17 ms·

We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do

• amazingamazing 6mo ago
  More doomer takes. The world survived two world wars and a cold war. This stuff is nothing. Engagement bait as usual.
  • esafak 6mo ago
    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.”
  • smarf 6mo ago
    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
  • jbxntuehineoh 6mo ago
    > 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
    • ares623 6mo ago
      vintage meme
• Vaslo 6mo ago
  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.
• cat-turner 6mo ago
  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.
  • tptacek 6mo ago
    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.
    • 3-cheese-sundae 6mo ago
      In the prediction markets, there's a fine line between predicting and manifesting.
      • tptacek 6mo ago
        I mean, I'm talking about things like hurricanes and earthquakes and forest fires, not running death pools.
        • echelon 6mo ago
          > 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.
          • tptacek 6mo ago
            "Dynamite the fault"? What are you, a Bond villain?
• hydroflame7 6mo ago
  '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.
  • bluetidepro 6mo ago
    I believe they are (maybe indirectly on some though): https://www.actionnetwork.com/education/tracking-prediction-market-lawsuits https://www.actionnetwork.com/education/tracking-prediction-...
  • qoez 6mo ago
    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
  • heavyset_go 6mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • mothballed 6mo ago
      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.
      • heavyset_go 6mo ago
        Wasn't there a crypto betting platform that was operating outside of the US, blocked US traffic and the US still went after them? I don't remember any specifics, or if I'm remembering anything right at all, but I feel like I read something about that.
• GenerWork 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • sghiassy 6mo ago
    It’s the insider betting that’s the problem. Not the intrinsic nature of gambling
    • GenerWork 6mo ago
      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.
      • tech_ken 6mo ago
        > 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.
      • unethical_ban 6mo ago
        You're waving away the dangers of government officials having a financial incentive to take actions based not on societal well-being or integrity.
      • jacobgkau 6mo ago
        > 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.
• sghiassy 6mo ago
  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-prediction-markets https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/politics/iran-war-bets-predic... Fact: Donald Trump Jump Jr is an advisor of polymarket
  • enoint 6mo ago
    And a paid advisor to Kalshi.
• dheera 6mo ago
  > 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.
• echelon 6mo ago
  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."
  • nlawalker 6mo ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
  • slopinthebag 6mo ago
    Is it actually illegal to bet on an assassination?
    • AStrangeMorrow 6mo ago
      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.
      • nick__m 6mo ago
        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.
  • IncreasePosts 6mo ago
    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?
• jjmarr 6mo ago
  [deleted]
  • chasebank 6mo ago
    Ban them too. Make bets have to be placed in person.
• kevinsync 6mo ago
  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!
  • testaccount28 6mo ago
    as a wise guy once said, "a grown man made a wager; he lost."
    • pixl97 6mo ago
      Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society. The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling scourge years later.
      • testaccount28 6mo ago
        some people like gambling. for them, risking money is an efficient way to purchase a thrill. do we not care about them?
        • pixl97 6mo ago
          People like doing Crack, do we not care for them?
          • testaccount28 6mo ago
            let's outlaw pulp fiction, and daytime teevee, while we're at it.
  • mikrl 6mo ago
    Bet your shirt AND the farm from the comfort of your phone
• JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  "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.
  • warkdarrior 6mo ago
    Why not both? There's money to be squeezed from both ends.
  • AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
    Hmm. That also means that key decision makers can pay money in order to lie to our enemies.
  • kibwen 6mo ago
    The Rosenbergs weren't spies, they were entrepreneurs providing an essential service to the nuclear proliferation industry!
  • kqr 6mo ago
    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.
    • amrocha 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
        > You don’t have any enemies. Nobody cares about you. Nobody is coming to hurt you or your family Do you think the U.S. and Israeli militaries have personal vendettas against each and every civilian we've killed in Iran? Of course we don't. We can barely count them. Just because you aren't personally on your community's adversary's radar doesn't mean they aren't a threat. (To be clear, I don't believe Iran was a threat. But there are threats to Americans, and it's absolutley not brainwashing to ascribe a threat to a group to oneself personally instead of waiting for it to be purely selfishly relevant before acting.)
• cowpig 6mo ago
  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?
  • Jblx2 6mo ago
    How is that different from regular old insurance?
    • cowpig 6mo ago
      Insurance is usually for things that primarily affect the purchaser?
      • hunterpayne 6mo ago
        There is no law that requires that and plenty of policies are bought that don't directly effect the purchaser in the way you imply.
        • cowpig 6mo ago
          And in some of those cases they can warp incentives, right?
  • HWR_14 6mo ago
    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...
  • pants2 6mo ago
    Couldn't that be said of stock markets and any markets? United Healthcare stock dropped 10% immediately after its CEO was killed.
• nine_zeros 6mo ago
  [dead]
• yieldcrv 6mo ago
  > 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.
  • warkdarrior 6mo ago
    > 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.
    • yieldcrv 6mo ago
      Not ignoring, deterring the state from involving itself in anything except the individual.
• seydor 6mo ago
  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
  • grvdrm 6mo ago
    It’s everywhere. Bill Simmons. Makes me insane. How many individual podcast hosts actually control those advertising slots?
    • hunterpayne 6mo ago
      You need to select better content then. None of the creators I follow/watch advertise gambling and I could care less if they did.
      • grvdrm 6mo ago
        Examples? And what app or platform do you use for listening?
• ed_balls 6mo ago
  Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax (last 5 years). Prediction market should be banned.
  • imglorp 6mo ago
    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 https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket
  • baal80spam 6mo ago
    > 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?
• juleiie 6mo ago
  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.
  • canticleforllm 6mo ago
    We are repeating a very, very old lesson. We will learn once more, the hard way.
• paulpauper 6mo ago
  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.
• kylehotchkiss 6mo ago
  Sounds like good ol' fashioned developing country style corruption to me! Anti-intellectualism 1, liberal democratic values 0.
• seatac76 6mo ago
  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.
• blitzar 6mo ago
  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
  • ragazzina 6mo ago
    In my European country gambling is very strictly regulated. Isn’t it the same in yours?
  • tolerance 6mo ago
    This posh HN culture war has gotta end.
  • tech_ken 6mo ago
    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/ https://readwrite.com/threats-israeli-reporter-polymarket/
  • matsemann 6mo ago
    In Norway, gambling is controlled by a state monopoly, same as our alcohol sales. Probably for the same reasons.
    • morkalork 6mo ago
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• dash2 6mo ago
  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?)
  • qup 6mo ago
    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.
  • georgemcbay 6mo ago
    I agree with you overall but I'm not sure the Trump bet is the best example. He certainly isn't going to be thrown out of office (unfortunately) but those 16% of bettors also win if he dies this year, and he's 80, fat, still gobbling burgers and shows signs of someone that has had at least one stroke so far. On the other hand he has access to the best medical care, but even still a 16% chance he drops dead before the end of the year isn't that outrageous.
    • hunterpayne 6mo ago
      Checks annuity tables for an 80 year old making it to 81...you giving 1:6 odds? Sure I will take that bet because the actual odds are only a small fraction. If I spread out the risk on multiple positions, I can make a very good return taking those types of bets. People that place bets on the political outcomes on PolyMarket are from one of three groups: 1) Insiders who think they have an edge (but probably don't), 2) fools that believe what their media of choice tells them and 3) People who make money on the first 2 groups. We both know that that the Trump market and people who believe everything they see on MSNBC (or whatever it is called now) have a big overlap. Its basically a way to print money because there are always people who are out of touch enough to believe their side is right 100% of the time and a <insert color here> wave is coming in the next election. Is this taking advantage of them? Maybe, but they are a walking negative externality in every other way in life so why not. Consider it a tax on political extremism and partisanship which I think it a good thing. Prove me wrong...
• nickdothutton 6mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market
• hermannj314 6mo ago
  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.
  • learn_more 6mo ago
    it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?
    • hermannj314 6mo ago
      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).
      • TheCowboy 6mo ago
        A lot of people assume insider trading in weather markets on data that's publicly available but they're unaware of. It's also a massive whoosh that you only consider the insider trader aspect in choosing to play weather markets. No consideration of how you would get an edge in these markets against extremely powerful weather models used by meteorologists who understand the subject and how to apply the data. It seems much different than betting against political pundits. It's also another whoosh not realizing that some of these stations are actually not that secure when you take a look at them in real life. Less insiders than betting on things that aren't tamper-resistant. Also, a lot of people complain about insiders profiting from last minute data. One way to limit this would be requiring markets to close in advance of final data, but people love to gamble (read: bet without an edge) on things at the last minute across all prediction market subjects.
• jackfruitpeel 6mo ago
  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.
  • paulddraper 6mo ago
    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.
    • butlike 6mo ago
      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.
      • mikeyouse 6mo ago
        It’s even worse on the phone.. there’s a running gag on IG with a lot of truth about “you might be at the bar with your friends at 12am but I’m locked in on German object splitting in half / other obscure betable ‘sports’“. It’s insane we let people do this to themselves and their families. https://youtu.be/sMDppu-X1mY?si=MK7JGHYjW3u4iyBy https://youtu.be/sMDppu-X1mY?si=MK7JGHYjW3u4iyBy
    • ifwinterco 6mo ago
      Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. It's exactly the same problem. You can ban drugs/gambling, but some people are unfortunately just wired to seek them out and will do so regardless. So a ban results in fewer people using them in total, but all of the revenue going to the black market. In an extreme scenario (for example, you ban a drug used by a large % of the population), that black market revenue becomes a real problem and you get Al Capone driving around Chicago with a Tommy gun shooting at people, massive corruption etc. I wouldn't put gambling in that bracket but a significant minority of people are wired to enjoy it and historically when it was illegal it was a significant fraction of the revenue stream of organised crime, so completely banning it is not cost free - you will get a slice of violence and political corruption to go with it. Having said that I agree there should be restrictions on advertising especially anywhere kids might be exposed to it
• apt-apt-apt-apt 6mo ago
  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.
  • Gigachad 6mo ago
    Prediction markets are just inside traders profiting off gambling addicts. If you are not an inside trader, you're the loser paying out.
    • cubefox 6mo ago
      Or you are simply better at predicting the future than most other people.
      • adamandsteve 6mo ago
        Being good at predicting the future will give you only a slight edge, so even a small amount of inside trading can make you unprofitable.
        • cubefox 6mo ago
          Being good at predicting is a broad skill which is applicable widely, while insider information only works for the specific thing the information is about. Far from every market will have insiders with special information. E.g. on who will win an election.
        • Enginerrrd 6mo ago
          Not really. I have a pretty solid 5+% edge over a long time period even on the competitive markets I bet in. On many markets I think it's closer to 10-20%. These are things that inside information can't really help as much as you'd think. And even on markets where someone would benefit from inside information... insiders leak a lot more information than you'd think before it tends to hit the market. Even reading the news can tell you more than you'd think if you look at it right. The single biggest hint is "Why am I reading this, and why now?". News stories on geopolitics almost never arise naturally, and that question will get you to a LOT of information that was not explicitly stated.
• taurath 6mo ago
  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.
  • throwaway27448 6mo ago
    Yes. The "freedom" people refer to is "the freedom to be an asshole and exploit people without repercussion".
    • alphawhisky 6mo ago
      Don't forget about the freedom in your pants! And by that, I mean a Glock (not reproductive self determination or gender self determination, obviously).
      • Jerrrrrrrry 6mo ago
        Hmmm...Defending yourself is literally the same as abortion and gender dysphoria. No.
        • throwway120385 6mo ago
          Insofar as there's some nuance to what individuals choose to do but we like to eschew that in debate and make blanket statements about what you should or should not be allowed to do?
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
    • erikerikson 6mo ago
      No. Those are the abusers of freedom who like to pretend their freedom doesn't stop at the tip of our collective noses. They are also a minority regardless of how vocal that small minority and the psyop saboteurs are that egg them on and keep them company.
• saltyoldman 6mo ago
  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?
  • kqr 6mo ago
    Yes, this is precisely how Polymarket works under the hood. IIRC you can even participate by working directly with the smart contracts.
• colesantiago 6mo ago
  Maybe it would be better to ban Las Vegas.
• GCA10 6mo ago
  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.
  • JoeDaDude 6mo ago
    I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.
• leflob 6mo ago
  Maybe we should build a prediction model of upcoming events based on volume of bets made on polymarket
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• orthoxerox 6mo ago
  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.
• UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • drstewart 6mo ago
    Lost from reddit, are we?
  • Zigurd 6mo ago
    How much of a hurry depends on whether Trump gets his $200 billion to continue the war. Have you checked the odds on Kalshi?
• kelseyfrog 6mo ago
  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.
  • mcmcmc 6mo ago
    So are you advocating for the idea that the wealthy should be able to control history then, by nature of having the largest amount of betting capital?
    • kelseyfrog 6mo ago
      I'm arguing for taking advantage of this before you can't.
      • mcmcmc 6mo ago
        People who aren’t sociopaths might argue no one should be taking advantage of this, and that the people behind these services should be in prison
        • senordevnyc 6mo ago
          “People who disagree with me are sociopaths” doesn’t have the persuasive power you seem to imagine.
          • mcmcmc 6mo ago
            Strawmen aren’t particularly persuasive either. If I said “people who think murder is okay are sociopaths” would you have a problem?
• jjcm 6mo ago
  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.
  • kqr 6mo ago
    > weather prediction markets Can also be used to hedge the risk of rain on the day you've planned an outdoor barbecue!
    • debatem1 6mo ago
      You can do this with some forms of trip insurance. I stared hard at arbitrage there a few years ago but it was too hard to get your money out if you were right.
  • themafia 6mo ago
    > is weather prediction markets Humans can, and do, manipulate the weather. There's actually international treaties against doing it. > Hundreds are creating their own weather prediction models Weather is chaotic. You don't run a model once and use the result. You run it hundreds of times and average the results. You also need really high quality real time data to be fed into the system to achieve any sort of accuracy, which, is not something any of these hundreds could do on their own. > markets could be a net good You can already sell weather predictions. You can just hang a shingle and do it directly. Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?
    • adamandsteve 6mo ago
      > Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved? Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms, also a market solution actually would work in this case imo. Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get, and there aren't really any negative externalities.
• praptak 6mo ago
  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.
• bombdailer 6mo ago
  Inventive markets is a better term for what they will become.
  • barbazoo 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
• rvz 6mo ago
  This is what "AGI" will bring more of. An "abundance" of gamblers.
• kdamica 6mo ago
  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.
• snaily 6mo ago
  Here's an alleged secondary effect of 2 in a quote by Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan[1]: “When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.” I'm with Matt Levine here[2]: "There is something particularly dystopian about the idea that: a) Some countries will bomb other countries. b) The people doing the bombing will profit from the bombing by insider trading the bombing contracts on prediction markets. c) This will cause the prediction markets to correctly reflect the probability of bombing, allowing the people getting bombed to avoid being bombed." [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarket-founder-says-war-bets-are-facing-growing-resistance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-07/polymarke... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lever-the-predictions https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-12/lev...
  • kqr 6mo ago
    I think the other side of the argument goes that (a) the bombings would happen anyway, and (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading. (The bombs "only" get marginally cheaper.) Thus the only actual effect is the early warning, which is a good thing in this case. Like if someone managed to figure out a way to make slightly cheaper bombs but with the tradeoff that the cheaper bombs gave a few hours of eary warning to the people being bombed, I think I would prefer you used those bombs. (There are many other cases where insiders may change the outcome to align with their bet. That is bad if the outcome is bad.)
    • dwaltrip 6mo ago
      > (b) bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits from the insider trading The people profiting aren't buying the bombs with their own money.
    • croes 6mo ago
      >bombing is very expensive so nobody actually profits You don’t actually believe bombs are sold without out a proper margin.
• nine_k 6mo ago
  The big issue underlying gambling, betting, alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive stuff all the way to fentanyl, is that people may literally lose their mind over it, at least party. A heavy addict ceases to be a responsible adult who can act reasonably and autonomously, and becomes driven by impulses they cannot control, like a schizophrenic who cannot control the voices in their head. Even more unpleasantly, this does not happen to everyone every time. Quite many people can have a glass of wine here and there without becoming alcoholics. A ton of people can play a game like Bejeweled out of boredom, and happily switch to more interesting activities, given a chance. Some people can voluntarily stop even taking heroin and subject themselves to therapy. Etc, etc. But a relatively small minority gets hooked badly. They cannot quit. They do not want to stop. The addiction becomes a primary life activity. Many more who could be hooked to physiologically brutal addictions like nicotine or heroin are wise enough to never approach those, understanding how badly it might end. But again, a relative minority cannot resist the lure. A less tolerant society would stigmatize such outcomes, adding strong social pressure that might keep potential addicts from getting into the habit. A society could also consider addiction a medical condition that requires intervention and treatment, like poisoning or a dangerous infection. Even modern Western societies are capable of that when sufficiently frightened, see COVID-19. Another approach, which I'd call "extremist libertarian", would just let addictions form, proclaiming that this is what people do exercising their free will. It would not be different from a complete lack of civilization, and leaving the problem to the evolution to solve. In either case the addicts would suffer, in worst cases going destitute and die. That would remove the addicts from the gene pool, probably lowering the risk of addiction in future generations, slowly. Slowly, and painfully, often not only to addicts but also to people around them. We struggle with addressing addictions because we struggle to admit that addictions exist, and that in bad cases they affect the sufferer's agency quite a bit. I'm afraid that without admitting this property of heavy addiction we won't be able to act in an efficacious way.
• heisenbit 6mo ago
  The problem is that these markets allow to translate political power directly to money. Worse destructive events are rare, need a lot less action (butterfly effect) and leave thus less traces and command high odds. Once committed the ones in power have a vested interest in causing destruction.
  • kqr 6mo ago
    Capitalism took care of the exchange between money and power long ago. Prediction markets, as terrible as they are, are peanuts in comparison.
    • jrexilius 6mo ago
      yes, because the last century of communism showed that it was really just capitalism where centralized power corrupts..
      • throwaway_7274 6mo ago
        kqr didn't make that claim
• edgarvaldes 6mo ago
  Gambling may be bad on its own, but the gambling and advertising combo are a very harmful combination IMHO.
  • AlexandrB 6mo ago
    I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
• mlmonkey 6mo ago
  I was reminded of this bizarre article: https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-league-daily-cover https://www.si.com/betting/2023/09/15/fake-indian-cricket-le...
  • dang 6mo ago
    Discussed a little bit here: Creating a fake Indian cricket league - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37580599 - Sept 2023 (10 comments)
• amelius 6mo ago
  Do you even need prediction markets if the department of war can just make the real markets do whatever the hell they want?
• rbbydotdev 6mo ago
  It's tough, because I think outlawing 'vices' like gambling is an infringement on your individual freedom - but when it's done with an enterprise it's so much more problematic. Thinking about for instance tobacco companies vs locally grown in the backyard.
  • moconnor 6mo ago
    We also outlaw vices like physical violence and property theft. Society is fundamentally counter to individual freedom, and the degree determines the nature of that society and the degree of cooperation possible within it.
• enceladus06 6mo ago
  Why is this such a big deal? I don't get why people make such a big deal betting on sports; if you want to waste your money go for it.
  • willturman 6mo ago
    Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.
• deviantony 6mo ago
  Wait, people can bet on bombings now? What the hell man.
  • a3w 6mo ago
    MAGA gets rich on bombing Iran? The "Uno reverse card" of millions of dollar paid out if you assassinate Trump came into play recently. This one regime is not trying for plausible deniability, though, which is not quite a reverse of just using the prediction market tool, too.
• firloop 6mo ago
  > And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few days[1]. [0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-revenue-2025-263-145801350.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-revenue-2025-263-1... [1]: https://gamingamerica.com/news/polymarket-free-ride-over-introduce-fees-march-30 https://gamingamerica.com/news/polymarket-free-ride-over-int...
  • roxolotl 6mo ago
    Thank you for this call out. I was blown away by that number because it would have meant volume was maybe pushing 1T.
  • shimman 6mo ago
    It's DT, don't expect honesty from his posts (unless he is bashing unions or workers, he's very honest about that).
  • pbreit 6mo ago
    Same as Block booking crypto trades as revenue.
    • firloop 6mo ago
      Are the referenced companies referring to their volume as revenue?
  • worldsayshi 6mo ago
    I can't believe people are throwing so much money on zero/negative sum games that on average have no benefit to anyone including yourself. I mean I know gambling is a thing but at least we are counting that as an addiction. But we seem to take polymarket more seriously.
    • Spacecosmonaut 6mo ago
• krick 6mo ago
  All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
  • thejohnconway 6mo ago
    That’s not what people are worried about, it’s the rigging of real world events (including wars!) that has people worried.
    • TheCowboy 6mo ago
      It's also a bit overblown. If you could rig a war, you would stand to make a lot more money playing the stock market than small potatoes prediction markets. A lot of money has been on the line based on which party wins elections even before prediction markets existed (see fracking or pipeline project approval as obvious examples).
    • krick 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  • TheCowboy 6mo ago
    I've been active and profitably trading in prediction markets for a long time now, but I think this perspective is also not helpful. Prediction markets exist within the laws and institutions of society to be able to function, and the public should debate and discuss how they're regulated. Problem gamblers do present a negative externality where third parties can bear the cost, especially when they have dependents.
  • echelon 6mo ago
    Gambling outside of equities and securities is a negative externality. (Investment in startups, goods, etc. makes the economy spin. Investing in what hoop a ball goes through does no good at all.) This puts plenty of people who shouldn't gamble into debt and lowers their societal fitness. The other side of the gamble is probably losing on average too. Only the house and infrequent insiders win. These private companies are fleecing our economy's dynamicity without reinvesting it in aligned positive externalities. It's a cancer. At least the lottery goes to education, in theory. My college was subsidized by the lotto, so there's that. Kalshi and PolyMarket aren't doing anything positive.
• jongjong 6mo ago
  Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make their stocks go up. Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country. The real problem is centralization of power. Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes. That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies. My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation. You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
• andrewflnr 6mo ago
  How much of this is fixed if a person is only able to bet token amounts on each outcome? Let's get crazy and make it $20. A few crazy people might run Sybil attacks but it'll be a lot more limited and obvious. Not that I'm opposed to consigning all these gambling apps back to the fiery depths from which they came, but if you do want to preserve the ability of healthy people to have a little bit of fun, limiting the bet size has almost no effect on that while drastically reducing the damage. It seems like a good compromise, if anyone is looking for one of those.
  • TheCowboy 6mo ago
    PredictIt operated with $850 limits for years, and overall this seemed fine. Limits of various sizes might make sense depending on the subject, where the risk of penalty greater outweighs the potential profits.
  • chias 6mo ago
    I'd bet that a significant majority of prediction market revenue comes from people who bet big. So I expect your solution would fix all of it, as a second order effect, in that running one would stop being a viable business model.
    • jaccola 6mo ago
      I bet that most of their revenue doesn't come from people who want to bet big! If only there were some kind of market where we could materialise our bets...
    • andrewflnr 6mo ago
      That would be fine by me, but I don't think they need massive revenue to be viable. Certainly they would have to downsize from where they are now.
  • lurkshark 6mo ago
    Part of the argument of prediction markets is that it incentivizes good forecasting. Theoretically if you wanted to concoct a novel political polling technique or rent some compute for a new hyper local weather model, you could recoup your costs via the prediction market. I think in practice the volume of sharp money in the prediction markets is a small fraction and the majority would be better served with the limits you’re proposing
• ragall 6mo ago
  Gambling is flourishing not because we're in a low-trust world, as the article says, but because the living conditions of an increasingly large part of the population as such that they cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life. We're returning to the social dynamics that dominated much of history (if you consider how much gambling was a scourge, from ancient Rome to thousands of years of history in China).
  • trynumber9 6mo ago
    So do you have a lot of trust in people that "cannot hope of ever achieving a comfortable life"? It seems like a risky proposition.
    • ragall 6mo ago
      Still, yes. I can trust that if I were in an accident, people passing by would be decent enough to try to help me. To see a place where you'd have the rational expectation of being robbed by passers-by, see Russia.
• ruthven-elara 6mo ago
  [dead]
• AIorNot 6mo ago
  Trump and his Tech Bros enable this to make money for themselves its like Trump is turning the whole of America into Alternate reality Hill Valley of 1985 in Back to the Future https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN https://youtu.be/gwJQG4tFqZA?si=9IbdAR4O-lGiTVtN See: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-markets-truth-predicts https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/21/politics/trump-prediction-mar...
• dmichulke 6mo ago
  Isn't the bomb argument actually a statement about (the current way we implement) democracy? Maybe it's the separation of powers that's not working...
• YZF 6mo ago
  https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/court-idf-reservist-accused-of-using-classified-info-to-bet-on-polymarket-is-air-force-major/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/court-idf-reser... This was just on the news: "A reservist suspected of using classified information to place bets on the Polymarket prediction site served as a major in the Israeli Air Force, a Tel Aviv Court reveals. The defendant was indicted alongside his alleged accomplice last month on severe security offenses, as well as bribery and obstruction of justice, after they allegedly bet on the timing of Israel’s opening strikes that kicked off the 12-day war with Iran last June. The case was subject to a court-issued gag order, which was partially lifted this evening following a petition from several Hebrew-language outlets. The details of the case were cleared for publication, but the defendants’ names are still under wraps. According to the indictment, the soldier was briefed on the June operation in a confidential meeting a day before it was carried out, then notified his civilian accomplice about the offensive. When Israeli warplanes were on their way to attack Iran, the reservist let the civilian know, and the latter placed a bet on the war’s timing. The pair allegedly made $162,663 after winning the bet, which they agreed to split evenly between themselves."
  • bronco21016 6mo ago
    I’d love to read about their Opsec failures. It seems like an offline conversation or Signal chat with disappearing messages could’ve saved these two. Any links to details on the case?
  • yonatan8070 6mo ago
    In addition to this article, I've recently read this one [1], where the reported received numerous violence and death threats from people who wanted him to change the a story he published to match what they bet on Polymarket. [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...
    • superxpro12 6mo ago
      Yeah this is a much more likely outcome of unregulated gambling... I expect to hear a LOT more of this. Also plan for a swift, complete erosion of trust in sports officiating.
• joelthelion 6mo ago
  There is a class of prediction markets that are useful and seem immune to most of these problems : play money prediction markets. I've been enjoying them for years; I feel they provide a useful service to understand what is going on in the world, and they don't seem to provide the perverse incentives that we are seeing here. Oh, and they seem to work just as well.
  • kakadu 6mo ago
    > There is a class of prediction markets that are useful No there is not. That's as damaging a statement as "soft" drugs or "problem" gambling. Statements usured by corporate PR to set up a fake middle ground and delegate responsibility to the consumer for any "bad" behaviour.
    • DirkH 6mo ago
      There literally are drugs vastly less addictive and harmful than others. So some designation of some as "soft" and others as "hard" is not unwarranted (though we can argue where that cutoff is) and anything that paints all drugs the same is a false equivalence that suspiciously appears more ideologically anti-drug driven rather than impartial evidence-driven. Same goes for anyone saying all gambling is the same.
  • dogcomplex 6mo ago
    Prediction markets are just fine IF they have some means of regulation against insider trading and perverse incentives. This phase is the same thing derivatives markets looked like before the 2008 crisis and Dodd-Frank, and several other waves before that of crisis and reform (Securities Act, Market Reform Act). Every new financial medium gets its moment in the sun when all the crooks extract everything they can, before eventually market governance steps in. Crypto's been in scammer phase for a while. It needs decentralized governance to solve it this time though, since obviously classic governance is a dumpster fire and couldn't enforce anything on crypto even if it tried.
    • Shaanie 6mo ago
• _fin6 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• Towaway69 6mo ago
  Is there a site which implements the ideas behind the file Indecent Proposal[1]? It would be a site where folks could start auctions based on stuff they want from other folks. So Bob wants Janes jumper. He goes onto the site, creates an auction with an initial offer of $5. Jane is informed that Bob wants to buy her jumper. She turns down the offer. Bob raises his offer to $10. She declines the offer. Then Cane joins the auction and makes an offer for $15. Jane refuses that too. One see where this is going. The point is that Jane cannot shutdown the auction and anyone can make a bid. The trajectory is that Jane will reach a point where she is forced to make a moral choice (much like in the film). Everyone has their price, even Jane in this case. It is easy enough to imagine what besides jumpers will be placed on the site. It is an highly immoral idea and something akin to cyber mobbing or AI fake porn. So does the site exist already? Asking for a friend. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_Proposal
  • ugh123 6mo ago
    This sounds like a great Black Mirror episode
  • ares623 6mo ago
    that's just darkweb stuff right?
    • Towaway69 6mo ago
      Why? I find Polymarket and these gambling sites just as bad. Is AI with it's fake porn is any better? And just yesterday, Meta and Google was found responsible for addiction[1]. How is this worse? I guess I forgot to say that a site like that would be simply be a poke in the eye of how stupid the internet has become. It's ridiculous to see folks not liking this idea yet finding the idea of betting on wars to be ok. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/03/25/meta-and-google-found-liable-in-social-media-addiction-trial/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/03/25/meta-and...
• moconnor 6mo ago
  The article’s “worst case” is not dark enough. The real evil is when someone ensures the famine occurs so they can profit from an outside betting position.
  • Aushin 6mo ago
    Was thinking this as well. Not shocking though, the pundit class, of which Derek is a high-ranking member, is pretty unimaginative (in a way I imagine is deliberate)
• johanneskanybal 6mo ago
  Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for. It's something without any consequence or meaning. The Author mixing that with the dictator and his cronies making buck from their position is offensive.
  • gyosko 6mo ago
    > Betting on sport is kind of what sports where made for. What?! Beg I your pardon, but I think sport is a very different thing to me.
• derelicta 6mo ago
  Have Westerners ever thought of working and creating real value instead of betting on the death of little children?
  • neop1x 6mo ago
    Yes, they have. They’ve made tons of great products and services that you use every day without even thinking about it, in contrast to Russia for example. It’s a shame you don’t see how much they've improved our quality of life.
    • derelicta 6mo ago
      You must be confused. Most of the products that end in your hands were made by hard working folks from the Global South. All Westerers do is own the companies, the labour and the politicians from those countries. But don't worry, sooner rather than later, even Westerners will have to relearn what working truly means.
• PeterStuer 6mo ago
  We have the 'official' stock (prediction) market regulated by the SEC, FINRA, CFTC, ... , yet (allegedly) insider trading isn't unheard of. We have the more recent crypto (prediction) markets with (allegedly) complete market manipulation where those same regulators stepped in after being woken up late to the party. Now we have these 'open range' prediction markets with the CFTC wrestling for getting a toe in without stepping on those of the casino, sports betting, Native American gaming, lotteries ... interests?
• k__ 6mo ago
  Half-OT: when does gambling become safe? I mean, insurance is basically basically betting that bad things happen to you.
• password4321 6mo ago
  pennywagers seemed reasonable but has shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30163868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30163868 > We give users a little bit of money each week to play with ($0.50 right now) and if they can run it up past a certain point we'll pay them out in cash. If they lose the money, we put another $0.50 in the next week. It's legal in the US since the users aren't allowed to deposit and mainly for entertainment purposes.
• BITS-Rohit 6mo ago
  Kind of Nice i would say ?
• DrBazza 6mo ago
  > Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America. Here's one story about gambling in the UK: the TV advertising is relentless and out of control after 9pm due to legislation passed in the early 00s. Gambling can quite literally lose you your house, friends and family. But apparently it's totally fine to advertise as long as HMRC get ££££. On some TV channels, every second advert, or worse, most adverts, are gambling. Bingo? Slots? Poker? Sports? All of the above. The biggest UK tax payer for several years was Denise Coates. Tobacco advertising, on the other hand, is totally banned in the UK, but won't lose you your house or family and friends (unless of course you die). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Coates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Coates
  • gadders 6mo ago
    Most addictions will ruin your life - whether it is gambling, drugs or alcohol.
    • vincnetas 6mo ago
      Right, so why advertise gambling or any other of them?
      • gadders 6mo ago
        Food addiction kills too. Shall we stop advertising food?
        • whoiskevin 6mo ago
          Why should we advertise something that you have to go consume? Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat?
          • SideburnsOfDoom 6mo ago
            > Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat? Looking around at the world, yes? Less-heathy takeaway chains do advertise constantly, and concepts like the food pyramid are there to literally "tell you about bread, vegetables, meat" as an advertisement for a better alternative. People aren't born knowing this - if they don't learn it from parents, they will either learn it from someone else, or not know it and have a poor diet out of ignorance.
• gadders 6mo ago
  Not really commenting on the politics side, but do Americans realise sports betting has been legal in other countries for decades? (Since 1960 in the UK at least). Yes, there were a few fixes when in-game betting and exchanges first came in in the UK, but by and large most problems are solved now. Maybe a less parochial view would help them get a sense of proportion?
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• everdrive 6mo ago
  We're just in a bleak time. It seems that many people are scrambling to do the most harm possible. Everyone's building the torment nexus. I'm not sure what else to do but attempt to insulate my family from it.
  • pdfernhout 6mo ago
    I'm hoping that someday more people will appreciate the humor in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity." Until then, there is always "The Optimism of Uncertainty" by Howard Zinn: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertainty/ https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/optimism-uncertai... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. ..."
  • jfil 6mo ago
    Whenever I think to myself "how did things get this bad?", I also force myself to think, "how did they get good, in the first place?" Today, we are building the Torment Nexus. But yesterday, we were building the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, etc. etc. Things can get worse, but they can also get better - we just have to do our small part in making them better.
    • nrlucas 6mo ago
      They got good through legislation. The left is focused not on the correct thing (albeit a thing worthy of support), and the right refuse to acknowledge the benefit of regulation / legislation and are totally disenchanted with the possibility of politics while they just just blame the left for all their problems.
• superxpro12 6mo ago
  The final conclusion about the evolving and rising focus on "money" as a core value is interesting, and one that seems to make sense to me. I think most people before the age of information found meaning in life in these non-monetary "beliefs"... religion, community engagement, etc. Mostly to the benefit of the wealthy class. I think people are finally waking up to the fact that the wealthy (parasite) class have been using these non-monetary values as a smokescreen for generations to extract more and more wealth out of the lower classes, and the internet has allowed this zeitgeist to forment. Anecdotally, I've experienced this in the company i work at. For years and years and years, we would complain about low salaries, with respect to peer companies. And they would always throw distractions at us instead of just... raising salaries. "More happy hours, more team building activites, more company benefits that didnt actually cost anything". Anything but raise salaries.
  • kjkjadksj 6mo ago
    Yeah everyone likes to throw a stupid little comment at Robinhood but come on. My parents did not invest outside their 401k. My grandparents actually stuffed 20k in their mattress, must have been pretty good money when they put it under there. We are approaching the first couple years of this country where investing knowledge has actually proliferated out of the country club. It is a huge shift in the tide but no one wants to talk about it, if only to make a jab at robinhood perhaps.
    • Breza 6mo ago
      The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.
  • pilgrim0 6mo ago
    But now the desire for earthly riches took a role similar to religion and it is being weaponized to extract even more wealth from the working class.
  • 6mo ago
• DeathArrow 6mo ago
  >A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue. That does not only explain gambling but explains many things. And it's not just about the US, it's about the whole West.
• DeathArrow 6mo ago
  >I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself. After traditions and religion become less important, virtue wasn't replaced by money and market but by status seeking. We are all now comparatively rich to how we were 50 years ago or to people from third world countries. So money doesn't make a big difference, but status does. Followers, approvals, being highly viewed in a particular niche is much more valuable for many people than money. And even money, when they are important, they aren't important because one can buy good and service, money are important because they can confer status. So my conjecture is that it's status seeking what might be the end goal for many people in the West and what is provoking big issues for societies, like severely declining birth rates.
• rfwhyte 6mo ago
  Anyone with half a brain, or who doesn't stand to be personally enriched by the plague of parasitical gambling / prediction sites can see they are obviously a net negative for society, yet they stand to make some already very rich people even richer, so they will of course be allowed to run wild regardless of the harm they cause. We do not live in a world where policy decisions are based on what's best for the people, we live in a world where policy decisions are almost exclusively made according to what will further enrich the wealthy elites, so there's effectively a 0% chance we will see any meaningful regulatory action here, as it doesn't' matter if gambling is destroying the fabric of society as long as some bastards are getting rich off of it, as that's literally all that matters these days.
• edge_trader_41 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• grahammccain 6mo ago
  They really need to regulate this things. Like people could spoof markets and stuff so easily. Do things that would be traditionally illegal in regular markets but not predication markets.
  • euroderf 6mo ago
    It's like poker. If you don't know who the patsy is, the patsy is you.
• waffletower 6mo ago
  I think stories like these may make the host, Y Combinator, uneasy. They have invested in Dome, a prediction market startup, which was acquired by Polymarket last month. I had a comment to a previous story, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397822, critical of prediction markets which had acquired a fair amount of points and prominence, but ultimately was flagged and removed by moderators. It seemed over the top and I suspected that there might be a YC Polymarket connection, and subsequent searches revealed this to be the case (Dome as mentioned above). Perhaps this comment will be flagged too. Unfortunately, Hacker News might not be the best venue to discuss the dystopian possibilities of prediction markets.