19 ms·
Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
- kome 5mo agowell, it's gambling.
- delichon 5mo agoThey require no gambling license to be a stock broker on the Bolsa de Madrid stock exchange.
- nyc_data_geek1 5mo agoEquities are underlying collateral. Prediction markets are literally just betting on an outcome, no underlying asset exists.
- delichon 5mo agoCollateral is not uncommon in gambling (e.g. pink slips). That does not seem to distinguish gambling from speculating.
- bena 5mo agoThat's not collateral, that's the thing being wagered.
- petcat 5mo agoWhat collateral is underlying the massive, state-sponsored, Spanish lottery ticket and scratch off racket?
- JCTheDenthog 5mo agoI don't think you'd find anyone arguing that the lottery isn't gambling, so I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
- contubernio 5mo agoA casino is by definition a house that takes rake and is not the government or one of its subsidiaries ...
- piltdownman 5mo agoPrediction Markets act the same way as Gambling Exchange - the assets are denominated as both sides of the book minus the spread. https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/ https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/
- pantulis 5mo agoEven if it was the same --I think it's not-- you'll need a "SIBE operator license", and cannot do it solo, you have to be an employee of an authorized firm (bank, broker or dealer).
- delichon 5mo agoIt seems redundant to have two different regulatory systems for slightly different kinds of speculation.
- RandomLensman 5mo agoThere are all sorts of different regulatory systems for all sorts of slightly different kinds of things.
- orwin 5mo agoI think it's fine. Here renting (or teaching) light sails (light catamaran) needs a different license than renting (or teaching) any sail cruiser, including catamarans, despite being basically the same object (boats with sails). Feels that the small differences are enough to justify a different regime.
- wsatb 5mo agoHow do you defend these slimey companies? They’re actively running a mob casino and you still have people acting like government is the bad guys here. That doesn’t mean there can’t be better regulation of other markets, but comparing prediction markets to stock markets is a huge stretch.
- delichon 5mo agoDisagree, I find their product valuable and use them daily as a source of unusually high quality predictions. When used for this purpose insider trading is a feature that improves the quality of predictions. I see some fraud as in any market, but the overwhelming majority of transactions are voluntary, open and relatively informed within a highly transparent system. I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
- sorokod 5mo agoA thought experiment: how would you feel about betting on a market that is an the outcome of a medical procedure? On a negative outcome? On a market for a negative outcome of your own procedure?
- gventura18 5mo agoIs it bad to take out a life insurance policy right before you have a medical procedure?
- arter45 5mo agoIf the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages. If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
- rtkwe 5mo agoIt's not like equities markets are unregulated, be serious.
- lifestyleguru 5mo agoYour comment explains long queues to lottery ticket offices every time I visit Spain:)
- tech_ken 5mo agoRight they require a brokerage license instead because it's a different industry. Not sure what your comment is trying to say here.
- deaton 5mo agoOh so finally someone is calling a spade a spade.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoThese - 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.
- hmry 5mo agoYeah. 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?
- philipallstar 5mo agoWell, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual. That is indeed legally fine, though potentially distasteful. Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.
- CPLX 5mo agoWhat 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.
- anthk 5mo agoIn 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. https://russpain.com/en/news-3/authorities-consider-legalizing-bingo-for-seniors-in-spain-416497/ https://russpain.com/en/news-3/authorities-consider-legalizi... >Rarely exceed 25 euros. Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoWell, that makes perfect sense. The whole world will eventually do the same. gambling with software is still gambling, just like accounting with software is still accounting.
- IAmBroom 5mo agoYou are stunningly more optimistic than I.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoI thought I was being cynical. Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states I mean Spain blocked these markets for now, to investigate how to deal with them, I don't think it's for sure they'll be classified as gambling and allowed, might very well be outlawed. Probably parent got confused you said "The whole world will eventually do the same" (about blocking/banning) but then seemingly you thought these were "classified as gambling" already.
- jceg 5mo ago[flagged]
- ozgrakkurt 5mo agoYou can see this idea in action right now if you search “usa drug zombies” or similar thing on the internet.
- bit-anarchist 5mo agoDrugs are very well known for being deregulated. How's the "War on Drugs" going?
- peer2pay 5mo agoYeah great idea! Let’s also just legalise recreational fentanyl while we’re at it
- akramachamarei 5mo agoYes
- satvikpendem 5mo agoAs long as it's safely overseen and accessible to be administered as well as having treatments on standby, it would actually be much safer and kill far fewer people than today.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoThere are entirely practical reasons that "private decisions of adults" can worsen society as a whole. We need laws and we can debate about nudging that line back and forth, the answers aren't easy. But acting like there shouldn't be a line is nonsensical.
- hunterpayne 5mo agoActing like taking action doesn't have negative consequences is also nonsensical. There is a reason why we consider (Alcohol) Prohibition bad public policy. It was a complete disaster. Somehow those that wish to control others always forget this. These are literally the situations for which the phrase, "the cure is worse than the disease" was coined.
- _diyar 5mo agoThese services run on the blockchain, right? So in effect, there is no blocking them.
- jdiez17 5mo agoYou can block the web user interface and effectively block Polymarket for 99.9% of users. No ban is ever 100% effective.
- piltdownman 5mo agoOff-ramping to fiat would be criminalised and pursued beyond the wildest dreams of La Liga/Cloudflare. A gambling site you can't withdraw your winnings from is of no interest to anyone.
- m00dy 5mo agohow's it related to the Cloudflare ?
- TZubiri 5mo agospain also blocks cloudflare for copyright infringement
- embedding-shape 5mo agoTo be a bit more specific, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours a week as Cloudflare, compared to other CDNs, aren't responding or acting on legal requests from Spanish judges.
- TZubiri 5mo agoCorrect, to be even more specific. Cloudlfare uses a reputation pooling technique to provide anonimities to their clients (providers, through reverse proxies, in this case). Since cloudflare does not comply with requests to selectively stop distributing the banned content in Spain, and since ISPs cannot perform that filter due to header encryption like encrypted HELO, then the Spanish courts opt to perform the least destructive block which is to block based on time.
- ai_slop_hater 5mo ago[flagged]
- bilekas 5mo agoNo because they're not gabling. They also don't have an alcohol license too.
- cwmma 5mo agono they have a securities license. Also while a lot of stuff in stock markets are gambling like, the stock market is a positive sum game where very basic techniques (e.g. index investing) have positive expected values. The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.
- throwawa1 5mo agoWhen I see people making money on Iran attacks, and murder of heads of state - it shows clearly something is deeply wrong with Polymarket. Its a level worse than Vegas or Indian casinos. A literal ticket to hell. I'm all for banning these evil sites.
- shitlord 5mo agoA lot of people made money off the Iran war, through regular old publicly traded stocks.
- tstenner 5mo agoPublicly traded stocks‘ reactions to a war are harder to predict and have way less leverage than a bet like "US will launch 527 missiles against Iran between 3 and 5 pm"
- croes 5mo agosomething is deeply wrong with some humans
- throwawa1 5mo agoIts just a dark mirror episode. I can't imagine waking up and thinking "boy I'll really make some money if we kill Ayatollah Khomeini today"
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoThe other side of that argument could be something like: "Dude, Khomeini better not be killed, it'd suck for me, an average iranian dude. I'd probably bet he dies so I can hedge my personal financial wellbeing for that case"
- bigyabai 5mo agoWhich is also hardly imaginable.
- everdrive 5mo agoI don't usually see advertisements, but I was in a position recently to see a real-life television stream, and I was quite surprised to see them run an advertisement for Kalshi. I was pretty surprised that something like this would be advertised to normal people. I'd half expect the next ad to be for a hitman, or for beating your wife, or something. Seems crazy that this is tolerated whatsoever.
- ericmcer 5mo agoIn the early 2000s major sports didn't even want to run "enjoy a vacation to Las Vegas" ads because of the loose connection to gambling. Now they encourage users to bet as part of the commentary.
- ninkendo 5mo agoYou know how a clear sign of a “bad neighborhood” is when you see a large percentage of payday loan buildings, liquor stores, gun stores, etc? I see the percentage of advertising devoted to gambling to be a similar bellwether to the decline of my whole country. And it’s getting worse all the time. I can’t turn on the tv, look at billboards on the freeway, watch a sporting event, or even walk down a supermarket checkout without getting constantly reminded of how far we’ve fallen.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- danlugo92 5mo ago250 years is the average empire's age of death
- haritha-j 5mo agoAgreed, and also more and more emphasis on industries that try to make money off of moving money (gambling, trading etc.), as oppposed actaully creating value is probably also a contributing factor.
- 5mo ago
- seydor 5mo agoplease stop calling them prediction markets. It's not even accurate, you do not buy a prediciton
- izzydata 5mo agoCan you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- seydor 5mo agopolymarket is selling bets, not predictions and other people are buying them. they are not being sold by people. It's like calling the casino a probability market.
- flexagoon 5mo agoI think the term "market" comes from the fact that it uses stock market–like pricing and allows you to sell your bets at any time. Ie. you buy "shares" of some outcome for 0.3$ if the probability is 30%, and then if the probability at any point goes to 50%, you can sell the "shares" for 0.5$ each. (Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
- seydor 5mo agosure, a bet market which is gambling, not a 'prediction market'. those are not predictions
- lxgr 5mo agoYou can gamble on the stock exchange, just like you can "non-gamblingly" hedge certain risks by buying/selling certain financial products such as event futures. (Many insurance policies are structurally just that and are used for very boring non-gambling purposes!) I don't think you'll find a simple/useful answer by slicing the problem on that axis.
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago[flagged]
- Fnoord 5mo agoYou need a license to operate in Spain. The license is fairly available (EU regulations enforce this). So, Polymarket is able to obtain a license if they wish to operate in Spain, if they follow the fair rules to obtain a license. Don't want to obtain a license? Don't want to follow the rules in Spain? No problem, but no business in Spain. Websites blocking works like that, too. Which makes sense: local law > remote law. Else I could host some websites selling LSD to Americans on the clearnet. No US government would accept that, zero chance. Other countries such as USA work in a similar manner. Work permits such as green card, to name an example. The people who complain about regulations and law either don't understand why they exist or how they work, or they have an interest in the abolishment of it because they benefit from that. Then you get that BS about how USA is better off than EU. Well, if you're healthy, educated, and employed, sure. Otherwise? You can just use your eyes. Go drive through a rich and poor neighborhood in both. The poverty in USA is horrendous, and the effects are shown. We got poverty too, but not as severe. No need to go to that area between West and East coast. You can experience this right near the Bay Area. San Jose is supposedly a mess. I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
- warkdarrior 5mo ago> I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's. Fry's closed in 2021.
- emsign 5mo agoThere you have it.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoYou can replace Spain in the article with any other jurisdiction and my comment would be unchanged. This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great). Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not? Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in? The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.
- stackedinserter 5mo ago[flagged]
- croes 5mo agoSo why did you write a comment
- anthk 5mo agoWithout Spain everyone up from Po Valley would be pretty much bankrupt trying to spend cheap money on Holidays and half of South America woudn't be able to commerce well with the EU and ditto with cheap gas from Argelia and the like. Crap out Spain and Center Europe collapses tomorrow. And not just the Lutheran Europe. South America, USA, and tangentially Russia and China too. Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma... Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
- elnatro 5mo agoWho asked you, you are irrelevant to anything.
- stackedinserter 5mo agoTrue, just like you. But it doesn't make Spain more relevant.
- elnatro 5mo agoSo you are irrelevant then, right? So why are you commenting? I would bet that you don’t even know where Spain is on a map.
- kaveh_h 5mo ago
- throwawaypath 5mo agoPolymarket is a casino. A roulette wheel is not a "market". You can't beat the house.
- theragra 5mo agoThere is no house? Betting is against other players
- InsideOutSanta 5mo agoThe service is the house, and they take fees on bets, so they are the only ones guaranteed to win.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoBy that logic market makers in the stock market are basically like a casino too. No one is of course guaranteed to win in anything but at least the stock market doesn't ban you for making too much money like a casino does.
- RIMR 5mo agoI mean, yeah, pretty much.
- satvikpendem 5mo agoI can actually consistently make money in the stock market, not so in a casino.
- hunterpayne 5mo agoThere is an entire profession of Poker players that consistently make money in casinos but not from casinos. You simply don't understand how this all works.
- spwa4 5mo agoAre they still doing blocks so configuring either Google's DNS or Cloudflare DNS will still unblock the sites?
- embedding-shape 5mo agoSeems the blocks aren't in effect yet, I'm on Spanish ISP (Vodafone) here and can still access polymarket.com and kalshi.com. Traditionally, Spanish ISPs tend to do DNS blocks yeah, at least when it comes to long-lasting piracy and other "clearly illegal stuff" like Women's rights. It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5mo agoI'm on Movistar and can't access it without my trusty VPN that I have for football match times :)
- embedding-shape 5mo agoInteresting, added my ISP to my previous comment (Vodafone). Do you have a lot of stuff you use daily that goes away during the games? Personally the only thing that seems to stop working is Docker Hub, everything else seems OK, trying to figure out if it's just my ISP that is lenient or what's going on...
- Al-Khwarizmi 5mo agoIt changes depending on the day. But yes, some days it's really a lot (affecting forums, news sites, etc.). I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason, in fact I've been seriously consider changing ISP for that reason but I'm too lazy (plus in 12 years with them I think I've had a single outage which was solved in an hour or two, so even if I oppose them morally, it's convenient to stay...)
- christkv 5mo agoLol it could not possibly be the coincidence that there were bets on ex prime minister Zapatero going to jail before the 30th of June or other meme bets making the rounds in Spain in the last couple of days.
- Unai 5mo agoThere are bets everyday, so no matter when the ban is announced, you can always attach a conspiracy to it.
- christkv 5mo agoMost of Spain did not even know polymarket existed until a couple of days ago.
- Unai 5mo agoNot sure how you want me to respond to that. Are you getting that from a feel of yours or some statistical analysis of familiarity with polymarket in Spain? I don't think it matters much anyway, I bet most human beings don't know what polymarket is. But still, you think it warrants a conspiracy? To what end? None of this makes much sense to me.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoI'd say based on vibes too, it seems to have gotten more common subject to talk about, also on TV, news and so on. It was virtually not talked about a year ago, compared to today. Google Trends seems to agree too: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=polymarket&date=today%205-y&geo=ES https://trends.google.com/explore?q=polymarket&date=today%20...
- hunterpayne 5mo agoAlso, most of Spain can walk to a functioning casino which will be more than willing to take all sorts of odd prop bets.
- linuxhansl 5mo agoGood. Just naming things differently does not work in other countries. If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
- Zigurd 5mo agoThis is a big part of the reason we have judges, and why we should not replace them with LLMs.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoAlso the reason laws aren't overly specific, so these judges can make those judgement calls in the cases. Following the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law is something many judges care about as well.
- Paracompact 5mo agoCounterargument: Any "specific" wording of gambling would have condemned this activity. On average, vagueness in law generates more loopholes for corporate criminals to hide behind than it generates discretion for judges and juries to rule against them.
- daemin 5mo agoWhat is your stance on loot boxes in video games then? Is that akin to a poker/slot machine or is it more like a kinder surprise?
- Paracompact 5mo agoI wouldn't personally lose sleep on whichever way loot boxes were legislated. If their contents are easily converted into real-world cash, I would say the company bears some responsibility for the actions of any black markets, perhaps proportional to the volume traded. CS:GO has to crack down on its massive skins market, Kinder doesn't have to sweat its little toys. Generally, I think the common-law notion of "consideration + chance + prize" augmented with the requirement of an "insurable interest" (in order to keep the insurance industry legal) discerns the truth well enough. Insisting that any "prize" not be monetary or monetarily-convertible keeps it from becoming a cyclical addiction, and evaluating infractions relative to volume keeps extremists from banning gumball machines and Kinder eggs.
- imagetic 5mo agoGood
- satvikpendem 5mo agoInteresting comments here. I'd rather have prediction markets than casinos or sports betting services, because in the latter, you're playing again the house which can and will ban you for winning too much, while prediction markets are simply market makers taking a fee. Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
- biophysboy 5mo agoThere is evidence that high-frequency, 50% accurate bot traders make most of the money on prediction markets simply due to being able to make bets faster.
- brailsafe 5mo agoSeems like you're still betting against the house, you just can't be banned for winning too much
- sd9 5mo agoIt's not cut and dry to differentiate between the act and the wager. One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them. It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit. Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.
- seydor 5mo agoIt's a roulette that you can actually manipulate. that 's why it's worse.
- afinlayson 5mo agoDidn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...
- toephu2 5mo agoU.S. citizens still need to pay taxes on their winnings. Kalshi and Polymarket require you to provide your SSN.
- LanceH 5mo agoYou have to complete the cycle to make sense. gambling happens, tax comes in, crime goes up, police get hired, politicians get the police vote
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- stetrain 5mo agoThey've discovered that it's more efficient if the money flows directly from the private enterprise to the politicians without going through tax revenue.
- ethin 5mo agoGood. Now take the next step and ban them outright.
- ddp26 5mo agoI see a lot of comments like this is the blocking of prediction markets about politics, war, etc. It's important to remember that ~80% of activity Polymarket and ~90% of Kalshi, by volume, are sports. These are effectively sports betting websites with prediction markets on the side.
- bastard_op 5mo agoIt ought to be illegal everywhere, the only reason it won't be in the US is the president is on the grift with his kids operating on the boards of them.
- LanceH 5mo agoI find it humorous that these are simultaneously attacked as being gambling and attacked because some people know more than others and are "betting" on a sure thing.
- agnosticmantis 5mo agoBoth can be true: insiders bet on a sure thing, outsiders naively gamble, the house gets a cut no matter what.
- nyeah 5mo agoNot sure I get the joke. Should "we're crooked" be a defense against illegal gambling charges?
- LanceH 5mo agoWho would the charges be against? The person who violated some trust, or the market maker? I could be pretty neutral on the market maker, really. The point of a prediction market is to put information to use. There may be some line to be drawn on such markets, but that line really isn't drawn. There are just vague gestures that it is both gambling and not gambling due to insider information. If you wanted to regulate it, legislate which markets can be made. Require notification that it is not gambling and is all about the trading of insider information and that gamblers have less than "fair" odds.
- nyeah 5mo ago>not gambling due to insider information. I can't make this argument work at all. Gambling with some cheating is still gambling.
- MrJobbo 5mo ago[flagged]
- ceasesurthinko 5mo agoYet blocks the internet completely decimating all necessary services for a couple hours for La Liga futbol. Spain is a backwards country
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> blocks the internet completely decimating all necessary services Not really how it works in practice here, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours, everything mostly keeps working as it always is.
- HDBaseT 5mo agoIt's only Cloudflare IPs, its only the most popular reverse proxy and CDN provider on the internet. Only a mere 20%+ of internet traffic traverses via Cloudflare.
- lionkor 5mo agoThose companies chose to accept cloudflare downtime and blocking as their own downtime.
- embedding-shape 5mo agosome Cloudflare IPs, not every IP, nor does 20% of what you typically do on the internet go away during these few hours.
- tigrezno 5mo agoYou talk like it's the government who is blocking those ips. It's a stupid right wing judge, friend of La Liga's owner who is allowing such a scheme. Spanish congress approved recently a way to stop such a thing.
- the_gipsy 5mo agoIt's wrong, but also: just stop centralizing on cloudflare. It's just a glorified proxy, do you really need it, or are you marking an enterprise compliance checkbox?
- jorl17 5mo agoI sincerely hope these abominations made to either enrich the corrupt/immoral or prey on the addicted are made illegal during my lifetime.
- port11 5mo agoI cannot imagine the mental loopholes the creators go through in order to sleep at night. This is bottom of the barrel stuff, we don’t need it anywhere in Europe.
- felooboolooomba 5mo agoPeople wonder how bad prediction markets are going to get. I think it's going to get a lot worse. If left unchecked it'll en up like the 1997 paper "Assassination politics" describes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Politics%22_essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Poli...
- UltraSane 5mo agoThe main way betting markets can increase accuracy is by making it profitable for insiders to leak secret information.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Romanulus 5mo ago[dead]
- fHr 5mo agogood
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- navs 5mo agoI'm still astounded that Polymarket, as a feature, is embedded inside Substack. Not a third-party plugin but baked into the platform. YouTube is one thing. It's practically ubiquitous in terms of video sharing but Polymarket?
- NotCamelCase 5mo agoETrade also started recently to include that disgusting thing in their News feed for watch lists -- as if it can really predict anything, with no way to turn it off (AFAICT). It's clear that it's being pushed in many directions. Complete shamelessness all around.
- Falimonda 5mo agoGood. Now ban sports betting.
- InveStar 5mo agoInteresting!
- marcosvm 5mo ago[flagged]
- paul_knox 5mo ago[dead]
- bilekas 5mo ago> Spain - like other European jurisdictions - considers prediction markets a form of gambling when bets are placed on uncertain outcomes. What is the defense in the US for example that these are not gambling, "bets are placed on uncertain outcomes", it's that close to, if not the definition of gambling ?
- jimnotgym 5mo agoThere is no difference. Spain just got the right answer before the US
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- utopiah 5mo agoMoney?
- arein3 5mo agoWill spain ban calls and puts as well?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- throwawayffffas 5mo agoWill the SEC or CFTC do anything about the blatant insider trading?
- bilekas 5mo agoNo because investment brokers, who you make your calls and puts with have a license.. Not the same thing. Nobody is asking the gamblers to have a licence, just the service provider.
- arein3 5mo agoBet it's not a gambling licence though, and not under the same restrictions.
- ropable 5mo agoKalshi, Polymarket and every other prediction market should have been drowned at birth by regulators. They offer zero positive utility to the world. I hope that we follow Spain's example here in Australia; we have a hard enough time with legal gambling as it is.
- cthor 5mo agoThe utility is a fairly robust signal about the probability of certain events occurring. It's pretty helpful for grounding your beliefs about the world (in certain domains). For example, I had a lot of people ask me about the Hantavirus and if it was worth worrying about. I didn't have to do any research other than look at the various prediction markets and see them all at 5-10% to determine it was probably a nothingburger. Much quicker than having to parse a bunch of fearmongering news reports and such.
- pu_pe 5mo agoEven for that function, I think their benefits are overrated. Someone could easily manipulate that number if it fits their purposes (ie a health tech startup trying to peddle some cure). The numbers given to you are an illusion of understanding that does not replace actual research.
- Retr0id 5mo agoI don't think it's as easy to manipulate as you say.
- pu_pe 5mo agoSmaller markets are easily swayed by not so much money. Arbitrage is difficult because there is an inherent threat that you're betting against insider information. In this specific case it's clear that the market doesn't represent our collective knowledge about hantavirus at all. Twenty days ago the odds of a hantavirus pandemic being declared by the WHO were ~10% and now it's 5%. This is just a reflection of the news cycle, it would be nuts to say that this is a reliable estimate for the underlying scientific facts.
- mentalgear 5mo agoThe only societally rational thing to do. Cheers to Spain for being a global humanitarian leader on this and many other global issues! (I am worried though by the extreme-right forces trying to throw over the government though.)
- gepiti 5mo agoGreece does the same.
- schnitzelstoat 5mo agoI’m surprised these haven’t already been banned tbh. It doesn’t make sense that if I bet on the outcome of a football match then it’s gambling but if I bet on the outcome of the Ukraine war then it’s I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-gambling.
- whazor 5mo agoBetter would be for polymarket to block the purchase from countries where it doesnt have a license.
- morelandjs 5mo agoIf anyone from Kalshi or Polymarket is reading this: your advertising is reprehensible. Dumb bros bragging about getting rich betting on the weather. Cringey get-rich-quick influencers. No one believes for a second your claims that prediction markets serve the public good. I’ve never wanted an industry to fail so badly.
- torcete 5mo ago> Spain's Consumer Rights Ministry temporarily banned so-called prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi [..] Why a ministry has the authority to do so? What I don't like about my country, and the whole UE, is the lack of democracy. And this is a good example. A democracy needs to have real separations of powers. The legislative body creates a law, and the judiciary, based on that law, will decide on banning or not the online gambling site. A ministry belongs to the executive branch of the Estate. It is not up to them to decide whether something is illegal or not.
- the_gipsy 5mo agoThere is nothing undemocratic about this. The law was already there, a minister in Spain does not only propose or vote on laws, but has quite some executive influence. This has always been so and is nothing unusual. You can't really operate this stuff in a vacuum, otherwise it would take years to take any actions against illegal gambling, way too late.
- jimnotgym 5mo agoAgree, the ministry just applied the existing law. Simple.
- torcete 5mo agoAgain, assuming separation of powers: In a democracy, ministries are part of the executive branch. Their role is to follow and implement the law, not to judge violations. If a law is violated, then a judge, and not a ministry, should be the one to enforce it. When an administrative body blocks access to a service without prior judicial oversight, it blurs the line between the executive and the judiciary. And since separation of powers is a key component of any democracy, this raises legitimate concerns about the quality of democratic checks and balances. Just to be clear: I’m not arguing that unlicensed online gambling sites should remain accessible. The issue is how the restriction is carried out, and whether it respects democratic principles and institutional roles.
- 5mo ago
- tim333 5mo agoI can understand them wanting to ban Polymarket et al but it's hard to implement unless you ban all use of cryptocurrency. Once you've done the converting fiat currency to some sort of crypto, all the other transaction can happen anonymously offshore. I've mucked about on Polymarket a bit including betting on Kamala to win of all things.
- phoronixrly 5mo agoNobody is under the delusion that this ban will not be circumvented. The point is to make using these sites so inconvenient that the vast majority of their (potential) users won't bother jumping through the hoops. Imagine your neighbour the alcoholic gambling addict having to learn to use cryptocurrency and VPNs and then having to file taxes in case any substantial winnings (from illegal gambling)...
- haritha-j 5mo agoIt never will be completely stopped, but IMO this still makes a massive difference. Gambling is one of those things where barriers make a massive difference. For decades, it was under control when you had to go to vegas to do it. But now, when its all over TV, you're enticing people way more.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Marazan 5mo agoIt has been crazy seeing the explosion of Polymarket and Kalshi in comparison to Betfair. Betfair doesn't present itself as anything other than what it is: a gambling exchange where the punters make the book. In my 10+ years time of using it they despite some occasionally shoddily worded markets they have only properly screwed up a market twice (The Australian Open in 2022 when Djokovic was denied entry to Australia and Betfair basically forgot the winners market was cross matched when they went to remove him and the 2020 Presidential election where they suspended the market when Trump went to hospital with Covid despite the fact the market rules said that the market would still settle if any participant died and obviously most people had been taking into account that both candidates being mega ancient whilst a global pandemic was happening might be a factor). Betfair is boring, staid and reliable. Compare that to Kalshi and Polymarket who do everything they can to pretend they are not gambling platforms. It's kind of gross.
- basisword 5mo agoIt's lunacy that you can create a gambling website, name it a 'prediction market' and somehow that skirts the law. It's a gambling website for nerds and high-ups in the USG.