,
- noise dominates most measurements,
- a good story is not evidence,
- it is very rarely possible to know things more certainly than 10--90 %.
Phrases to look up are "confirmation bias", "availability heuristic", "uncertainty calibration", "outside view", "Fermi method".
Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading and perverse incentives. This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
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.
> Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading
Why?
If a prediction market is supposed to predict it makes no sense to exclude the best informed people. If I want to know the risk of a Boeing airliner crashing this year, Boeing insiders have much more to contribute than armchair observers.
And if a Boeing insider sabotages a plane to profit on a prediction market - that's illegal. If they're willing to break the law on sabotaging planes, they're surely also willing to break the law on insider trading at the same time. If we think this is a realistic risk, prediction markets should be banned entirely.
Only reason to exclude insiders is if the real purpose of a prediction market is recreational gambling.
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How do you suppose that would work? The only predictions possible are things which are virtually impossible to influence, like atmospheric events?
> This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act).
Just because a rule was created after something bad happened doesn't mean that the rule is effective to prevent it from happening again. The most common result when they try to ban something without removing the incentive for it to happen is to cause it to happen less obviously. Then the rule (and all its unfortunate costs) gets credited with not observing the bad thing anymore, even though that's not the same as actually preventing it.
Notice that you can use the stock market in the same way as a prediction market. After that healthcare CEO got murdered the company's stock took a hit, as anyone could reasonably have predicted it would. That's a perverse incentive in line with betting that someone will kill the CEO. We don't really have a great way of preventing stock trading from creating that incentive, we mostly just rely on the fact that if you do the murder then murder is very illegal. But if that works for the stock market then why doesn't it work for prediction markets?
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I don't buy it. It can easily be mirrored to hard money bets.
> There is a class of prediction markets that are useful
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.
How much of this is fixed if a person is only able to bet token amounts on each outcome? Let's get crazy and make it $20. A few crazy people might run Sybil attacks but it'll be a lot more limited and obvious. Not that I'm opposed to consigning all these gambling apps back to the fiery depths from which they came, but if you do want to preserve the ability of healthy people to have a little bit of fun, limiting the bet size has almost no effect on that while drastically reducing the damage. It seems like a good compromise, if anyone is looking for one of those.
I'd bet that a significant majority of prediction market revenue comes from people who bet big.
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.
That would be fine by me, but I don't think they need massive revenue to be viable. Certainly they would have to downsize from where they are now.
I bet that most of their revenue doesn't come from people who want to bet big!
If only there were some kind of market where we could materialise our bets...
PredictIt operated with $850 limits for years, and overall this seemed fine. Limits of various sizes might make sense depending on the subject, where the risk of penalty greater outweighs the potential profits.
Part of the argument of prediction markets is that it incentivizes good forecasting. Theoretically if you wanted to concoct a novel political polling technique or rent some compute for a new hyper local weather model, you could recoup your costs via the prediction market.
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
We're seeing high bets the day before, such that the bet goes through without too many people noticing and adjusting. Maybe forbidding bets X days before deadline would help to reduce chance of insider trading?
Or just shut down the whole thing. Bets on bombing is truly immoral and downright despicable.
You sound like the people proposing how a social network could operate without making people addicted to doomscrolling. Anyone can make a worse service like that but it won't stop the superior service from operating, which is the problem.
I guess I wasn't clear that I'm proposing a statutory limit on gambling amounts, not a voluntary limit by the service, as an alternative to banning it entirely.
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The article’s “worst case” is not dark enough.
The real evil is when someone ensures the famine occurs so they can profit from an outside betting position.
Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]:
“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...
This is naive. The people deciding about the bombing will profit most by taking a very large and unlikely position against the market’s predictions and then carrying it out immediately.
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.
> blocking a door for a few minutes. Or betting against many trains and throwing a hopefully fake body onto a busy line.
Not necessary. If you just bet against them being punctual always, you'll have a 80% plus success rate.
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Oh,
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.
And as a cherry on the cake: making a bet a few hours before so they can profit (even more) from it.
I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is the early warning, which is a good thing in this case.
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.)
> (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading
The people profiting aren't buying the bombs with their own money.
>bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits
You don’t actually believe bombs are sold without out a proper margin.
The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'.
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.
I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city.
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.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Eadington
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My friend's idiot loser husband got addicted to sports betting and day trading and lost their life savings and even spent kids college funds. She found out because he had started to apply for a home equity loan to catch up on some of his debts and they called her to verify some paperwork.
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.
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> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
I think the difference between the two is Amazon and Meta do provide some utility to balance it out, whereas gambling is purely a net negative on society. You can be young and naive enough to believe you're "making the world a better place" in big tech. You can't work on pure gambling products without being a scammer at heart; you know what you signed up for.
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> 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.
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Or the young person who needs a job and doesn't yet have OP's fully formed understanding of exactly where the line is - apparently gambling bad/ ad tech OK.
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I don't like Amazon personally. But how is it like gambling or social media? I guess shopping can be an addiction but wouldn't that condemn the entire retail sector?
Naive? I think it shows a higher than average level of awareness. Gambling is rent-seeking that targets vulnerable individuals. It's really only a small step away from dealing in addicting drugs; and is in some ways worse, because it addicts not just individuals, but also cities and countries who get used to the tax output.
Morals start and stop somewhere, please don't attack people when they actually show some proper morals on this forum despite the employment of many members here.
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this is a false equivalence. Amazon and Meta have caused plenty of damage, companies in our capitalist economies are bad etc. But shipping you books or connecting you to other people isn't inherently evil. There's nothing wrong with the service itself. Gambling is. It's been a vice in virtually every culture for thousands of years. It's akin to peddling drugs. The practice itself is corrosive and destroys people.
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.
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I'd be ok with the rule only if the candidate liked the field. I respect anyone who is willing to have a bad time in order to put food on the table, and be upfront about it. There's plenty of psychopathic candidates where I won't get that datapoint simply because they were luckier with the job market.
> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity
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.
> It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics.
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?
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I agree, to a point, but it seems like this is the false dilemma that comes up every time, meanwhile there are achohol, fast food, and gambling ads imbued in nearly all popular entertainment and everywhere in public.
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.
Personal liberties are overrated, and a functioning society is underrated. OnlyFans, sports betting, and junk food appeal to some people with low impulse control and high time preference in the short term, but have massive negative consequences on everyone in the long run.
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It's just not going to be a clear hard line. Would it be ok for alcohol companies to sneak in an additive that makes those who consume their product ten times as likely to develop alcoholism? I think that's a different scenario than just selling a product, and I think that there is a lot of corporate activity just like the former.
What you're arguing for is more or less what the status quo has been for gambling. Like gambling? Cool! You can go to Vegas or a casino on native lands to do it. We have geofencing for mobile apps as well if you don't want to sit next to a smoker pulling a slot machine. Curbing it like this -- but not making it entirely unavailable -- acts as a buffer against the social malaise described in the article.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why not just ban the thing you don't want and just criminalise the whaling?
an added negative aspect of going further down the banning path is:
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/…
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25% is too low, I think it's more like 80% of alcohol sales to drinkers that consume unhealthy amounts (whether that makes you an "alcoholic" or not is rather subject).
Alcohol, especially hard alcohol, used to have limits on advertising. Baseball is now literally sponsored by/partnered with Polymarket.
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?).
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Well I think a good way to differentiate things that are guilty-pleasures like a twinky and gambling is to take a survey of people and see what % say "I wish I had never ever gambled in the first place" vs "I wish I never had been allowed to buy twinkies"
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.
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> I don't have a solution,
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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532954
The real litmus test for your beliefs is gun rights. Taken to it's logical conclusion you would think that you would be staunchly pro 2A.
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> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
It's a very different kind of addiction.
Working in sports bettings is like working on an online casino.
They earn billions from pushing gambling as well, substantial portion of their ads.
A feed is optimized for engagement.
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...
Gambling and weapons (or "defence" depending on perspective) are two industries I refuse to work on principle.
On my deathbed I want to look back on life and feel I've made a small positive impact on the world.
If your deathbed is at the hands of an adversary that beat you because you didn't have any weapons, do you think your views might change?
> I'm in senior leadership, and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
or even if they are pro-gambling jeez would you never be able to work with someone you disagreed with politically
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> have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
Or an AI company acting as a casino with offers, boosted usage and limits to get you addicted into spending more tokens + credits on their digital slot machine which accepts 'tokens' as an exchange for 'promises of productivity' and 'intelligence'.
If the output doesn't work, roll the dice again and spend more tokens.
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Anyone who worked in it? Like someone who needed a salary took a job, and now due to your grandstanding they're locked in to keep working in that industry because they can't get a job elsewhere?
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
The intended effect is to feel good about oneself, so I’m sure it’s working fine.
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.
Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.
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.
It has been going on in the US for years - even when it was illegal, there was still illegal gambling and more then one person has been caught throwing games. Sports beet was always legal in Law Vegas though (at least from what I can tell), but most states banned it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Rose#Betting_scandal,_per...
Yep. Gambling is Australia's version of America's gun problem. We've recently banned kids from social media, yet we're apparently unable to ban gambling ads from kids content. Every time the (various levels of) government here talk about even the tiniest new gambling related regulation, somehow - definitely totally without any brown paper bags whatsoever going into any back pockets - it doesn't seem to actually happen. Magic!
>Same in Australia and only recently
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.
If you're from a place like Malta it's basically the only way to do IT and perhaps "escape" it later.
what do you mean legal "for many years"? it was never illegal. we have had telephone betting for decades, gambling for centuries...the reason online gambling was banned in the US was because the biggest donors to both parties requested it...there is no other reason because banning is a proven way to maximise harm (and even overly restrictive regulation has been proven to be very poor, as in Hong Kong).
thanks for telling everyone you are in senior leadership
Super surprised to see Ireland mentioned at the top comment here. I've always thought it catastrophic that betting companies could advertise on TV here, but never really considered how other countries compared to us. Is it really the case that we're outliers? Would love to see laws change here.
Even at the best of times, the United States does not have a strong culture of observing or learning from other nations.
i live in a small midwest town and had the privilege of watching it slowly atrophy into near nothing over time. the steel mill closing, 2008 market crash, fentanyl crisis, covid, both shopping malls turning into liminal spaces frozen in 1994.
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.
So cyberpunk is a real outlook after all hearing your situation.
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At the very least we should make it like smoking. Let people do it if they want but definitely dont allow advertisements.
So you want them to keep working on those products?
> and have made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired.
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.
...or you could look at their resume. btw, maybe i'm missing the joke, but working on the system you're describing would put you on the black list.
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> anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
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.
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God forbid some poor soul who needs a job to feed their family works for a casino. snob
> made it clear that anyone who has worked on these products should not be hired
As in, even a dev, HR, etc person having worked for an online gambling company? I feel this may be a slippery slope..
Everything is a slippery slope to somewhere. That doesn't mean you can't draw lines.
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Don't forget the janitors. They're all accomplices of the peddlers of misery.
Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working at one of these places had other options & chose to sell their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire them.
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Actions have consequences. You can justify your actions however you want, and I can judge you for them.
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Here in the Netherlands we have a big building housing a pro gambling lobbyist organization. Their sole goal is to bribe politicians and spread misinformation on public tv channels. A typical example of rottenness inside the western society.
They’re the financial equivalent of recreational drugs.
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.
Gambling is the only vice where the store doesn't close. Even the prostitutes go to sleep for a while. But you can drive to the casino and gamble it all away anytime.
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Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. It's exactly the same problem.
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
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Care to disclose the company you work for? Is that the stakeholders stance too, or just your own? Did you disclose this policy to your bosses if any?
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.
It's tough, because I think outlawing 'vices' like gambling is an infringement on your individual freedom - but when it's done with an enterprise it's so much more problematic. Thinking about for instance tobacco companies vs locally grown in the backyard.
We also outlaw vices like physical violence and property theft.
Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
I was reminded of this bizarre article: https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-le...
Discussed a little bit here:
Creating a fake Indian cricket league - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580599 - Sept 2023 (10 comments)
I got into weather betting markets earlier this year since I figured those can't possibly be rigged, it is automated weather station data yet some groups in the market know the truth a few minutes before everyone else based on the way the markets move.
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.
I'd be curious to know why you decided to bet on weather patterns in the first place. Seems like a very roundabout way to lose money.
Absolutely every single thing you could ever bet on can be rigged.
> said the low of the day was 17
People are gambling on the "low of the day?"
Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.
I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.
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).
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There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.
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.
The high speed traders win, and you're not part of the club.
it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?
Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute.
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).
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Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
If you wager in a prediction market, isn't it expected that there will be some insider trading or thrown results? Because there are clearly people who know when and where bombs will land, and financial incentive to throw results.
Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
Prediction markets are just inside traders profiting off gambling addicts. If you are not an inside trader, you're the loser paying out.
I think we got “lucky” for a while when prediction markets were a small niche interest and they provided a weird novel way of making predictions.
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.
That's absolutely it. Cheaters or chumps, neither of whom should be encouraged.
Or you are simply better at predicting the future than most other people.
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> Thus it makes sense to not participate at all, unless YOU are the one doing the cheating.
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.
The real power in prediction markets is creating a market for what you want to occur - it's a tangible method to leverage hyperstition.
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.
So are you advocating for the idea that the wealthy should be able to control history then, by nature of having the largest amount of betting capital?
Don't the wealthy already "control history" by having the "largest amount of capital"?
I'm arguing for taking advantage of this before you can't.
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How? Some guy wants Polymarket gone so he bets $1 billion that it will be gone. Since this is absurd, everybody bets against him and makes a tidy profit. Whatever this is you’re proposing it doesn’t work.
I think they're saying you bet $1 billion it will not be gone, and someone takes that bet and kills Polymarket (How?)
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Wait, people can bet on bombings now? What the hell man.
MAGA gets rich on bombing Iran? The "Uno reverse card" of millions of dollar paid out if you assassinate Trump came into play recently. This one regime is not trying for plausible deniability, though, which is not quite a reverse of just using the prediction market tool, too.
Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets predicted), people could soon literally lose their house on a bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
Worse: It won't even be your own bet that does the damage.
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.
Bet your shirt AND the farm from the comfort of your phone
as a wise guy once said, "a grown man made a wager; he lost."
Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society.
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.
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'Predictions' market is the silliest loophole for gambling. Honestly, more surprised Fanduel, DraftKings and the like who have spent millions on lobbying and buying licenses, are not fighting tooth and nail on this.
If I made a platform like that, I'd be RICO'd after the FBI kicked down my door and confiscated everything I own.
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.
If you don't mind not having US customers, it's easy enough to get an online gambling license in a few jurisdictions, maybe $20-50k all in (Nevis and Anjouan are a couple of the more notable ones), at which point you can serve a large portion of the world. This was basically the scenario polymarket was in for awhile until they started making inroads into US regulatory apparatus.
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Especially when the "prediction" part isn't even part of the product, it is an accidental byproduct. No one pays for access to the predictions.
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.
> the more liquidity that gets dumped on a particular outcome, the more motivation there is to tamper with the real-world outcome
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.
Those predictions are just market data, market data is often very expensive (my data usage at work is probably about $100k a year and i'm not even a trader), I imagine polymarket will be too when they are more established.
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Give one example.
And there is a kid’s legal version! They sell them in Walmart - Pokémon packs. I don’t know how any of this is legal in a civilized country.
I have mixed feelings being a parent now. It can be fun to get a mystery box or pack. But it does feed on the anticipation and rush of surprise. Kids seem to lack the self control to stop. Video games seem the worst to me since they're so intangible it's easier to get carried away before others notice.
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LEGO does it too, with "mystery minifigure" packages.
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.
Kids version has been around my entire life (baseball cards) it even used to come with bubblegum!
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Don't forget the other children's gambling trainers:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=...
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I believe they are (maybe indirectly on some though): https://www.actionnetwork.com/education/tracking-prediction-...
They totally are tho. And at the same time trying to win via the loophole if it doesn't close by launching their own efforts
I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker. This reduces the adverse selection of players. For instance, if you actually win regularly on these platforms they'll actually ban you, much like a casino. My understanding of prediction markets is that it's pure market making which is preferable
In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.
> I prefer prediction markets to gambling because the platform isn't the bookmaker.
Just because you prefer poker to slots, that doesn't suddenly mean that poker isn't gambling.
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Except there is still adverse selection, just like there is in the stock market. People who have inside information are going to bet more, and you will take the other side of that bet not realizing that has happened.
Actually I believe DraftKings just added a prediction market...
Actually, prediction markets are closer to stock markets (insofar as you consider stock trading to be gambling). Insider trading is the bigger issue
Insider trading does not (and should not) apply to prediction markets.
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".
I've heard people say this but it really only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than 10 or 20 seconds.
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.
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Prediction markets are nothing like stock markets. Maybe they are more like binary options markets. In the UK for example, these were for a long time regulated as a gambling product, and for the past 7 years have been banned to retail consumers.
Kalshi has Trump Jr on its board and is federally regulated. I'm not sure FanDuel and DraftKings will win that fight for the next 3 years.
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I thought the “daily fantasy” loophole was pretty silly too.
Both have a prediction market product.
It truly is insane.
The CFTC is granting "no-action" exemptions on the basis of....nothing, really.
The "educational" value of these markets.
On the basis of nothing, or on the basis of gifts and connections?
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pennywagers seemed reasonable but has shut down.
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.
The problem is that these markets allow to translate political power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a vested interest in causing destruction.
Capitalism took care of the exchange between money and power long ago. Prediction markets, as terrible as they are, are peanuts in comparison.
yes, because the last century of communism showed that it was really just capitalism where centralized power corrupts..
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Just game-theoretically, suppose you bet $100 on some disaster.
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?
Search for "assassination markets", which is a longish treatment of this idea. Specifically, people collectively can bet large sums of money that X will not be killed Thursday at 5pm. And anyone can take the other side at insanely good odds...
Couldn't that be said of stock markets and any markets?
United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO was killed.
Well, there are laws against insider trading.
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Yes, and sounds like a great way to get RICO conspiracy to commit murder added to your charges just for trading on it.
How is that different from regular old insurance?
Insurance is usually for things that primarily affect the purchaser?
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How does someone with a mere $10 stake have the opportunity to contribute to the cause of a $10mil disaster?
Realistically, they'd have to be far more connected to the event, and as such, far more exposed to some kind of risk.
Pessimistically, i imagine that's what they meant by "enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy". Like its a lot easier to destroy an art piece in a museum than to create one.
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>I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.
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.
These prediction markets shouldn't be allowed for situations where humans can control the outcome.
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.
With enough cash on the line, humans are very resourceful at manipulating outcomes.
Humans already control the weather: 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.
Funny, downthread there is actually a report of someone experiencing manipulation of weather prediction markets:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535355
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Who is to say if it rained or not? Well now they are a target.
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.
That was a Times of Israel reporter Emanuel Fabian [1] but your point stands.
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...
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Or you could just fund the NOAA instead of making up reasons for more markets.
> weather prediction markets
Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
> is weather prediction markets
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?
> 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.
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"where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position"
To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.
Or heck, with the amount of $$$ on the line, cash-strapped nation states could even finance their warfare this way. Like that $14M bet on when an attack would land in Israel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401044 -- that could buy a lot of drones!
Aww, conspiracy theories are no fun when they're so plausible.
The Rosenbergs weren't spies, they were entrepreneurs providing an essential service to the nuclear proliferation industry!
Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of people who know things we want to know.
> pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us
Something tells me China has better opsec around such leaks than we do.
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Just workshopping some sv vc tech speak…
Disrupt being a traitor…
The uber of spying…
"Disrupt" feels like yesterday's Web 2.0 lingo, now we say "Democratizing".
Hmm. That also means that key decision makers can pay money in order to lie to our enemies.
Why not both? There's money to be squeezed from both ends.
>A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.
That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
Gambling may be bad on its own, but the gambling and advertising combo are a very harmful combination IMHO.
I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
Isn't the bomb argument actually a statement about (the current way we implement) democracy?
Maybe it's the separation of powers that's not working...
The big issue underlying gambling, betting, alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive stuff all the way to fentanyl, is that people may literally lose their mind over it, at least party. A heavy addict ceases to be a responsible adult who can act reasonably and autonomously, and becomes driven by impulses they cannot control, like a schizophrenic who cannot control the voices in their head.
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.
Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for. It's something without any consequence or meaning. The Author mixing that with the dictator and his cronies making buck from their position is offensive.
> Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for.
What?! Beg I your pardon, but I think sport is a very different thing to me.
The amount of suspicious bets around international politics is disturbing
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
And a paid advisor to Kalshi.
Inventive markets is a better term for what they will become.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
We have the 'official' stock (prediction) market regulated by the SEC, FINRA, CFTC, ... , yet (allegedly) insider trading isn't unheard of. We have the more recent crypto (prediction) markets with (allegedly) complete market manipulation where those same regulators stepped in after being woken up late to the party. Now we have these 'open range' prediction markets with the CFTC wrestling for getting a toe in without stepping on those of the casino, sports betting, Native American gaming, lotteries ... interests?
Obligatory: The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.[1]
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market
Sounds like good ol' fashioned developing country style corruption to me!
Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
Kind of Nice i would say ?
Not really commenting on the politics side, but do Americans realise sports betting has been legal in other countries for decades? (Since 1960 in the UK at least).
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?
Actually complex math under the scene is harder than you think. If a billionaire tries to pump a "bad" policy, every smart trader sees the arbitrage and bets against them. They’d eventually donate their net worth to anyone who knows the truth. It's the ultimate tax on being wrong.
Today Integrity is merely means to score more views and likes
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.
We are repeating a very, very old lesson. We will learn once more, the hard way.
I've always said we should just legalize insider trading. Just make it painfully obvious to everyone that speculative trading is the loser's game.
Let's make a bet on how bad it can get
I can place a bet that by 2027 we will have 1 bet and a payout on a bet that predicts a horrible catastrophe.
I agree with Thompson about these kinds of prediction markets, but predicting horrible catastrophes is one of the prosocial early use cases of these things.
Agreed, as long as it's a catastrophe that the bettors can't cause, but for which advance warning can mitigate harms.
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.
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In the prediction markets, there's a fine line between predicting and manifesting.
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Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause.
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.
This is what "AGI" will bring more of. An "abundance" of gamblers.
All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
I've been active and profitably trading in prediction markets for a long time now, but I think this perspective is also not helpful.
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.
That’s not what people are worried about, it’s the rigging of real world events (including wars!) that has people worried.
It's also a bit overblown. If you could rig a war, you would stand to make a lot more money playing the stock market than small potatoes prediction markets. A lot of money has been on the line based on which party wins elections even before prediction markets existed (see fracking or pipeline project approval as obvious examples).
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Gambling outside of equities and securities is a negative externality. (Investment in startups, goods, etc. makes the economy spin. Investing in what hoop a ball goes through does no good at all.)
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.
It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do. Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.
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.
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I agree that this is bad but the libertarian in me says "the market will resolve this because who in their right mind would be a counterparty to these bets knowing that there is so much insider trading?". But then again, many people are not in their right mind.
Prediction market creators making the case that their existing is some sort of a market efficiency play is the most laughable thing I have ever heard.
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.
Gambling is flourishing not because we're in a low-trust world, as the article says, but because the living conditions of an increasingly large part of the population as such that they cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life. We're returning to the social dynamics that dominated much of history (if you consider how much gambling was a scourge, from ancient Rome to thousands of years of history in China).
So do you have a lot of trust in people that "cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life"? It seems like a risky proposition.
Still, yes. I can trust that if I were in an accident, people passing by would be decent enough to try to help me. To see a place where you'd have the rational expectation of being robbed by passers-by, see Russia.
Have Westerners ever thought of working and creating real value instead of betting on the death of little children?
Yes, they have. They’ve made tons of great products and services that you use every day without even thinking about it, in contrast to Russia for example. It’s a shame you don’t see how much they've improved our quality of life.
You must be confused. Most of the products that end in your hands were made by hard working folks from the Global South. All Westerers do is own the companies, the labour and the politicians from those countries. But don't worry, sooner rather than later, even Westerners will have to relearn what working truly means.
Maybe we should build a prediction model of upcoming events based on volume of bets made on polymarket
Maybe it would be better to ban Las Vegas.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you also craft an Etherium contract to do the same thing as these prediction markets. So even without a company "framing all the markets" you could still have gambling based on base eth?
Yes, this is precisely how Polymarket works under the hood. IIRC you can even participate by working directly with the smart contracts.
I like prediction markets because they offer much more diverse markets compared to stocks/options and sports betting, which are far more limited. The downsides are limited liquidity and fraud, but this is endemic to other markets too.
Do you even need prediction markets if the department of war can just make the real markets do whatever the hell they want?
An argument not mentioned here and which I didn’t appreciate until I actually took part in these markets myself, is that you need a supply of stupid/uninformed people to take the other side of the informed people’s bets.(In economic terms, no-trade theorems apply.) That suggests to me that the dream of perfect information revelation isn’t going to come true. Instead, the liquid markets will be those with a large supply of marks, who bet for identity reasons or who are simply ignorant and naive. (Currently polymarket gives a 16% ish probability that Trump will lose office this year. Sounds like wishful thinking to me?)
Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract * 100 right?
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.
If the odds are set correctly, you should have the same EV on either side of a bet.
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.
I agree with you overall but I'm not sure the Trump bet is the best example.
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.
So for example "shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far" sounds like the kind of "information" that has not yet made it into a mainstream news outlet, probably for good reason. And indeed when I searched, I found it on The Daily Beast, whose reliability I doubt.
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!
Checks annuity tables for an 80 year old making it to 81...you giving 1:6 odds? Sure I will take that bet because the actual odds are only a small fraction. If I spread out the risk on multiple positions, I can make a very good return taking those types of bets.
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...
Half-OT: when does gambling become safe?
I mean, insurance is basically basically betting that bad things happen to you.
Attaching payouts to events skews the incentives. A baseball player gets the incentive to fuck up on purpose. Fortunately politicians are much more honest and would never make a decision to profit from a bet in a similar dishonest way.
Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make their stocks go up.
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.
Why do we need to reinvent the wheel again. There's a reason why these things are banned.
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
It’s everywhere. Bill Simmons. Makes me insane.
How many individual podcast hosts actually control those advertising slots?
You need to select better content then. None of the creators I follow/watch advertise gambling and I could care less if they did.
While many of us try to stay true as possible to be Libertarian when we say we are, this, like smoking in public, are not hills I’m willing to die on if someone decides to restrict.
The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.
I'm still reeling from the fact that the sitting president pumped some meme coin the day (iirc) he took office. And this largely passed by without any consequence, reckoning, or repercussions. It's just accepted now that even the highest office will scam their own supporters
The US government and private interests are clearly incentivized to keep the crypto industry subdued to a chaotic casino. Participants engage willingly. If crypto is legitimized, it threatens the US dollar, sanctions regime and the US’s ability to project power as the world leading reserve currency.
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.
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Forget pumping. He set free a high profile white collar criminal, who in return deposited 2 billion real dollars into Trump shitcoin exchange. And NO ONE bat the eye, not a single congressman or regulator body. Check and balances, my ass. More like cheeks and obeisances.
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Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
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Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
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When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.
I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.
> When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid
In a free market system, wealth is created, not concentrated.
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Completely agree with this. I watch many commercials on television targeting elderly folks and I just cringe. They seem to be doing everything they can to separate the viewer from their money for a dubious product or service.
“There’s a sucker born every minute, and we’re gonna take ‘em for all they got” - Harry Wormwood in Matilda
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.
Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.
This sounds like everyone is not perfect therefore no one should be singled out as a bad guy, everyone is equally shady. Which is objectively not true. Even the shit IT practices like stealing private information or stealing copyrighted property can be "rationalized" to benefit better targeted advertisement or better LLM generators and so on. Gambling on the other hand is pure 100% social damage with zero redeeming qualities. Even drugs have some positive aspects to them, unlike gambling.
I read "scambling" recently and the word has stayed with me since.
This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.
Are you saying this is specific to the US?
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.
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Reminds me of what Frank Sobotka says in The Wire: "We used to make shit in this country, build shit here. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
If this is referring to the US, yes indeed. We're great at the whole free market, fiduciary duty to shareholder bit. We're terrible at using law to manage the negative externalities.
I have bad news, I don't think we're that great at the free market either.
Professor Cottom's a certified (McArthur) Genius, and she clocked this "scam culture" back in 2021:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/opinion/scams-trust-insti...
Things have gotten dramatically worse since then.
I knew a couple of McArthur Genius grant recipients (they were students like me) when I was in college. I wouldn't put any of them among the top most intelligent students I went to school with. The way they are chosen isn't exactly bad but it doesn't end up with giving the grants to "geniuses". If you aren't in one of the top most competitive fields, its more about applying and getting the right recommendations. If you get one in math or CS, then yes...that's very impressive. Professor Cotton (sp?) isn't in one of those fields.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535377.
Americans: freedom to
Europe: freedom from
> “not even pretending to care about people they affect.”
“Not even pretending to care about the people they elect.”
There, I fixed it for you.
I’ve seen this too. And with AI, it’s empowered even more people to spam, imitate, steal and remix others’ work, research and artistic expression.
The big grift is on - and sadly, our fearless leader is the epitome of it.
I saw someone say recently "hobbies are a luxury" and I tend to agree.
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.
> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
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.
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> The problem is capitalism
Capitalist countries build walls to keep people out.
Socialist countries build walls to keep people in.
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> By the late 1970s and 1980s the balance had shifted to where more households than not had both parents working.
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.
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The UK? or Ireland? or USA?
Isn't it interesting that you can't tell!
Well, really, that's all countries.
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.
All of the greatest societies champion their defeat of and superiority from people exactly like that.
Very ahistorical view
Trump and his Tech Bros enable this to make money for themselves its like Trump is turning the whole of America into Alternate reality Hill Valley of 1985 in Back to the Future
https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN
See: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-mar...
Assassinations markets are what's next.
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."
Ah, you beat me to it. I learned about assassination markets in a previous post about the overall gambling/prediction markets topic a few weeks ago; the concept is so coherent that it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
If someone want him dead, someone have to bet that million on the target being alive at a specific date. Unless someone plan to do the execution themselves, the bet must be lost for the target to be unalive !
Someone would need to take the opposite side of that bet. And who would do that knowing someone might try to assassinate him in order to win that bet?
In this scenario, that would be the people paying for the assassination. The people who want it to happen bet that it won't. The people who want to do it bet that it will. The net result is that if one of the people who bet on it happening makes it happen, they are being paid by the people betting against it, in a plausibly deniable way.
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.
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Is it actually illegal to bet on an assassination?
I am not sure, but you don’t have to technically bet on assassination. You can bet on an event which would happen as a result of said assassination. X won’t get re-elected. Company Y CEO will change in 2027. This is artist Z last tour. Athlete K won’t participate in this event etc.
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Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries.
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
> Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries
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.
In my European country gambling is very strictly regulated. Isn’t it the same in yours?
Can't speak for everyone here, but I (as a US citizen) am way less bothered by sports gambling specifically than I am by generalized Kalshi-type gambling being abused by powerful insiders in the federal government (or other institutions). Like yeah I don't think it's great that we've enabled yet another route for young men to completely ruin their lives, but civil liberties, personal responsibility, etc. etc. etc.
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/
Well, we were able to observe in the impact of legalization of online betting in real time, watching every other ad slot during sports games turning into gambling app ads designed to hook 20 something men into lighting their paycheck on fire for a brief dopamine hit.
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).
Americans would definitely not be shocked at the idea of gambling being legal, and I don't know why you'd think they would be. The US has gambling tourist destinations.
In Norway, gambling is controlled by a state monopoly, same as our alcohol sales. Probably for the same reasons.
Canada too, you buy liquor and lotto tickets from a crown corporation
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All those other countries also have history of regulating it and body of literature (as in opinion pieces and stories) about observed harms of it.
"Americans may be shocked to hear that in the rest of the world gambling has been a thing for centuries."
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.
Nonsense!
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This posh HN culture war has gotta end.
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> If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
Three of the "four ways to lose" described in the article are significant harms inflicted on parties besides the bettors themselves. One cannot avoid these harms by not directly gambling.
The issue is the combined risk of insider trading coupled with the bias of disaster-centric betting, or at least event-centric betting. This means if you have the means to create an “out of the ordinary” event you have a strong incentive to make it happen and to bet on it. These must be controllable events, so not natural or complex systems. On the gentler side it would be sports fixing, which has always existed. On the worse side it would be causing war, making economic decisions that will impact many, betting on people death and so on. These kind of things are seemingly already happening to a certain degree.
It’s the insider betting that’s the problem. Not the intrinsic nature of gambling
You're always going to have some sort of insider leaks, and quite frankly I don't care if they make money off of it in a betting app. This isn't like the stock market which is a vehicle for wealth for hundreds of millions. Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
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Ban them too. Make bets have to be placed in person.
> Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes.
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.
> I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
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.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
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.
the basis of my view is the observation that homes can be mortgaged to trade financial markets as well
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
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That’s a lot of words to tell everyone you don’t know what an “externality” is.
You put your own case powerfully, but you don’t seem to have reacted to Derek Thompson‘s case, except to say that you’re not bothered about gambling addiction. (And why not? If people predictably do things that are bad for themselves, that damages the efficiency case for free markets and everything.)
I did read his article, and there are the geopolitical events and the sporting events he talks about.
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.
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> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
That ignore the societal influence on an individual. If everyone around you gambles, you are more inclined to take up gambling.
Not ignoring, deterring the state from involving itself in anything except the individual.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
libertarianism is a cancer
Not as much as Communism, but both seem like utopian ideologies based on an idealized model of human behavior.
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Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax (last 5 years). Prediction market should be banned.
That seems to imply concern for the gambler, who at least has chosen to play.
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
> Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax
How about you let people decide what they do with THEIR own money?
Why is this such a big deal?
I don't get why people make such a big deal betting on sports; if you want to waste your money go for it.
Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.
Americans coming to the realisation that much of the rest of the world came to decades ago and acting like it’s a massive revelation is…absolutely par for the course for the US. Just hurry up and implode already.
Lost from reddit, are we?
How much of a hurry depends on whether Trump gets his $200 billion to continue the war. Have you checked the odds on Kalshi?
More doomer takes. The world survived two world wars and a cold war. This stuff is nothing. Engagement bait as usual.
> Oh, you think (bad thing) might happen? Why do you even care when (worse thing) happened in the past? Checkmate! I am very intelligent.
gr8 b8 m8 i r8 8/8
vintage meme
the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the species seems more like bait than the article
You're joking, right? A hundred million people died in those wars.
“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.”
Is there a site which implements the ideas behind the file Indecent Proposal[1]?
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_Proposal
This sounds like a great Black Mirror episode
that's just darkweb stuff right?
Why? I find Polymarket and these gambling sites just as bad. Is AI with it's fake porn is any better? And just yesterday, Meta and Google was found responsible for addiction[1].
How is this worse? I guess I forgot to say that a site like that would be simply be a poke in the eye of how stupid the internet has become. It's ridiculous to see folks not liking this idea yet finding the idea of betting on wars to be ok.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/03/25/meta-and...