These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
Whoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel.
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"
It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
We ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.
You mean the incident where his copilot intentionally locked him out of the cockpit and crashed the plane into a mountain? Hardly seems like an indictment of locked doors to me.
There was also Helios 522 where one of the cabin attendants only managed to enter minutes before the engines flamed out, there is a strong argument if the door wasn't locked he could've entered earlier.
And my understanding is that the current theory for MH370 is that the pilot locked out the copilot and then depressurised the cabin.
There are non-fatal cases like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 where the copilot locked the captain out when we was in the restroom (though loss of life was still a possibility, one of the engines had flamed out and was on emergency fuel).
As with all incidents, there are many factors that lead to them, but in these cases the presence of locked and reinforced cockpit doors contributed to the incident (in malicious cases the fact the door was impenetrable was clearly part of the decision-making, and in accident cases it was obviously an impediment to any positive outcome once the incident occurred).
I don't even think Karen got involved, it was just the Bush administration seizing the opportunity for more corruption, pork barrels, surveillance and harassment of the population at large full stop.
When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.
> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.
I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.
But it the long run we should maybe still attempt to solve it, before there are mandatory body scans everywhere and cars only start, if you do a mental examination first?
Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.
Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.
Oh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter.
It also substantially changes the definition of who's an insider. Polymarket has bets for random things like a particular word being used by an announcer. Suddenly the announcer is an insider on that bet.
I don't understand why people would want to bet on such an easily gamed outcome. I can understand that some people are compulsive gamblers, but it seems such a foolish thing to bet on. To me, it'd be like betting with someone about how many fingers they're going to hold up.
Enough people do care about pro sports that someone who doesn't still needs to worry about being caught in a riot should something like this happen. (they already worry about riots for real wins/losses)
The main relationship is to all gambling. Sports likely gets assumed to make it worse because people still believe the myth that the Super Bowl is the worst DV day of the year.
People sometimes do drastic things when they experience large gambling losses. They might embezzle, rob, scam, be unable to pay rent or debts. It has a significant effect on people who are not directly involved in gambling.
Yeah. You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home. For obvious reasons. But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
> You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home
This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.
I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Both of your examples are people protecting their insurable interest. Ownership is the most common insurable interest, but there are many other ways to have one.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
Even if you have an insurable interest, moral hazard may arise - acting recklessly or other abuse, while knowing you are insured/covered. Somewhat similar to friendly fraud in retail/ecommerce.
Insurance normally has fine print about those things. Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide. Fire insurance doesn't pay out if you intentionally burn your house down (the fire department also will investigate because even though it is their job they don't like risking their life fighting fires)
You can get insurance without the above provisions, but it will cost a lot more. Once in a while someone manages to collect on a claim for loss of their expensive cigars after they smoke them - but this is rare and usually not worth the cost.
This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
some life insurance policies pay out for suicide after an initial exclusion period. this is often six or twelve months. insurers can include it because suicide claims are relatively uncommon.
if there is evidence that someone took out the policy with the intention of creating a claim then the insurer may treat it as fraud and decline it.
Unless you short the property. Essentially, sell it now on the bet that it will drop in value later. Then it burns down and you repurchase the vacant lot and return the property to the original owner.
> With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
I don't think any corporation "cares" about social issues, but, fwiw, polymarket isn't as ok with it as you imply. Polymarket reportedly detected the suspicious behavior, reported it, then worked with investigators to nab Gannon Ken Van Dyke.
Insurance doesn't exactly cancel that. Maybe in a theoretical world, perhaps.
For example, I have a decently-sized life-insurance policy. If buying insurance "exactly covered that", I would be indifferent to whether I lived or died. But I'm not. And I can't think of a policy-size that would make me so. Money is an imperfect substitute.
Less dramatically, I have really good auto coverage. The car itself is nothing special, and the coverage I have would make me whole (minus a very small deductible) But I am very much not indifferent to replacing the car with money, and it would take way more than the deductible to change my mind on that.
The hassle-value alone would go way over. And hassle-value is usually not insurable.
Insurance fraud is absolutely a thing--but the insurance company still wants you to prefer that the event doesn't happen. That it doesn't work perfectly doesn't really invalidate the point.
Yeah, you are being pedantic. The clear meaning is that you're not just allowed to insure arbitrary properties.
If you wanted to correct a misconception, you should provide a better, more complete understanding, not just express frustration about a misconception that doesn't even exist outside of an uncharitable reading.
In this case, that means refining the point to the more accurate model, that you need an insurable interest -- i.e. reason you don't want the event to happen, even knowing you'd get a payout[1]. Your counterexamples only work as such because that exists![2] If you want to fix all the people who don't have your superior understanding, that would have been a great way to help them out.
>I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It exists because it's approximately true: you can't get insurance on 99.99999% of buildings in the world because you have no insurable interest in them. And any time someone could correct that false premise, they probably just complain rather than providing the complete understanding -- exactly the choice you just made here.
To be clear they had explicitly written in the contract from the start that death didn't count. And they paid out the full amount - just not to the same betters they would have if he had left office alive.
There are a lot of things short of death that we don't want to encourage either. There is a huge grey zone here that I frankly don't want to entrust to private entities.
I've seen contracts on whether California will burn this summer.
Any bum defending these contracts is to me either a shill or way too dumb to understand the concept of incentives.
Oh and there was an Israeli journalist that got life threats because he reported that an Iranian missile struck some place in Israel, and apparently there was a huge bet on it on polymarket.
Funny how average HNer is opposing Flock cameras that solve real crimes by covering it up as a "freedom" yet completely fine regulating contracts with hypothetical incentives.
Remember how things ended up when insurance policies on loans you didn't hold were allowed... I think there is quite a lot of good reasons to ban those sort of bets.
In German law, any contract, including bets, is void if it is “sittenwidrig”. For example, if your wager in a bet is to become one’ slave in case you lose, this bet is void.
I suppose they never specified the wager. But, given the topic is prediction markets and the topics of the bets, I thought it was implied that the wagers would be exclusively in money. With that in mind, is there any example of a law against specific topics being betted on?
Nope. "We're just an intermediary between people" is a 100+ year old yarn that casinos and bookies have been trying to spin. If you're presenting a point of entry to a betting line and taking a cut, congrats, you're the house. Doesn't matter if you adjust the betting line manually based on intuition or algorithmically based on betting volume. Sometimes it doesn't get enforced because of corruption, but if this was the case, then why aren't there tons of independent unregulated poker casinos where players just play against each other? If you facilitate and take a cut, you're the house.
My phrasing was poor, but they do so generally in a very good faith fashion. It's not just a wink wink rake type thing. For instance there are no fees at all on the most popular and high-volume markets - geopolitics and world events. And not only are there are no fees even on smaller markets for market 'makers' - people who put up an offer, but they provide a percentage of all fees collected from market 'takers' back to the makers, as a means of encouraging liquidity.
What the hell are you talking about? You are absolutely not allowed to bet on whatever you'd like with another individual. Depending on what you're betting on (for example, the price of a stock or the throw of a card), it falls under varying different regimes. This is highly regulated and has been for most of the whole of human history.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
In Spain in elderly caring homes there was a tradition to bet on Bingo matches for simbolic prices (barely one or two euros, enough for a coffee and that's it). It was legalized on paper recently, but technically everyone turned a blind eye.
It was, believe it still is, somewhat similar in Australia, where the game Two Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-up), which was a wartime favorite among soldiers, was implicitly or allowed on Anzac Day despite being gambling.
There's many true crime cases where the spouse took out multiple life insurance policies then did the killing to earn money. It's a bounty. We should care about the effect in practice.
> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
They can already do this easily with the stock market.
Usually though people's pay/power directly correlates with how badly they can screw the company if they go (legally) rogue.
But anyone can get a job at XYZ, buy puts, and go and set the factory on fire the next day. Betting markets don't change the fact that you'll be arrested, except that you'll be arrested for a few thousand dollars rather than whatever you can squeeze out of options.
The difference is if someone sets fire to a factory that fire will be investigated and odds are that person will be caught (not always, but few people know how to set a fire that large and cover their tracks). By contracts someone who works in the factory is much more likely to be able to figure out how to "have an accident" doing something they normally do, everyone knows it is then but they just get a "do better next time" talking to, and the factory throws up some more guards.
Anyone who can figure out "how to have an accident" can do it. A fire at an aluminum plant last year tanked Ford stock 6%. For a relatively boring stock like Ford, the right options would have moved 1000%+.
> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.
The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.
what are these "actual odds" and if you have the time machine that lets you observe the necessary outcomes to calculate them, why are you bothering with making money on betting markets?
The "actual odds" is that if you get, say, 100 bets that were at 10% yes when the bet was resolved, you'll see that around 10% closed yes and 90% closed No.
So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.
The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.
Him placing the bets or a co-conspirator placing the bets and sharing the profit is the same thing. He is effectively betting on himself saying those words which he then goes on to say.
I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
> Him placing the bets or a co-conspirator placing the bets and sharing the profit is the same thing.
So we're in agreement that if he is not profiting from saying it, then it's OK, correct?
> I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
If my friends make a bet that I will/won't do something, and I choose to make one side win, that is not match fixing. I'm sure match fixing only applies to regulated games. If people want to make bets on unregulated games, and lose their shirt, they have only themselves to blame.
For something to be match fixing, the government has to recognize the activity as a sport, and most state laws require the person to benefit from the fixing, which the CEO here is not and/or they require "rule tampering" - there was no rule broken here.
Depends how you count profiting from it, if you only count direct monetary profit, or if you count things such as favours to be profit.
There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
T hen again crypto isn't known for its bastion of legality and morality, therefore I would assume there are some deals going on in the background which are probably illegal, and if not that then unethical - not that they would care about that.
> or if you count things such as favours to be profit.
There needs to be evidence of such a thing, no?
> There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
I have motivation. If people are placing stupid bets on me, I sure as heck want them to suffer for it.
I'm sure some people view a CEO doing this as unethical, but I fully support it. Whoever lost money on that bet had it coming.
Of course, my preference is both sides losing money, but we can't have everything.
Speaking of ethics: There is a reason why betting and gambling are categorized under "vices". If you make any bet on things out of your control, the questionable ethics begins with you. Don't put it on a third party who was not involved in crafting the bet.
I believe in some jurisdictions, private bets are not legally enforceable (i.e. if I make a bet with you and lose, it is my legal right to refuse to pay). There's a good reason for that!
They can take any position they want and do whatever they want, the point is that these oddball markets are very thin so there just isn't much money there to harvest. You can only bet $50M at your chosen risk if you can find enough people to take the other side, and these markets simply don't have many participants betting much money.
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
It seems like it's a huge assumption on your part that the bets you are describing are in the "0.89" range and not something significantly higher, even disregarding what others pointed out about this having already provably occurred.
It depends on the market of course. In looking it up the only markets that have ever come even close to that sort of payout are things like presidential elections where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
Nobody's making millions betting on things like the weather.
>where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
So what's the point of polymarket, then? If at best we get "negligible" "insiderism", how is it that we are supposed to be benefitting from this as a society the way OP and others insist that revealing insider preferences "would"
Because it's the most effective tool we know of for surfacing the true odds of something (Which also includes the fact that insiders will place outsized bets to move the needle towards the truth.)
An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
>An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
Trump didn't win by a landslide and he barely won the popular vote...
>The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
Praying someone has an example besides the election, to which it seems to have made absolutely no difference at all
It's not supposed to make a difference but to provide information to people, which it does a great job of. Go browse Polymarket and the odds they lay on most of everything are about as close as one can get as to the "real" odds of that thing. They're essentially like a superhuman pollster. I'm a big fan of them but have not placed a single bet. It's simply that if you want to see what's happening in the world, a browse of their front page is way more informative than browsing a e.g. news website, especially in modern times.
As for the election, a Republican winning the popular vote by a couple million can't be called a landslide in nominal terms, but it is in terms of normal results. The DNC currently completely controls California and New York. After those 2 states alone Trump was down 7 million votes in 2020. The rest of the states tend to be either very small or relatively competitive. To make up the popular vote amongst them requires a very large edge. Polymarket had Trump as a 2:1 favorite the day before the election, and he would indeed go on to win every single swing state. The corporate media and their associated pollsters had Harris ahead.
If the information does not make a difference, what is the point of the information? White noise is "information". Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is "information". What is the point?
> As for the election, a Republican winning the popular vote by a couple million can't be called a landslide in nominal terms, but it is in terms of normal results. The DNC currently completely controls California and New York. After those 2 states alone Trump was down 7 million votes in 2020. The rest of the states tend to be either very small or relatively competitive. To make up the popular vote amongst them requires a very large edge. Polymarket had Trump as a 2:1 favorite the day before the election, and he would indeed go on to win every single swing state.
And the numbers were actually much more closer to what the national media outlets reported... so again, what is the value of the "information" on polymarket? All it reflected was that there were a couple of whales that were betting hard for Trump. The results did not remotely reflect the polymarket odds at all as you concede. I'm not sure how you think that doesn't end the conversation, but it seems to be more of a political point you are making that is divorced from the reality of the numbers reported.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "make a difference." But providing accurate odds on a wide array of topics isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds.
But you already conceded the odds were not accurate.
> But providing accurate odds on a wide array of topics isn't yelling fire in a crowded theater and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds.
I didn't say they were. You are making the broad meaningless distinction of implying that the "information" provided by "prediction markets" has any value. If it does not have value, what is the point of having the markets?
>Perhaps I don't know what you mean by "make a difference."
If the availability of the information makes no difference societally, then what is the value of the information? I'm not sure if you are being so obtuse on purpose, or what. But you keep saying it provides information... so what? As I pointed out... white noise is information.
> and the results of the election did reflect the polymarket odds
No they did not. Trump did not win by twice as much and certainly did not in the popular vote.
Oh boy. You don't even know how prediction markets or even odds work, at all, yet are abnormally strongly opinionated on the topic, and just assume you know everything without bothering to even check once. Of course. Prediction markets are binary yes/no. When Polymarket prices Trump as a 2:1 favorite, that does not mean he's expected to win 66% of the vote, but that if you ran the election 3 times, he'd be expected to win twice.
Polymarket's accuracy (as defined by an event corresponding with the majority position) is 90% a month out from an event, and 94% 4 hours out from an event. I suspect a weighted analysis (e.g. a 90% event should happen 9 of 10 times, not 100%) would show even better results. That is dramatically higher than you get from things like pollsters, and it's all freely available to the public.
Correct, but there is a direct correlation between the size of the market, and the power of the people determining the outcome.
Then there is also the fact that the power of the people determining the outcome is inversely proportional to their care about betting markets.
Put this together and you get "The larger the size of the market, the less the people who can single handily swing it care about doing so".
If you are someone who can command hundreds of thousands of people to bet millions for or against you, you almost certainly lose more than you would gain by gaming it.
Mind you the market also naturally prices in this risk of the one person going rogue and taking them winnings for themselves. You will never find a market for "WarmWash will post nothing for 3 days straight on HN" because no one will take the other side of it.
When they're not thin they're popular (sports, awards), they favor insiders and/or various levels of manipulation (throwing dildos at a match), or both (military strikes, stock market, etc). They're full of natural or artificial drama, and people love to throw money at that.
I have a bot betting on a handful of what I consider (so far) markets that are impossible to cheat (bar UMA shenanigans): nobody has any control over the outcomes, previous knowledge is very limited. It makes some money, but looking at the depth, the volume, and my metrics, even being the fastest 100% of the time without worrying about bankroll, one of them would gimme roughly $1-2k a week.
There was a good Perun video on this topic which goes through the various ways in which a betting market can distort or affect a war effort (and can be applied to a larger organisation like a company)
Donald Trump made a fake school where he was telling single moms to max out their credit cards so that they could eventually take a photo in front of a cardboard cutout. This would be for like $5-10 grand
Single moms historically don't have tons of extra money, and Trump was ostensibly a billionaire.
Is there any difference in practice between placing a large bounty on some known person dying in the next week and just straight up ordering a hit on them for that amount?
You raise a good point: There's nothing intrinsically good about betting and trading venues, and the sane default option might well be to prohibit it. We allow stock and bond trading as it fulfils important functions [1].
What you describe (profiting from creating havoc by some "short" bet) is indeed problematic and is regulated.
This is also one more reason why trading should not be unconditionally anonymous. Another reason: proper trading venues have rules against "squeezing", namely that no entity may hold more than some threshold ratio of the open interest. That's obviously impossible to enforce with anonymous markets.
[1] Tradings allows individuals to time-shift consumption, it funds productive enterprises, it incentivises convergence of market price with fundamental value, which in turn is what enables efficient investment allocation, and it allows the emergence of an economy-wide equilibrium of savings and investments. Note though that all of these functions might well be fulfilled by having, say, one minute of trading a day.
Or maybe we should somewhat regulate the stock market, require identification of traders, have a regulatory body that can retroactively investigate suspicious trade patterns and determine the identity of who's behind them?
At least the stock market is supposed to have a purpose besides gambling, to raise investment for companies. (Whether it's actually successful at that is a separate matter.) And anyways, your scenario would probably be considered insider trading, and that's already banned.
You're not that wrong - look at e.g. Tesla. Back in the day, the point of the stock market was not to make money off stock price changes, but to make money of the dividends, which was much more stable (but has a different set of issues associated with it)
Historically similar services have also been used to try to manipulate the real world by using bets for creating opinions. Like if you get to vote between candidate x and y and x leads by 75% to 25% on Polymarket maybe you don't vote for y even if the real numbers may be way closer.
Well, this is what's happening in the stock market with the insider trading, pump and dump schemes, shorting and many more algorithms that utilize power imbalance to extract more capital for decades.
Polymarket is quite tame in comparison, in my opinion.
This is very naive. Many people have incentives to manipulate the financial markets, also with real world consequences. Should we ban financial markets as a result?
Do you really think that there are no people, who have bet on the price of something in one direction or the other, who enact real world consequences on people or other entities in order to ensure their bet? This is par for the course.
Financial markets serve a worthwhile purpose and can’t be gamed to the same degree as Polymarket. Polymarket enables completely absurd levels of dangerous manipulation, with significantly worse potential real world outcomes.
These people committed crimes, such as the catch all 'securities fraud'. Polymarket is unregulated and lots of ways to commit ethical fraud without committing legal fraud.
Sounds like a solution structured the wrong way, the world should leave alone people who don’t commit crimes and take care of the people who manipulate the world in horribly destructive ways instead of limiting what law abiding citizens can do. These people who use their power to manipulate bets are almost always not corrupted by polymarket, but they were already criminals.
Can someone give a more concrete example around all this?
How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught? Didn't they catch someone that had pre-knowledge of the Venezuela campaign?
(I'm not asking because I want to do this, I'm asking because it's not clear to me how this is realistically possible.) Also, given that you can't just create a market on either platform, it's not like I can just say "XXX has 3 months to live".
If a criminal wants to make money on crime, they have better ways to do it than put 10k of their own money to make 50k by killing someone.
I just don't get this whole argument. If you're a contract killer, why put yourself and the contractee up in the feds sights?
> How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught?
Assuming you get away with the murder, guessing that's not the part you're asking about, a concrete example: https://polymarket.com/event/next-french-presidential-electi..., bunch of people on that list, surely many of them are like the typical European politician, mostly without assassination protection most of the time. Place a "No" bet on one of them, then hire someone to assassinate, and Polymarket indirectly drove someone to murder another person, as they could profit from it.
As a contract killer, I don't think you'd put yourself or your client more up in the fed sights than without Polymarket, it'd just look like another bet.
Its just stochastic terrorism is the thing. Betting markets on a a negative outcome are ginning up a big "you could make money if the bad thing actually happens" and over enough scale you'll get that idea into the head of someone who concludes they should try and make it happen.
This is the same reason it is generally illegal to make public statements lamenting that someone hasn't killed a person.
The problem is if you are a criminal you need to cover your tracks and your client tracks. Someone can meet with an assassin to kill so and so on a street corner. However how do you get a large amount of cash to the assassin if they pull the murder off. Large amounts of cash are too often tracked, and most other electronic payments are as well. Bitcoin has a public ledger that is not as anonymous as advocates like to claim (and the police are presumably getting better at understanding it)
I don't know if a contract is a good way, but it gives some deniability.
I would have expected it to be illegal in the U.S by now but we live in a strange reality where the current administration's family is literally profiting off of it.
> I would have expected it to be illegal in the U.S by now but we live in a strange reality where the current administration's family is literally profiting off of it
Legislation by who is willing to "donate" the most; law of the jungle capitalism.
Unfortunately there are ways for people to spend money on these sites. That's why the Netherlands has legalised gambling because the bad websites couldn't be stopped.
They are easy to stop - follow the money. A few sting operations where you lose a bet and then the courts agree to enforce your reverse change and they will shut most of this down. Bitcoin payments are a little harder to shutdown, but the friction makes it much harder.
You can also follow people. Tax fraud is how a lot of criminals are caught - we don't know what you did but we can prove you didn't get the money legally and that is enough.
> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
Maybe a bit out of scope for this article, but seems like in every country “Younger millenials and Gen-Zers” are turning to gambling online while traditional gambling (like Vegas) dies.
I feel like this might be a net negative from the pure speed and access in which you can lose money online vs real life, but idk.
In practice La Quiniela works more like a lottery than betting, though. No immediacy, no lights and sounds, no adrenalin rush. I don't think there's much risk of people falling into severe addiction by playing that.
For some people it becomes more like a ritual, some groups of friends do it together as something social to talk about football, I think it leads in some degree to people paying attention and talking about lower rank matches :D
I've played a couple of times solo and in group but never sticked to me.
No related to the point, but what it did stick to me for one season was La Liga Fantástica from Marca ( a fantasy league on paper) when I was a child, because it had the data component, you had a budget to pick players etc, This was before we had internet broadly, if I remember correctly the paper would publish huge lists with the teams ranking or the players stats. But what I do remember was some of my best players like Zalazar :D
Ludopaths often try to put on the same level national lotteries with sports betting and other means of information based betting.
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.
> Play money means it's much easier for anyone anywhere in the world to get started and try out forecasting without any risk. It also means there's more freedom to create and bet on any type of question.
Their investors/lawyers probably did not want to back the risk using real currency adds.
I would go further than this: all forms of online gambling should be banned, globally. It's probably sufficient to remove them from app stores and to remove their access to the international financial system, which is very doable.
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
I strongly disagree and think all forms of gambling should be legal.
Sadly, from my point of view, you're right that right now going after the on/off crypto ramps would be enough to dissuade most people from using crypto gambling sites. I hope for a more educated populace that can bypass these laws and engage in whatever consensual activities they want to, as long as they're not directly harming anyone.
Again, you are imposing your world view onto others. You should be able to do it however the hell you want. I don’t like gambling, and I don’t like many other things, but that is why we are all different and have agency. Accountability is a different argument, but gambling? Please.
I'm sure you've be entirely fine with me and a few friends placing wagers whether or not your house burns down next month. Nothing illegal of course, just hundreds of thousands of dollars wagered on whether or not your specific house burns to the ground for any reason.
Unregulated gambling has very obvious externalities. Don't insult our intelligence by suggesting it doesn't.
The DF clearly states that there cannot be contracts on topics of war, terrorism, assassination, gaming and unlawful activity and in general anything that:
- incentivize harmful acts
- create manipulation risks
- are "contrary to the public interest"
So, all these contracts on the topics of US attacks, sports, whether California will burn due to fires, openly violate it.
But CFTC's head has publicly stated that they won't act on them.
Dodd-Frank does not clearly state there cannot be those contracts. Dodd-Frank grants the CFTC jurisdiction to govern those contracts. what you are saying was struck down in court in September 2024 where the judge ruled those contracts are legal but the content, fairness, and quality of such contracts are CFTC jurisdiction.
Insider trading is already illegal. What needs to be regulated is not markets, it is politicians. Once that is done, markets can peacefully continue the way they are.
Hard disagree. In the prediction market case, we're seeing many categories of people being incentivised to act on markets: soldiers, diplomats, staffers, journalists, businesses, sports and esports teams, as a quick, non-exhaustive list.
Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?
They are certainly critically flawed at the moment, but I still feel that with proper traceability, KYC, etc. it would be a much fairer system than the current betting companies. It’s one of those use-cases where blockchain technology actually makes sense.
The genie is out of the bottle. Crypto-only underground prediction markets will always exist. I think it is better to heavily regulate legal options instead of pushing them underground. That didnt work for drugs or prostitution, and it wont work for gambling.
Except it generally worked for gambling for a very very long time. The existence of a black market does not mean something should be legal. Human trafficking happens, but that doesn't mean we should legalize and tax it. (extreme example I realize, but I use it to illustrate a point)
Pushing it to black markets takes away the possibility of heavy regulation (which absolutely should be in place), and stigmatises victims (gamblers), making it harder to come clean to friends and family. I agree with your assesment that no one should even start to gamble, I just doubt that declaring it illegal will achieve that.
The US Supreme Court effectively legalizing sports betting overnight provided an almost perfect real-world experiment to test that argument. And the result?
"Prediction market" ads running constantly on both sports channels/websites like ESPN. Shortly followed by mainstream cable news like CNN featuring Polymarket stats as a routine part of their horserace polling coverage. Gambling is now an omnipresent temptation for anyone even casually interested in following sports/political news.
And now millions of young men who previously would have had to seek out niche illegal venues to gamble have several dozen different apps on their phone offering to light their disposable income on fire by clicking a couple buttons every paycheck.
Except, gambling isn't illegal here - in fact, it's very common. There are lots of casinos within a few mins walk in any city in Spain. All the prediction markets need to do is comply with existing laws.
For some reason, American companies have a really hard time following existing laws and regulations here. AirBnb and Uber both had the same approach of basically saying "Oops we didn't know" until the law (and others) cracked down on them, I'm sure someone could find older examples too, and surely tons of examples outside of Spain too.
Yup, totally nuanced comment coming from a completely sane person since "central planning regulatory hell" and "laissez faire economy without laws" are the two only options we have here, good job carrying the conversation forward with curious and interesting comments.
What? Maybe you visited a particularly casino-heavy area, but in general there aren't many casinos in Spain. In many regions (e.g. mine) they're restricted to one per province. My city (250K population in the core, metropolitan area about 500K) has one. Madrid (6M metropolitan area) has four, Barcelona (5M) has one.
Sports betting places on the other hand have multiplied like fungi in the last two decades, unfortunately.
You are incredibly naive. There is one on every street, they are just called "sports bars" instead of casinos.
You're probably talking about the big Vegas style entire-hotel casino that aren't so popular in Europe anyway outside a niche crowd. The average lower class Spanish person frequents these "sports bars" heavily
Prop betting on a transparent and equitable Exchange is a perfectly reasonable and egalitarian proposal - it's the Betfair Exchange vs Betfair Sportsbook model expanded outside of the scope of sports.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.