6 ms·

I wonder if it can really be enforced. It's clear that prediction markets are a scourge -- there seems to be no upside whatsoever.

nom 5mo ago
Thanks to crypto it can't be enforced and is here to stay, like all forms of online gambling.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Polymarket is not a dark web hidden service. It has owners with names and addresses known to the government.
stock_toaster 5mo ago
> I wonder if it can really be enforced. At the very least maybe it would make the advertising (tv, college campuses, etc) of prediction markets illegal in Minnesota? That alone seems like a good thing.
- shawn-butler 5mo ago
  The law also goes after payment providers and network providers (vpn) etc if they "knowingly" provide service to anyone who engages in prediction market betting. The law[0] as written is a mess. You could in theory shut down the "legal" Minnesota state lottery that is otherwise carved out from the law by claiming they are providing data on outcomes via the internet if someone outside the state is betting on the outcome of the lottery in a prediction market. [0]: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/SF/4760/versions/ccr/0/ https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/SF/4760/versions/... (search for "ARTICLE 8")
delichon 5mo ago
I get a lot of value from prediction markets and query for them most days. Today for the Los Angeles Mayor's race and the Kentucky 4th district Representative race. In both cases I saw a big difference between the market and the vibe on my feeds. I believe that the market emits higher quality predictions. Each market is a community with a financial incentive to think outside of the bubble.
- datadrivenangel 5mo ago
  prediction more easily allow people to convert money into public opinion, which is suboptimal.
rizzom5000 5mo ago
Do you also believe there is no upside in crowdsourced information found in, say, commodities, equities and futures markets?
- free_bip 5mo ago
  Those are not the same as prediction markets
- justonceokay 5mo ago
  Those markets create pressure to ensure that real physical goods and useful services are priced accurately. Prediction “markets“ are in my estimation no different than roulette. If you cross your eyes hard enough, you could claim that roulette gambling provides economic pressure to ensure that roulette wheels are balanced evenly. But when the roulette wheel is Vanah White’s dress color, what does that mean? Charitably, it’s a fun pass time. Through a dystopian lens, prediction markets pressure all public figures to play a kind of Keynsian Beauty Contest with their own behavior. Like social cooling for the celebrity/owning class.
bronson 5mo ago
No upside whatsoever? Clearly you're not an insider trader.
tancop 5mo ago
there is one upside, its a big incentive to indirectly leak things like album release dates and military operations. anything that helps get some secrets out is a positive in my book
- kibwen 5mo ago
  No, this doesn't work. Predictions markets can only resolve to things that are publicly verifiable, so any leaked information is information that was destined to become public anyway. Furthermore, the leaker is disincentivized to leak in such a way that the act of leaking could compromise their insider knowlege; the structure of the markets means that leakers don't want you to have this information in any way that opponents could usefully invalidate. They're just gambling. I'm not trying to argue for or against gambling here, but please stop trying to delude yourselves into thinking these gambling sites are anything other than gambling.
  - plutaniano 5mo ago
    Unresolved markets transmit information too. A market doesn't need to resolve to transmit information.
    - kibwen 5mo ago
      Sure, and a white noise generator transmits information too.
- freejazz 5mo ago
  But they don't get secrets out, they just make a bet? Show me any information like this on any of the prediction markets...
superfrank 5mo ago
> there seems to be no upside whatsoever There's the same upside as pretty much all other forms of gambling. Plenty of people enjoy it and it can be used to generate tax revenue for the state. Don't get me wrong, there's tons of harm that can come from it, but the arguments to allow them are essentially the same arguments for allowing sports betting.
- kube-system 5mo ago
  This is true, however many of those arguments are weaker when applied to things for which the outcome is more consequential than the outcome of a sporting game.
  - superfrank 5mo ago
    Sure, but that's not really an argument to ban prediction markets, it's an argument to regulate what the public can or cannot bet on. Most major online sportsbooks have taken bets on the US presidential election for well over a decade. I can't imagine anyone really arguing that it's okay for DraftKings to offer that market, but not okay for Polymarket to offer it. I put it somewhere else in this thread, but there are actually two different questions that need to be answered separately. Are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name and are there certain things that we should not allow people to gamble on. The argument around prediction markets always seems to squish those two into one which I think does people who want regulation a disservice. I think to most people, the answer to first question (are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name) is a pretty resounding yes. The second question has a lot more room for debate though. Even if people agree that there should be things we don't allow people to bet on, there's still plenty to argue over where we draw the line. The problem is that as long as we mush these two together, people will use the disagreement over the second question to prevent action from being taken on the first.
    - kube-system 5mo ago
      > Sure, but that's not really an argument to ban prediction markets, it's an argument to regulate what the public can or cannot bet on. I wasn't making any argument above in either way. But the reality is that sports betting is not legal in much of the US. DraftKings is only legal in about half of US states. Minnesota does not permit DraftKings to operate in their state. They don't permit any kind of online gambling whatsoever, and I don't think they think any differently about Polymarket... and Minnesota's regulators have answered that clearly in this case by enumerating it specifically. And more generally speaking, laws apply to what someone is actually doing, not what they claim they are doing. If a law bans wagers on the outcome of a sporting event, it doesn't actually matter whether you call it something different. Someone can't sell crack cocaine and call it a "dietary supplement" and get away with it, because the law doesn't depend on the label the actor gave their own actions, it hinges on the definitions of the actions as defined under the law. And as for the second question, in gambling there's always a risk of harm to the bettors themselves. I don't think most Americans have a problem with that, currently. But, there's also risk to corrupting the subject of the bet itself. In a casino, this is easily mitigated by regulating the game, and the potential risk is only to the participants. In sports betting, this risks corrupting the games themselves. This is a slightly larger risk, and it risks corrupting sportsmanship for the athletes involved, but ultimately it is still a game. But wagering on other events up to and including literal war literally poses a much larger human risk than simply spoiling a game. You could take this "prediction market" laundering of words to an absurd conclusion: "A large binary option that someone will [insert any illegal action]" is just literally a payment for someone to do a crime using different words. > Most major online sportsbooks have taken bets on the US presidential election for well over a decade. I can't imagine anyone really arguing that it's okay for DraftKings to offer that market, but not okay for Polymarket to offer it. DraftKings is legal in about half of the US. It is not legal in Minnesota.
ungreased0675 5mo ago
Whenever I see something weird happen in a sports game, or even a lack of effort by individual players, my first thought is if sports betting was responsible.
fasterik 5mo ago
Information aggregation is the theoretical upside of prediction markets. Granted, their effectiveness in that role is an empirical question. For gambling in general, the upside is that people obviously enjoy it, not to mention the right/freedom to make choices about how one spends time and money as a responsible adult. If harm to the consumer and societal burden are the downsides you're concerned about, you could justify banning smoking, alcohol, and junk food for the same reasons. We don't generally do that because we recognize that where there's demand there will be a market, whether it's legal or illegal. So you also need to weigh the potential harms of a black market against those of a legal and regulated market.
ghaff 5mo ago
How is it different from the stock market?
- ars 5mo ago
  Stocks are linked to entities that perform economic activity, i.e. make a profit, and share that profit. i.e. everyone can win. Predictions markets are just bets: one person wins, one loses.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    Options (especially 0DTE options) are a lot like sports betting.
    - ghaff 5mo ago
      And GameStop would probably like a minute (or maybe not) to discuss the tenuous connection between some underlying economic valuations and stock price. Yes, the stock market is underpinned by real economic activity. But, be real, there's a lot of essentially betting involved too.
anon291 5mo ago
Prediction markets ensure that there is always produce in your store.
- dragonwriter 5mo ago
  Commodities futures markets on which what are traded are contracts for future delivery of goods do that. Prediction markets—forums for gambling on the outcome of a platform-provided referee as to how a proposition about the future will be resolved—do not do that at all. Now, the legal definition of commodities markets for regulatory purposes in some jurisdictions may be broad enough that prediction markets are legally a subtype of commodities market despite doing a very different thing than traditional commodities markets, but that’s an artifact of a legal definition being drawn in a very broad way at a time when it didn’t matter because nothing like prediction markets existed.
  - anon291 5mo ago
    A commodity market may not be a pure prediction market but you can buy weather futures on most commodities market and a host of other predictions which are necessary for agricultural production. https://investor.cmegroup.com/news-releases/news-release-details/cme-launch-hurricane-futures-and-options-futures-contract https://investor.cmegroup.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

nom 5mo ago

Thanks to crypto it can't be enforced and is here to stay, like all forms of online gambling.

tardedmeme 5mo ago
Polymarket is not a dark web hidden service. It has owners with names and addresses known to the government.

stock_toaster 5mo ago

> I wonder if it can really be enforced. At the very least maybe it would make the advertising (tv, college campuses, etc) of prediction markets illegal in Minnesota? That alone seems like a good thing.

shawn-butler 5mo ago
The law also goes after payment providers and network providers (vpn) etc if they "knowingly" provide service to anyone who engages in prediction market betting. The law[0] as written is a mess. You could in theory shut down the "legal" Minnesota state lottery that is otherwise carved out from the law by claiming they are providing data on outcomes via the internet if someone outside the state is betting on the outcome of the lottery in a prediction market. [0]: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/SF/4760/versions/ccr/0/ https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/SF/4760/versions/... (search for "ARTICLE 8")

delichon 5mo ago

I get a lot of value from prediction markets and query for them most days. Today for the Los Angeles Mayor's race and the Kentucky 4th district Representative race. In both cases I saw a big difference between the market and the vibe on my feeds. I believe that the market emits higher quality predictions. Each market is a community with a financial incentive to think outside of the bubble.

datadrivenangel 5mo ago
prediction more easily allow people to convert money into public opinion, which is suboptimal.

rizzom5000 5mo ago

Do you also believe there is no upside in crowdsourced information found in, say, commodities, equities and futures markets?

free_bip 5mo ago
Those are not the same as prediction markets
justonceokay 5mo ago
Those markets create pressure to ensure that real physical goods and useful services are priced accurately. Prediction “markets“ are in my estimation no different than roulette. If you cross your eyes hard enough, you could claim that roulette gambling provides economic pressure to ensure that roulette wheels are balanced evenly. But when the roulette wheel is Vanah White’s dress color, what does that mean? Charitably, it’s a fun pass time. Through a dystopian lens, prediction markets pressure all public figures to play a kind of Keynsian Beauty Contest with their own behavior. Like social cooling for the celebrity/owning class.

bronson 5mo ago

No upside whatsoever? Clearly you're not an insider trader.

tancop 5mo ago

there is one upside, its a big incentive to indirectly leak things like album release dates and military operations. anything that helps get some secrets out is a positive in my book

kibwen 5mo ago
No, this doesn't work. Predictions markets can only resolve to things that are publicly verifiable, so any leaked information is information that was destined to become public anyway. Furthermore, the leaker is disincentivized to leak in such a way that the act of leaking could compromise their insider knowlege; the structure of the markets means that leakers don't want you to have this information in any way that opponents could usefully invalidate. They're just gambling. I'm not trying to argue for or against gambling here, but please stop trying to delude yourselves into thinking these gambling sites are anything other than gambling.
- plutaniano 5mo ago
  Unresolved markets transmit information too. A market doesn't need to resolve to transmit information.
  - kibwen 5mo ago
    Sure, and a white noise generator transmits information too.
freejazz 5mo ago
But they don't get secrets out, they just make a bet? Show me any information like this on any of the prediction markets...

superfrank 5mo ago

> there seems to be no upside whatsoever There's the same upside as pretty much all other forms of gambling. Plenty of people enjoy it and it can be used to generate tax revenue for the state. Don't get me wrong, there's tons of harm that can come from it, but the arguments to allow them are essentially the same arguments for allowing sports betting.

kube-system 5mo ago
This is true, however many of those arguments are weaker when applied to things for which the outcome is more consequential than the outcome of a sporting game.
- superfrank 5mo ago
  Sure, but that's not really an argument to ban prediction markets, it's an argument to regulate what the public can or cannot bet on. Most major online sportsbooks have taken bets on the US presidential election for well over a decade. I can't imagine anyone really arguing that it's okay for DraftKings to offer that market, but not okay for Polymarket to offer it. I put it somewhere else in this thread, but there are actually two different questions that need to be answered separately. Are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name and are there certain things that we should not allow people to gamble on. The argument around prediction markets always seems to squish those two into one which I think does people who want regulation a disservice. I think to most people, the answer to first question (are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name) is a pretty resounding yes. The second question has a lot more room for debate though. Even if people agree that there should be things we don't allow people to bet on, there's still plenty to argue over where we draw the line. The problem is that as long as we mush these two together, people will use the disagreement over the second question to prevent action from being taken on the first.
  - kube-system 5mo ago
    > Sure, but that's not really an argument to ban prediction markets, it's an argument to regulate what the public can or cannot bet on. I wasn't making any argument above in either way. But the reality is that sports betting is not legal in much of the US. DraftKings is only legal in about half of US states. Minnesota does not permit DraftKings to operate in their state. They don't permit any kind of online gambling whatsoever, and I don't think they think any differently about Polymarket... and Minnesota's regulators have answered that clearly in this case by enumerating it specifically. And more generally speaking, laws apply to what someone is actually doing, not what they claim they are doing. If a law bans wagers on the outcome of a sporting event, it doesn't actually matter whether you call it something different. Someone can't sell crack cocaine and call it a "dietary supplement" and get away with it, because the law doesn't depend on the label the actor gave their own actions, it hinges on the definitions of the actions as defined under the law. And as for the second question, in gambling there's always a risk of harm to the bettors themselves. I don't think most Americans have a problem with that, currently. But, there's also risk to corrupting the subject of the bet itself. In a casino, this is easily mitigated by regulating the game, and the potential risk is only to the participants. In sports betting, this risks corrupting the games themselves. This is a slightly larger risk, and it risks corrupting sportsmanship for the athletes involved, but ultimately it is still a game. But wagering on other events up to and including literal war literally poses a much larger human risk than simply spoiling a game. You could take this "prediction market" laundering of words to an absurd conclusion: "A large binary option that someone will [insert any illegal action]" is just literally a payment for someone to do a crime using different words. > Most major online sportsbooks have taken bets on the US presidential election for well over a decade. I can't imagine anyone really arguing that it's okay for DraftKings to offer that market, but not okay for Polymarket to offer it. DraftKings is legal in about half of the US. It is not legal in Minnesota.

ungreased0675 5mo ago

Whenever I see something weird happen in a sports game, or even a lack of effort by individual players, my first thought is if sports betting was responsible.

fasterik 5mo ago

Information aggregation is the theoretical upside of prediction markets. Granted, their effectiveness in that role is an empirical question. For gambling in general, the upside is that people obviously enjoy it, not to mention the right/freedom to make choices about how one spends time and money as a responsible adult. If harm to the consumer and societal burden are the downsides you're concerned about, you could justify banning smoking, alcohol, and junk food for the same reasons. We don't generally do that because we recognize that where there's demand there will be a market, whether it's legal or illegal. So you also need to weigh the potential harms of a black market against those of a legal and regulated market.

ghaff 5mo ago

How is it different from the stock market?

ars 5mo ago
Stocks are linked to entities that perform economic activity, i.e. make a profit, and share that profit. i.e. everyone can win. Predictions markets are just bets: one person wins, one loses.
- criddell 5mo ago
  Options (especially 0DTE options) are a lot like sports betting.
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    And GameStop would probably like a minute (or maybe not) to discuss the tenuous connection between some underlying economic valuations and stock price. Yes, the stock market is underpinned by real economic activity. But, be real, there's a lot of essentially betting involved too.

anon291 5mo ago

Prediction markets ensure that there is always produce in your store.

dragonwriter 5mo ago
Commodities futures markets on which what are traded are contracts for future delivery of goods do that. Prediction markets—forums for gambling on the outcome of a platform-provided referee as to how a proposition about the future will be resolved—do not do that at all. Now, the legal definition of commodities markets for regulatory purposes in some jurisdictions may be broad enough that prediction markets are legally a subtype of commodities market despite doing a very different thing than traditional commodities markets, but that’s an artifact of a legal definition being drawn in a very broad way at a time when it didn’t matter because nothing like prediction markets existed.
- anon291 5mo ago
  A commodity market may not be a pure prediction market but you can buy weather futures on most commodities market and a host of other predictions which are necessary for agricultural production. https://investor.cmegroup.com/news-releases/news-release-details/cme-launch-hurricane-futures-and-options-futures-contract https://investor.cmegroup.com/news-releases/news-release-det...