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Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

by fzil 6mo ago

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
By far?! There's a very long list.
Waterluvian 6mo ago
I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways. Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls. Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  >And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys?" I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.
  - KeplerBoy 6mo ago
    Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
  - Waterluvian 6mo ago
    I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
    - croon 6mo ago
      By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
    - relaxing 6mo ago
      Conan hosted the Oscars.
  - iso1631 6mo ago
    I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
  - relaxing 6mo ago
    Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
  - KPGv2 6mo ago
    > Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys? Does the lamentations of women count as a musical number?
- ipaddr 6mo ago
  The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
  - kasey_junk 6mo ago
    Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders. And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
    - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
      > insider trading is the point Says who?
      - Ajedi32 6mo ago
        It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders. Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
        hrimfaxi 6mo ago
        Who cares what they call themselves? They're not prediction markets, they are just gambling on events. The "point" of prediction markets is not an accurate prediction in the same sense that the "point" of sports betting isn't that your bet means the team will win.
- yyyk 6mo ago
  >I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting... >But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.
- Balgair 6mo ago
  Friend of a friend does announcing online. Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours. So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul. Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say. No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said. That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially. You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat. It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades. [0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.
  - chimeracoder 6mo ago
    > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player. The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
    - nemomarx 6mo ago
      One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.
- walthamstow 6mo ago
  You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.
- RIMR 6mo ago
  Yeah, but even "harmless" bets like the one you describe are too easy to rig. Who is to say that someone who works on Conan's show won't have some influence over the programming and intentionally steer the show so that they win their bet? We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.
- dfxm12 6mo ago
  I think it is naive to assume that under capitalism, with no guardrails in place, that the people involved with these markets will leave money on the table purely by self restraint/acting in good faith. If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.
- skywhopper 6mo ago
  Sure, it’s fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn’t shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.
- watwut 6mo ago
  > And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" What about calling it "gambling" rather then "prediction market"? And then applying the gambling regulation on what is gambling. People betting on stuff is not exactly a novel idea, the novel thing is how they are avoiding the regulations.
- mapt 6mo ago
  It's a matter of market size and the inherent goal of the market; The factors are implicitly at odds. A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy. A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit. Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.
- btilly 6mo ago
  Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination. The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Order-Temporarily-Pauses-DOJ%27s-FCPA-Enforcement-and-Orders-a-Review-of-Guidelines-and-Policies.pdf https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord... The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    Or bribery: "I didn't pay anybody to dismiss the case against me. I just innocently hedged my personal risks by betting I'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk just happened to be betting I'd go free, so that my million dollars is coincidentally in their pockets... well, that's just how things work out sometimes in prediction markets."
    - btilly 6mo ago
      The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into Justin Sun that got stopped. See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet. As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open... (To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)
- EGreg 6mo ago
  Here is a much more moral and useful prediction market: https://unblockers.org https://unblockers.org
- brightball 6mo ago
  Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports. You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life. And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part. It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.
  - bilbo0s 6mo ago
    Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer being able to "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." story. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past. These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
    - brightball 6mo ago
      Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too. https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level. Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show. We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
- akudha 6mo ago
  if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right? I had fun betting $5 here and there Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in front of an insider so that they reveal (or cause) a strong outcome through greed? Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."
- uoaei 6mo ago
  It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.
azan_ 6mo ago
I’d say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it’s not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful things related to internet in my opinion.
- ipaddr 6mo ago
  Or from the death of family and friends.
  - azan_ 6mo ago
    Barely anyone died from covid vaccine. Billions of doses were distributed, any serious side effects are extremely rare.
    - ipaddr 6mo ago
      1.6 million verified injuries in the US from the vaccine and many more not classified or reported. Myocarditis, Blood clot syndrome, Guillain‑Barré Syndrome, menstrual changes, Bell’s Palsy. This is before the long term studies are even in. I think those who took the vaccine are in for long term health issues. That often happens with medicines haven't been tested. At least you can sue.. Oh wait you can't.
- manphone 6mo ago
  We can walk and chew gum at the same time, the government can regulate thousands or millions of different types of things at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it.
  - echoangle 6mo ago
    > It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it. I don't know where you get that, the discussion is only about the claim that prediction markets are the worst thing on the internet. Multiple things can be bad without being the worst.
echoangle 6mo ago
It’s not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet. Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).
- Jeff_Brown 6mo ago
  As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.
  - echoangle 6mo ago
    I am sorry for that and I can see that it’s bad, but the internet just has a lot of things that are even worse.
    - manphone 6mo ago
      That’s not an explanation or an excuse at all.
      - echoangle 6mo ago
        What do you mean? The claim was that prediction markets are the worst thing on the internet and I mentioned some things that are worse. What else is there to explain?
  - lynx97 6mo ago
    It is a valueable learning experience. Especially if you are naiv enough like me, to actually give police a call after someone threatened you with death. Pretty sobering when the guy on the other end of the line just flips you off with "And what do you think are we supposed to do about it now?" Thats when you learn that some of your problems are pretty much imagined :-) and that there is a difference beween TV and real life...
- 6mo ago
coole-wurst 6mo ago
I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.
- ambicapter 6mo ago
  That existed before the internet.
- laurentiurad 6mo ago
  it's a hyperbole dude. It accelerates the moral decay of a society, and the barriers for entry are very low. The one you mentioned is straight illegal and punishable in any jurisdiction across the globe.
- loeg 6mo ago
  The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.
- tartoran 6mo ago
  One has nothing to do with the other and it's a poor argument to defend prediciton markets.
mathisfun123 6mo ago
Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days
- RGamma 6mo ago
  And goatse is harmless compared to the shit that's out there, especially because it only affects the dude himself. Even 3 guys 1 hammer isn't the worst yet (though pretty bad already).
cannonpr 6mo ago
It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.
- victorbjorklund 6mo ago
  Sounds like a urban legend.
- happytoexplain 6mo ago
  >It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior Why "can look", "but", "just"?
  - cannonpr 6mo ago
    Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.
  - Ajedi32 6mo ago
    I think GP is saying it's not the prediction market that's bad, but human nature itself. The prediction market just makes it more visible.
    - tclancy 6mo ago
      If we ignore that people are literally profiting from running the prediction market that happens to make it visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.
dominicrose 6mo ago
It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.
- riskable 6mo ago
  You've got the problem of prediction gambling framed incorrectly. It's not a matter of people losing money on bad bets, it's all about incentivized corruption and causing bad events (even catastrophic) so that a few may profit from them. It creates a perverse incentive for bad things to happen. As the odds shift and the potential payout grows, prediction markets can essentially fund crimes of all kinds and cause disasters. Simple example: Imagine if the payout for someone being assassinated goes really high. Eventually, people will be placing bets on that person being assassinated and make sure it happens. But it can get much worse than that! Imagine bets on dam collapse, buildings burning down, school shootings, even traffic accidents! Prediction markets are a bad idea all around and should be banned everywhere. It should be a no-brainer. In fact, we should all place bets that the world leaders of countries that allow prediction markets will be assassinated!
swingboy 6mo ago
Easily the worst thing and it’s not even close? Really?
rich_sasha 6mo ago
Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter. So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.
- applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
  On aggregate, humans will engage in exactly as terrible and selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is use our collective power as a social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.
deleted 6mo ago
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tomtomtom777 6mo ago
Absolutely horrifying. Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb. Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb. This needs to be banned.
- kibwen 6mo ago
  Make a bet for "$PUBLIC_FIGURE will be dead by $DATE" and see how quickly people realize that this is just a distributed assassination contract.
  - tim333 6mo ago
    It was kind of close to that betting on Trump to not win the last election - $3.2bn was bet on Trump vs Kamala and there was of course an assassination attempt although not related to the betting.
  - jamilton 6mo ago
    Technically any market that's about someone doing something by a certain time can be an assassination contract, if you think the market will it enforce it that way. Can't do it if they're dead.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - DANmode 6mo ago
    “Markets related to death are technically not supposed to be allowed at regulated prediction markets in the US.” https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-khamenei-prediction https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-khamene...
- bagacrap 6mo ago
  Who needs a bribe when they can participate in the market directly?
- efdee 6mo ago
  Already banned in several European countries, mostly because of the betting on political events.
base698 6mo ago
It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago
I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
vincnetas 6mo ago
But wait, there is more: Assassination market bet that someone will die by certain date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
- nekusar 6mo ago
  Huh, I figured they were rumors. But it's fairly close to a tontine. But those are banned in the USA. But in those cases, rewards are split regularly between survivors. People who die with a tontine lose their share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine I could see a movie about that, with living tontine holders sending out hitmen to remove other tontine holders, so they can get more money.
  - randallsquared 6mo ago
    The "popular culture" section of the very wiki article you linked has several such.
Bender 6mo ago
I ⤻ predict ⤺ that prediction markets will be more tightly regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. i.e. CFTC loses jurisdiction. - More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction. - Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.
- hnfong 6mo ago
  What do you mean outlawed? It will simply just happen in a jurisdiction that does not care about it. If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.
  - Bender 6mo ago
    That would be an interesting exercise. I suppose if it were outlawed the feds would seize all related domains and raid the HQ for Polymarket and Kalshi both in NY and freeze all their assets. It might spring up in another country under another domain name but then those could be seized as well. It could move to Tor but then money would have to be moved around on something like Monero I suppose. Anywhere money is involved gives countries incentives to cooperate. Which countries would be best for them to operate out of if they were outlawed? What percentage of their user-base would use the Tor Browser? Odd, I just noticed both Polymarket and Kalshi are hosted on the same IP address in San Fransisco. The IP belongs to Amazon but is not part of their cloud. That CIDR used to belong to Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and then Aptum Technologies and now Amazon in SF. Kalshi used to be based out of SF but moved to NY.
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empath75 6mo ago
So, a fun historical fact is that insurance markets started with people in coffee houses betting on whether or not ships would sink for fun. Eventually ship owners realized that if they bet on their own ship sinking, that it reduced the financial risk of travel, then betters realized that ship owners were doing that and decided to research before taking the other side of the bet, and so on until you end up with ship insurance. In a sense, prediction markets are all forms of insurance. A "war market" is just an insurance market against war. If you do business in someplace that is at risk at war, placing a huge bet on the war happening mitigates the risk of doing business in that place. There is a reason that insurance has taken the shape that it has -- incredibly detailed contracts, requirements that the insured have an interest in the thing being insured, etc, and the reason is exactly that pure prediction markets went through this exact cycle hundreds of years ago which lead to laws being passed banning the practice. That is why LLoyd's of London exists. It started as a pure gambling and became insurance through regulation and business evolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774 I'm not incredibly against the concept of prediction markets, per se, but running them _globally, _at scale_ with _no regulations_ is going to lead to really awful outcomes, up to and including murder.
- dboreham 6mo ago
  Yes but if you're a bloke toking on your pipe in Lloyds Coffee House in 1713 you don't know that you already ordered a submarine to sink a ship you're placing a bet will sink...
  - echelon_musk 6mo ago
    Submarines in 1713?
- kibwen 6mo ago
  > insurance markets started with people in coffee houses Regardless of whether or not that anecdote is true, insurance is one of the oldest human institutions. We have records of Hammurabi's code from ancient Babylon that pertain to insurance (including ship insurance).
nurettin 6mo ago
> moral degradation is off the charts Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.
jmyeet 6mo ago
I'm wondering how long it's going to take people to see the bigger picture and start connecting the dots. "Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse. Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation. Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care. Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP. Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos. A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive. And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does. Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true. So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves. But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.
- loeg 6mo ago
  [flagged]
bspammer 6mo ago
Just to play devil’s advocate, I have found prediction markets genuinely useful despite never placing a bet. In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped. Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.
tombert 6mo ago
I've hated the idea of Polymarket for about as long as I've known about it. It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling over things that involve the death of people. Things like missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.
- fsckboy 6mo ago
  you need to learn a little finance, i.e. that subset of economics dealing with financial markets. Markets "crowdsource" values in the face of changing needs, preferences, probability and volatility, and that's an incredibly useful thing. yeah, you can treat investing in markets as a game (fallacy: stock markets are gambling casinos), but people who are serious don't do that, so don't lay the sins of insincerity on markets.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    You might have a point with institutional investors, but regular consumers on Polymarket are absolutely just gambling.
RobRivera 6mo ago
Prediction Markets is such an invented phrase. Its a sports book. A sports book of alternatives. It's absolutely bonkers but hey, the grifters need a new costume, the crypto one is practically strings at this point
mlsu 6mo ago
Moral degradation? Buddy think about how much money can be made here. Eye on the ball. Try to think about what's truly important in life: making money by _monetizing every difference of opinion_. https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any-difference-in-opinion-2000695320 https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...
Zigurd 6mo ago
You will no doubt find some rational sounding arguments in favor of prediction markets here. Lots of useless and harmful things are fascinating. The math behind cryptocurrency, and things like the difference between proof of work and proof of stake are fascinating. But that doesn't make cryptocurrencies good. The genetics of tulip bulbs must be fascinating too.
- fwipsy 6mo ago
  Prediction markets are a separate concept from cryptocurrency. You can run one on cash within the typical KYC regime. If the arguments in favor of prediction markets sound rational, maybe they are rational? I'd argue that prediction markets are more like stock markets. Very useful, but they also create opportunities for abuse which will need to be addressed. If they are eliminated later because the current administration refuses to regulate them, that would be a huge shame.
  - enoint 6mo ago
    The point is that fascination is unrelated to value. I’d even argue that attention is unrelated to rationality. But attention is certainly related to profit.
  - Zigurd 6mo ago
    Up to this point nobody has staked out a territory that exists between securities on the one hand, and wild anything goes betting markets on the other hand. Requiring the use of national currencies does nothing to prevent what are effectively tontines incentivizing murder, or other perverse outcomes.
    - fwipsy 6mo ago
      Aren't death markets explicitly banned? Stock markets also incentivize murder. Short a company, then kill the CEO. Boom, profit.
basisword 6mo ago
We need to stop with the "prediction markets" bs naming. They're gambling websites with a larger variety of things you can gamble on.
- gzread 6mo ago
  They don't call themselves that, because online gambling is illegal. It's a bit like all the piracy websites being "an archive of Nintendo content to preserve it for future generations"
  - basisword 6mo ago
    Yes but we should call them what they are. They can call themselves what they like.
loeg 6mo ago
Sports betting seems worse? Easily lumped in to the same category, though.
duxup 6mo ago
I wonder if part of the deal is people gambling believe they have insider info, so any story to the contrary to them is clearly a lie costing them money, something that seems extra offensive?
red_admiral 6mo ago
They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community. Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.
- MattGaiser 6mo ago
  [dead]
  - Zigurd 6mo ago
    I would go with rationalism being a delusion of tech bros rather than blaming a failure of rationalism on those lumpen proles inventing silly sports propositions.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
      Do you know someone in particular who blamed sports betting on "lumpen proles"? It kinda seems like you're making up a person to get mad at here.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  They didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would take place because sports betting was illegal almost everywhere in the US until 2018.
  - thesquandered 6mo ago
    Christie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would even look on something like this.
- creatonez 6mo ago
  You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.
m3kw9 6mo ago
Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure
ACCount37 6mo ago
Cool it with the moral outrage. Even if I did believe that prediction markets are bad, "easily the worst things to grace the internet by far" is such a ridiculous hyperbole that it strains any belief.
- gzread 6mo ago
  There aren't that many things bad on this scale that I can think of.
abustamam 6mo ago
Someone on HN suggested that prediction markets would be interesting if only politicians were allowed to participate. For example, politician says that this bill will make the economy better (insert tangible metric here). Well Mr politician, put your money where your mouth is. If you indeed believe this is best for your constituents, bet on it, and if you're right, you'll reap the benefits of your legislation. If not, you're either incompetent or a liar; in either case, your people deserve to know. Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.
- gzread 6mo ago
  I do find that to be a fun thought experiment, but HN doesn't seem to agree. How would you know it was caused by that bill? Maybe politicians should just be paid based on something we want to incentivize, like lower quartile wages.
  - abustamam 6mo ago
    I'm curious how you know HN doesn't seem to agree! But I think your idea is probably a better idea than betting.

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

by fzil 6mo ago

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago

By far?! There's a very long list.

Waterluvian 6mo ago

I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways. Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls. Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)

lotsofpulp 6mo ago
>And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys?" I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.
- KeplerBoy 6mo ago
  Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
- Waterluvian 6mo ago
  I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
  - croon 6mo ago
    By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
  - relaxing 6mo ago
    Conan hosted the Oscars.
- iso1631 6mo ago
  I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
- relaxing 6mo ago
  Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
- KPGv2 6mo ago
  > Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys? Does the lamentations of women count as a musical number?
ipaddr 6mo ago
The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
- kasey_junk 6mo ago
  Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders. And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
  - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
    > insider trading is the point Says who?
    - Ajedi32 6mo ago
      It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders. Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
      - hrimfaxi 6mo ago
        Who cares what they call themselves? They're not prediction markets, they are just gambling on events. The "point" of prediction markets is not an accurate prediction in the same sense that the "point" of sports betting isn't that your bet means the team will win.
yyyk 6mo ago
>I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting... >But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight The era doesn't matter. The incentives are so bad, eventually you'd get a horrible result even with oversight. These markets are prone to this and shouldn't exist.
Balgair 6mo ago
Friend of a friend does announcing online. Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours. So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul. Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say. No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said. That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially. You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat. It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades. [0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.
- chimeracoder 6mo ago
  > It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers. While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets. At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law). Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player. The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
  - nemomarx 6mo ago
    One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.
walthamstow 6mo ago
You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.
RIMR 6mo ago
Yeah, but even "harmless" bets like the one you describe are too easy to rig. Who is to say that someone who works on Conan's show won't have some influence over the programming and intentionally steer the show so that they win their bet? We're already seeing athletes try to fulfill specific bets since it's way easier to rig a play than to rig a whole game. The problem with prediction markets is that people who bet on something small and influenceable have an actual chance to change the outcome of that thing in their favor.
dfxm12 6mo ago
I think it is naive to assume that under capitalism, with no guardrails in place, that the people involved with these markets will leave money on the table purely by self restraint/acting in good faith. If you just want fun, you don't need to be gambling real money.
skywhopper 6mo ago
Sure, it’s fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn’t shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.
watwut 6mo ago
> And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?" What about calling it "gambling" rather then "prediction market"? And then applying the gambling regulation on what is gambling. People betting on stuff is not exactly a novel idea, the novel thing is how they are avoiding the regulations.
mapt 6mo ago
It's a matter of market size and the inherent goal of the market; The factors are implicitly at odds. A small market is not at all efficient - it's unlikely to incorporate available information to attain accuracy. A large market invites manipulation of the event itself - it's auto-corrupting. If ball players make $1M/year and there are easy opportunities to throw a game and make $30M anonymously, then you can expect that the game you're seeing isn't legit. Arguably (go watch the show 'Billions') this is a big part of how the stock market works as well - insider information is rampant and overwhelming in profitability, and if you believe POSIWID ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... ) ... you're probably not doing a whole lot of trading as a personal investor based on publicly available information.
btilly 6mo ago
Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination. The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Order-Temporarily-Pauses-DOJ%27s-FCPA-Enforcement-and-Orders-a-Review-of-Guidelines-and-Policies.pdf https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord... The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  Or bribery: "I didn't pay anybody to dismiss the case against me. I just innocently hedged my personal risks by betting I'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk just happened to be betting I'd go free, so that my million dollars is coincidentally in their pockets... well, that's just how things work out sometimes in prediction markets."
  - btilly 6mo ago
    The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into Justin Sun that got stopped. See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet. As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open... (To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)
EGreg 6mo ago
Here is a much more moral and useful prediction market: https://unblockers.org https://unblockers.org
brightball 6mo ago
Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports. You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life. And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part. It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.
- bilbo0s 6mo ago
  Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer being able to "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." story. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past. These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
  - brightball 6mo ago
    Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too. https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level. Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show. We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
akudha 6mo ago
if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right? I had fun betting $5 here and there Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in front of an insider so that they reveal (or cause) a strong outcome through greed? Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."
uoaei 6mo ago
It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.

azan_ 6mo ago

I’d say that propaganda is much worse and more harmful and it’s not even close. Nowadays like 50% of population believes that covid vaccines are harmful because of bullshit they read on the internet. Prediction market is not even in top 100 harmful things related to internet in my opinion.

ipaddr 6mo ago
Or from the death of family and friends.
- azan_ 6mo ago
  Barely anyone died from covid vaccine. Billions of doses were distributed, any serious side effects are extremely rare.
  - ipaddr 6mo ago
    1.6 million verified injuries in the US from the vaccine and many more not classified or reported. Myocarditis, Blood clot syndrome, Guillain‑Barré Syndrome, menstrual changes, Bell’s Palsy. This is before the long term studies are even in. I think those who took the vaccine are in for long term health issues. That often happens with medicines haven't been tested. At least you can sue.. Oh wait you can't.
manphone 6mo ago
We can walk and chew gum at the same time, the government can regulate thousands or millions of different types of things at the same time. It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it.
- echoangle 6mo ago
  > It doesn’t make sense to say there’s stuff on the Internet that is worse therefore we cannot it should not do anything about it. I don't know where you get that, the discussion is only about the claim that prediction markets are the worst thing on the internet. Multiple things can be bad without being the worst.

echoangle 6mo ago

It’s not even close to being the worst thing in my opinion. There are people driven into suicide by blackmailing them over social media and people selling murder for hire on the Darknet. Some death threats are pretty harmless compared to that, assuming that nothing actually happens (which is pretty likely in my opinion).

Jeff_Brown 6mo ago
As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.
- echoangle 6mo ago
  I am sorry for that and I can see that it’s bad, but the internet just has a lot of things that are even worse.
  - manphone 6mo ago
    That’s not an explanation or an excuse at all.
    - echoangle 6mo ago
      What do you mean? The claim was that prediction markets are the worst thing on the internet and I mentioned some things that are worse. What else is there to explain?
- lynx97 6mo ago
  It is a valueable learning experience. Especially if you are naiv enough like me, to actually give police a call after someone threatened you with death. Pretty sobering when the guy on the other end of the line just flips you off with "And what do you think are we supposed to do about it now?" Thats when you learn that some of your problems are pretty much imagined :-) and that there is a difference beween TV and real life...
6mo ago

coole-wurst 6mo ago

I think CP is worse. Personally. Different priorities I guess.

ambicapter 6mo ago
That existed before the internet.
laurentiurad 6mo ago
it's a hyperbole dude. It accelerates the moral decay of a society, and the barriers for entry are very low. The one you mentioned is straight illegal and punishable in any jurisdiction across the globe.
loeg 6mo ago
The prediction markets achieve a scale that CP doesn't.
tartoran 6mo ago
One has nothing to do with the other and it's a poor argument to defend prediciton markets.

mathisfun123 6mo ago

Lol I guess you weren't around in the goatse days

RGamma 6mo ago
And goatse is harmless compared to the shit that's out there, especially because it only affects the dude himself. Even 3 guys 1 hammer isn't the worst yet (though pretty bad already).

cannonpr 6mo ago

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.

victorbjorklund 6mo ago
Sounds like a urban legend.
happytoexplain 6mo ago
>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior Why "can look", "but", "just"?
- cannonpr 6mo ago
  Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.
- Ajedi32 6mo ago
  I think GP is saying it's not the prediction market that's bad, but human nature itself. The prediction market just makes it more visible.
  - tclancy 6mo ago
    If we ignore that people are literally profiting from running the prediction market that happens to make it visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.

dominicrose 6mo ago

It still bothers me that it's banned in France, as many types of bets are. It's clear that nobody should risk money they can't afford to lose because that's what causes people to panic and behave in unpredictable ways. There should be ways to limit usage instead of a full ban or full authorization.

riskable 6mo ago
You've got the problem of prediction gambling framed incorrectly. It's not a matter of people losing money on bad bets, it's all about incentivized corruption and causing bad events (even catastrophic) so that a few may profit from them. It creates a perverse incentive for bad things to happen. As the odds shift and the potential payout grows, prediction markets can essentially fund crimes of all kinds and cause disasters. Simple example: Imagine if the payout for someone being assassinated goes really high. Eventually, people will be placing bets on that person being assassinated and make sure it happens. But it can get much worse than that! Imagine bets on dam collapse, buildings burning down, school shootings, even traffic accidents! Prediction markets are a bad idea all around and should be banned everywhere. It should be a no-brainer. In fact, we should all place bets that the world leaders of countries that allow prediction markets will be assassinated!

swingboy 6mo ago

Easily the worst thing and it’s not even close? Really?

rich_sasha 6mo ago

Does it degrade humananity or shine a spotlight on what was already a terrible part thereof? I'd say the latter. So we don't want that spotlight (or maybe do as a honeypot operation) but I'm not as of yet concerned for the effect they have on humanity.

applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
On aggregate, humans will engage in exactly as terrible and selfish behaviour as society lets them get away with, without fail. Murder, rape, theft are the way of nature. We don't need a spotlight to know this. The only thing we can do is use our collective power as a social species to shut down each type of harmful individual behaviour, which does not solve such behaviours completely but does drastically reduce them.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

tomtomtom777 6mo ago

Absolutely horrifying. Today they are bribing journalists to report on a bomb. Tomorrow they will be bribing armies to bomb. This needs to be banned.

kibwen 6mo ago
Make a bet for "$PUBLIC_FIGURE will be dead by $DATE" and see how quickly people realize that this is just a distributed assassination contract.
- tim333 6mo ago
  It was kind of close to that betting on Trump to not win the last election - $3.2bn was bet on Trump vs Kamala and there was of course an assassination attempt although not related to the betting.
- jamilton 6mo ago
  Technically any market that's about someone doing something by a certain time can be an assassination contract, if you think the market will it enforce it that way. Can't do it if they're dead.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- DANmode 6mo ago
  “Markets related to death are technically not supposed to be allowed at regulated prediction markets in the US.” https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-khamenei-prediction https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/the-chaos-of-khamene...
bagacrap 6mo ago
Who needs a bribe when they can participate in the market directly?
efdee 6mo ago
Already banned in several European countries, mostly because of the betting on political events.

base698 6mo ago

It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.

jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago

I don't like them either but there are literally sites on the Internet devoted to child porn and torture videos

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

vincnetas 6mo ago

But wait, there is more: Assassination market bet that someone will die by certain date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

nekusar 6mo ago
Huh, I figured they were rumors. But it's fairly close to a tontine. But those are banned in the USA. But in those cases, rewards are split regularly between survivors. People who die with a tontine lose their share. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine I could see a movie about that, with living tontine holders sending out hitmen to remove other tontine holders, so they can get more money.
- randallsquared 6mo ago
  The "popular culture" section of the very wiki article you linked has several such.

Bender 6mo ago

I ⤻ predict ⤺ that prediction markets will be more tightly regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. i.e. CFTC loses jurisdiction. - More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction. - Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.

hnfong 6mo ago
What do you mean outlawed? It will simply just happen in a jurisdiction that does not care about it. If they can't find a way to tax it, they won't find a way to cost-efficiently identify people participating in it.
- Bender 6mo ago
  That would be an interesting exercise. I suppose if it were outlawed the feds would seize all related domains and raid the HQ for Polymarket and Kalshi both in NY and freeze all their assets. It might spring up in another country under another domain name but then those could be seized as well. It could move to Tor but then money would have to be moved around on something like Monero I suppose. Anywhere money is involved gives countries incentives to cooperate. Which countries would be best for them to operate out of if they were outlawed? What percentage of their user-base would use the Tor Browser? Odd, I just noticed both Polymarket and Kalshi are hosted on the same IP address in San Fransisco. The IP belongs to Amazon but is not part of their cloud. That CIDR used to belong to Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and then Aptum Technologies and now Amazon in SF. Kalshi used to be based out of SF but moved to NY.

deleted 6mo ago

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empath75 6mo ago

So, a fun historical fact is that insurance markets started with people in coffee houses betting on whether or not ships would sink for fun. Eventually ship owners realized that if they bet on their own ship sinking, that it reduced the financial risk of travel, then betters realized that ship owners were doing that and decided to research before taking the other side of the bet, and so on until you end up with ship insurance. In a sense, prediction markets are all forms of insurance. A "war market" is just an insurance market against war. If you do business in someplace that is at risk at war, placing a huge bet on the war happening mitigates the risk of doing business in that place. There is a reason that insurance has taken the shape that it has -- incredibly detailed contracts, requirements that the insured have an interest in the thing being insured, etc, and the reason is exactly that pure prediction markets went through this exact cycle hundreds of years ago which lead to laws being passed banning the practice. That is why LLoyd's of London exists. It started as a pure gambling and became insurance through regulation and business evolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Insurance_Act_1745 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Assurance_Act_1774 I'm not incredibly against the concept of prediction markets, per se, but running them _globally, _at scale_ with _no regulations_ is going to lead to really awful outcomes, up to and including murder.

dboreham 6mo ago
Yes but if you're a bloke toking on your pipe in Lloyds Coffee House in 1713 you don't know that you already ordered a submarine to sink a ship you're placing a bet will sink...
- echelon_musk 6mo ago
  Submarines in 1713?
kibwen 6mo ago
> insurance markets started with people in coffee houses Regardless of whether or not that anecdote is true, insurance is one of the oldest human institutions. We have records of Hammurabi's code from ancient Babylon that pertain to insurance (including ship insurance).

nurettin 6mo ago

> moral degradation is off the charts Nah, I still see it on the logarithmic scale.

jmyeet 6mo ago

I'm wondering how long it's going to take people to see the bigger picture and start connecting the dots. "Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse. Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation. Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care. Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP. Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos. A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive. And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does. Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true. So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves. But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.

loeg 6mo ago
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bspammer 6mo ago

Just to play devil’s advocate, I have found prediction markets genuinely useful despite never placing a bet. In 2024 all of my social media feed was convinced the US election was going to go the other way. I have left wing politics and accordingly the algorithm wraps me in a bubble. It was all videos of empty trump rallies and Kamala hype. Polymarket was the main counter signal I had that the election wasn’t going to go the way I hoped. Similarly when the room temperature super-conductor hype was happening in 2023, the prediction market for it being real never went above 25%. It’s extremely useful to be able to look at that as a layman and go “ok this probably isn’t real”.

tombert 6mo ago

I've hated the idea of Polymarket for about as long as I've known about it. It's one thing when people are betting on how long a speech will be or something, but I really hate the idea of gambling over things that involve the death of people. Things like missile strikes and regime changes involve the deaths of humans and it seems pretty gross to make a game out of that.

fsckboy 6mo ago
you need to learn a little finance, i.e. that subset of economics dealing with financial markets. Markets "crowdsource" values in the face of changing needs, preferences, probability and volatility, and that's an incredibly useful thing. yeah, you can treat investing in markets as a game (fallacy: stock markets are gambling casinos), but people who are serious don't do that, so don't lay the sins of insincerity on markets.
- tombert 6mo ago
  You might have a point with institutional investors, but regular consumers on Polymarket are absolutely just gambling.

RobRivera 6mo ago

Prediction Markets is such an invented phrase. Its a sports book. A sports book of alternatives. It's absolutely bonkers but hey, the grifters need a new costume, the crypto one is practically strings at this point

mlsu 6mo ago

Moral degradation? Buddy think about how much money can be made here. Eye on the ball. Try to think about what's truly important in life: making money by _monetizing every difference of opinion_. https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any-difference-in-opinion-2000695320 https://gizmodo.com/kalshi-ceo-says-he-wants-to-monetize-any...

Zigurd 6mo ago

You will no doubt find some rational sounding arguments in favor of prediction markets here. Lots of useless and harmful things are fascinating. The math behind cryptocurrency, and things like the difference between proof of work and proof of stake are fascinating. But that doesn't make cryptocurrencies good. The genetics of tulip bulbs must be fascinating too.

fwipsy 6mo ago
Prediction markets are a separate concept from cryptocurrency. You can run one on cash within the typical KYC regime. If the arguments in favor of prediction markets sound rational, maybe they are rational? I'd argue that prediction markets are more like stock markets. Very useful, but they also create opportunities for abuse which will need to be addressed. If they are eliminated later because the current administration refuses to regulate them, that would be a huge shame.
- enoint 6mo ago
  The point is that fascination is unrelated to value. I’d even argue that attention is unrelated to rationality. But attention is certainly related to profit.
- Zigurd 6mo ago
  Up to this point nobody has staked out a territory that exists between securities on the one hand, and wild anything goes betting markets on the other hand. Requiring the use of national currencies does nothing to prevent what are effectively tontines incentivizing murder, or other perverse outcomes.
  - fwipsy 6mo ago
    Aren't death markets explicitly banned? Stock markets also incentivize murder. Short a company, then kill the CEO. Boom, profit.

basisword 6mo ago

We need to stop with the "prediction markets" bs naming. They're gambling websites with a larger variety of things you can gamble on.

gzread 6mo ago
They don't call themselves that, because online gambling is illegal. It's a bit like all the piracy websites being "an archive of Nintendo content to preserve it for future generations"
- basisword 6mo ago
  Yes but we should call them what they are. They can call themselves what they like.

loeg 6mo ago

Sports betting seems worse? Easily lumped in to the same category, though.

duxup 6mo ago

I wonder if part of the deal is people gambling believe they have insider info, so any story to the contrary to them is clearly a lie costing them money, something that seems extra offensive?

red_admiral 6mo ago

They've certainly turned out different than Scott Alexander predicted, once the markets were opened up to people who are not in the wider rationalist community. Not foreseeing the amount of sports betting that would take place, is kind of a failure of rationality in the first place, and I say this as someone who absolutely respects the community in general.

MattGaiser 6mo ago
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- Zigurd 6mo ago
  I would go with rationalism being a delusion of tech bros rather than blaming a failure of rationalism on those lumpen proles inventing silly sports propositions.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
    Do you know someone in particular who blamed sports betting on "lumpen proles"? It kinda seems like you're making up a person to get mad at here.
SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
They didn't foresee the amount of sports betting that would take place because sports betting was illegal almost everywhere in the US until 2018.
- thesquandered 6mo ago
  Christie's finest legacy. Not sure how accountability would even look on something like this.
creatonez 6mo ago
You should have lost your respect for the "rationalist" "community" a long time ago. They are aggressively wrong about everything, and most of them are eugenicists.

m3kw9 6mo ago

Same with sports betting, players can get death threats or pressure

ACCount37 6mo ago

Cool it with the moral outrage. Even if I did believe that prediction markets are bad, "easily the worst things to grace the internet by far" is such a ridiculous hyperbole that it strains any belief.

gzread 6mo ago
There aren't that many things bad on this scale that I can think of.

abustamam 6mo ago

Someone on HN suggested that prediction markets would be interesting if only politicians were allowed to participate. For example, politician says that this bill will make the economy better (insert tangible metric here). Well Mr politician, put your money where your mouth is. If you indeed believe this is best for your constituents, bet on it, and if you're right, you'll reap the benefits of your legislation. If not, you're either incompetent or a liar; in either case, your people deserve to know. Theres obvious issues with this system, but I thought it was a fun thought experiment.

gzread 6mo ago
I do find that to be a fun thought experiment, but HN doesn't seem to agree. How would you know it was caused by that bill? Maybe politicians should just be paid based on something we want to incentivize, like lower quartile wages.
- abustamam 6mo ago
  I'm curious how you know HN doesn't seem to agree! But I think your idea is probably a better idea than betting.