Comment by solenoid0937
2 hours ago
These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
Very close already. Death threats went to this journalist; seems someone bet on missile hits. https://factkeepers.com/polymarket-gamblers-vow-to-kill-jour...
It also incentivizes leaks from insiders, sometimes endangering others. A soldier was charged for betting on a military operation. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
And of course throwing pro sports, but that's been happening for ages. Sports has always been crooked: eg the Eupolus Scandal from 388 BCE.
I thought this one was the most interesting:
‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
Yeah. You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home. For obvious reasons. But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
being pedantic here but
> You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home
This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.
I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Both of your examples are people protecting their insurance interest. Onwership is the most common insurable interest, but there are many other ways to have one.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
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To perhaps be a bit more pendantic.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
No no I appreciate the pedantry, thank you for the correction
> I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual. That is indeed legally fine, though potentially distasteful.
Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.
> Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual.
What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
Nope. "We're just an intermediary between people" is a 100+ year old yarn that casinos and bookies have been trying to spin. If you're presenting a point of entry to a betting line and taking a cut, congrats, you're the house. Doesn't matter if you adjust the betting line manually based on intuition or algorithmically based on betting volume. Sometimes it doesn't get enforced because of corruption, but if this was the case, then why aren't there tons of independent unregulated poker casinos where players just play against each other? If you facilitate and take a cut, you're the house.
That "facilitating" argument didn't work out for Silk Road.
What the hell are you talking about? You are absolutely not allowed to bet on whatever you'd like with another individual. Depending on what you're betting on (for example, the price of a stock or the throw of a card), it falls under varying different regimes. This is highly regulated and has been for most of the whole of human history.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome, the less likely you care about a betting market.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket.
No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.
> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.
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So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.
Downvotes on HN is always fascinating. Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/coinbase-ceo-s-bizar...
> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket
They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical
Yeah, they unironically just attacked a strawman and sat of their laurels
The genie is out of the bottle. Crypto-only underground prediction markets will always exist. I think it is better to heavily regulate legal options instead of pushing them underground. That didnt work for drugs or prostitution, and it wont work for gambling.
Except it generally worked for gambling for a very very long time. The existence of a black market does not mean something should be legal. Human trafficking happens, but that doesn't mean we should legalize and tax it. (extreme example I realize, but I use it to illustrate a point)
Yup, that idea has been around for a while: https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
Insider trading is already illegal. What needs to be regulated is not markets, it is politicians. Once that is done, markets can peacefully continue the way they are.
Hard disagree. In the prediction market case, we're seeing many categories of people being incentivised to act on markets: soldiers, diplomats, staffers, journalists, businesses, sports and esports teams, as a quick, non-exhaustive list.
Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?
Maybe we should ban the stock market too.
In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
> I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
> should be illegal globally
Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
Is there something specific you're getting at?
I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.
Sadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.
> they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
They become hyperstition engines.
They'll be illegal anywhere democracy wants to properly function. How can I bet on this ripe assumption? Is there a market somewhere?
Historically similar services have also been used to try to manipulate the real world by using bets for creating opinions. Like if you get to vote between candidate x and y and x leads by 75% to 25% on Polymarket maybe you don't vote for y even if the real numbers may be way closer.
That opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)
It is marketing money so it is not even for arbitrage. And you don't need to provide all the liquidity. Just enough to tilt the result.
Someone should place a bet on the lifespan of the polymarket founders.
I would go further than this: all forms of online gambling should be banned, globally. It's probably sufficient to remove them from app stores and to remove their access to the international financial system, which is very doable.
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
Prop betting on a transparent and equitable Exchange is a perfectly reasonable and egalitarian proposal - it's the Betfair Exchange vs Betfair Sportsbook model expanded outside of the scope of sports.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
> Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem
What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years.
It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.