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.
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 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.
This is such a HN comment. Yes, I am not hiring those people either. If that sounds unviable or even uncommon then you’re just too deep in the culture. This is quite common.
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.
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.
Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly & monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste hours of your time every day all while ironically making you less connected to other people because users won't get off their phones and have a conversation.
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.
>Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures,
Kinda hard to reopen the steel mill when there's people in DC writing rules to prevent you from doing that because a bunch of people think that a steel mill that pollutes twice as much overseas is better than one in Ohio or whatever.
This pattern is all over the united states. Not just random industry towns in middle america.
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.
> 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.
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.
'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.
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'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.
That's only true if you leave your money in...which you don't have to do.
You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. I.e. I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election when it was closer to 50%.
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
poker and slots are two very different variants of gambling. Sure, there is plenty of chance/variance in poker but there is an undeniable skill component that is lacking in slots.
"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.
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.
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.
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:
> * Some countries will bomb other countries.
> * The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets.
> * This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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 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.
Surely a big point of sport is to get young people to do healthy, character-building team activities. That requires sporting heroes they can look up to, rather than cheats who will throw a game for money.
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.
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.
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.
What's even more interesting is when you consider that A) it doesn't have to be one person taking out a large position, it can be multiple people, over time, and B) the assassin doesn't have to be known or confirmed ahead of time, if someone decides their "reserve price" has been met, all they have to do to receive a payout is place the appropriate bet before performing the act.
The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
I'm not sure there's any deniability in placing the "won't be assassinated" bet, when you could equally state it as "I will pay $1M to whoever accepts this bet and assassinated this person"
Anyways, how exactly is this assassin going to collect on their bet? I'm pretty sure law enforcement will be looking into the fact that somebody place that bet and then shortly after, the assassination happened.
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.
It's the inverse, here how you have to bet (unless you plan to be doing the hands on assassination works) :
X will get re-elected. Company Y CEO will not change in 2027. This is not artist Z last tour. Athlete K will participate in this event etc.
Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be lost if you want your target dead.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't use these platforms so I don't know how the bets are structured. If someone comes along and places a bet that looks very much like insider knowledge, can you only bet against or can you place bets with them like following the shooter in craps?
Betting against something that looks like an insider making the bet really is something willingly done. It's just a dumb bet.
> 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
Absolutely garbage take, to be quite honest with you. War profiteering is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and the last thing we need in this world is more opportunities for it. Regardless of whether the punters getting screwed consented to gambling or not, the problem is the perverse incentives it creates at the highest echelons of power. Abusing access to military intel for profit is foul behavior that will only degrade the quality of our governance and foreign policy, not to mention the literal lives that will be lost as a result.
> Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
The stock market is 100% optional to participate in, and every broker tells you (is legally required to tell you, in fact) that you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose money. That didn't stop whatever forces have made them essentially required to plan for the normal life stage of retirement these days.
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.
> 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."
I understand the point you're making, but in this case, you're still incentivizing someone somewhere to not attempt to the best of their ability to intervene in that astroid. Bets that truly can't cause any change in behavior that might affect the outcome are a mostly theoretical category, in my opinion.
I think I see where you're coming from, but if we're using them to predict hurricanes, it's likely just meteorological data arbitrage. All else seems like random chance; hardly an example of an oracle.
Crazy, but, hear me out: mirrors in space warming the Atlantic, mirrors in Africa warming the atmosphere ("solar power"), Trump wanting to nuke a hurricane, etc.
Pandemic? Go harvest bats and put them in a cage with chickens. You don't even need a molecular bio lab.
Stock market crash? Bombs. Terrorist attacks.
Energy prices? Derail a train carrying fuel cars. Bonus points if it's in a major metro and has a blast radius. Or, I dunno, start a war with Iran.
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
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
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.
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.
Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
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.
The UK? or Ireland? or USA?
> 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.
This is such a HN comment. Yes, I am not hiring those people either. If that sounds unviable or even uncommon then you’re just too deep in the culture. This is quite common.
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.
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.
Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly & monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste hours of your time every day all while ironically making you less connected to other people because users won't get off their phones and have a conversation.
If you're from a place like Malta it's basically the only way to do IT and perhaps "escape" it later.
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?
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.
>Having failed their people at all other prosperities and futures,
Kinda hard to reopen the steel mill when there's people in DC writing rules to prevent you from doing that because a bunch of people think that a steel mill that pollutes twice as much overseas is better than one in Ohio or whatever.
This pattern is all over the united states. Not just random industry towns in middle america.
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.
> 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.
> 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..
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.
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.
'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.
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.
Happens already. Selling market data is part of how they finance themselves.
I believe they are (maybe indirectly on some though): https://www.actionnetwork.com/education/tracking-prediction-...
Actually, prediction markets are closer to stock markets (insofar as you consider stock trading to be gambling). Insider trading is the bigger issue
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.
That's only true if you leave your money in...which you don't have to do.
You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. I.e. I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election when it was closer to 50%.
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
Actually I believe DraftKings just added a prediction market...
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.
Don't forget the other children's gambling trainers:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=claw+machine&ia=images&iax=...
The average kid at these places thinks they're a skill-based game, so they aren't gambling any more than they are when they shoot hoops.
Kids version has been around my entire life (baseball cards) it even used to come with bubblegum!
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.
Inb4 Hunter Biden.
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?
the Kalshi legal team is a revolving door with the CFTC
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
> 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.
poker and slots are two very different variants of gambling. Sure, there is plenty of chance/variance in poker but there is an undeniable skill component that is lacking in slots.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> weather prediction markets
Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
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?
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: > * Some countries will bomb other countries. > * The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets. > * 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...
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
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/
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
Nonsense!
This posh HN culture war has gotta end.
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.
Or you are simply better at predicting the future than most other people.
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!
Bet your shirt AND the farm from the comfort of your phone
Worse: It won't even be your own bet that does the damage.
as a wise guy once said, "a grown man made a wager; he lost."
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.
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 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.
[delayed]
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.
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.
Inventive markets is a better term for what they will become.
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.
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).
This is what "AGI" will bring more of. An "abundance" of gamblers.
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
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.
How is that different from regular old insurance?
Insurance is usually for things that primarily affect the purchaser?
Sounds like good ol' fashioned developing country style corruption to me!
Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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 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.
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.
Surely a big point of sport is to get young people to do healthy, character-building team activities. That requires sporting heroes they can look up to, rather than cheats who will throw a game for money.
> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem.
libertarianism is a cancer
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
What's even more interesting is when you consider that A) it doesn't have to be one person taking out a large position, it can be multiple people, over time, and B) the assassin doesn't have to be known or confirmed ahead of time, if someone decides their "reserve price" has been met, all they have to do to receive a payout is place the appropriate bet before performing the act.
The end result is a combination of Kickstarter and Doordash for targeted homicide.
I'm not sure there's any deniability in placing the "won't be assassinated" bet, when you could equally state it as "I will pay $1M to whoever accepts this bet and assassinated this person"
Anyways, how exactly is this assassin going to collect on their bet? I'm pretty sure law enforcement will be looking into the fact that somebody place that bet and then shortly after, the assassination happened.
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.
It's the inverse, here how you have to bet (unless you plan to be doing the hands on assassination works) : X will get re-elected. Company Y CEO will not change in 2027. This is not artist Z last tour. Athlete K will participate in this event etc.
Like I said elsewhere in this thread the bet have to be lost if you want your target dead.
[deleted]
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'm sorry, but all this handwringing just smacks of moral Puritanism. If you want to do it, do it. If you don't, then don't.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't use these platforms so I don't know how the bets are structured. If someone comes along and places a bet that looks very much like insider knowledge, can you only bet against or can you place bets with them like following the shooter in craps?
Betting against something that looks like an insider making the bet really is something willingly done. It's just a dumb bet.
You're waving away the dangers of government officials having a financial incentive to take actions based not on societal well-being or integrity.
> 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
Absolutely garbage take, to be quite honest with you. War profiteering is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, and the last thing we need in this world is more opportunities for it. Regardless of whether the punters getting screwed consented to gambling or not, the problem is the perverse incentives it creates at the highest echelons of power. Abusing access to military intel for profit is foul behavior that will only degrade the quality of our governance and foreign policy, not to mention the literal lives that will be lost as a result.
> Gambling/prediction markets are 100% optional to participate in and you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose.
The stock market is 100% optional to participate in, and every broker tells you (is legally required to tell you, in fact) that you should go in with the expectation that you're going to lose money. That didn't stop whatever forces have made them essentially required to plan for the normal life stage of retirement these days.
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.
> 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."
I understand the point you're making, but in this case, you're still incentivizing someone somewhere to not attempt to the best of their ability to intervene in that astroid. Bets that truly can't cause any change in behavior that might affect the outcome are a mostly theoretical category, in my opinion.
In the prediction markets, there's a fine line between predicting and manifesting.
I mean, I'm talking about things like hurricanes and earthquakes and forest fires, not running death pools.
I think I see where you're coming from, but if we're using them to predict hurricanes, it's likely just meteorological data arbitrage. All else seems like random chance; hardly an example of an oracle.
> forest fires
Fire bug
> earthquakes
Dynamite the fault
> hurricanes
Crazy, but, hear me out: mirrors in space warming the Atlantic, mirrors in Africa warming the atmosphere ("solar power"), Trump wanting to nuke a hurricane, etc.
Pandemic? Go harvest bats and put them in a cage with chickens. You don't even need a molecular bio lab.
Stock market crash? Bombs. Terrorist attacks.
Energy prices? Derail a train carrying fuel cars. Bonus points if it's in a major metro and has a blast radius. Or, I dunno, start a war with Iran.
This could get really bad.
"Dynamite the fault"? What are you, a Bond villain?
The Bond villain would be the person running the betting market.
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?
More doomer takes. The world survived two world wars and a cold war. This stuff is nothing. Engagement bait as usual.
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
> 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
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.”