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These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to w
by solenoid0937 5mo ago
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.
- 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.
- FireBeyond 5mo agoIt was, believe it still is, somewhat similar in Australia, where the game Two Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- kube-system 5mo ago> Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual. What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
- bit-anarchist 5mo agoCould you provide an example?
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- wsng 5mo agoIn 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.
- bit-anarchist 5mo agoI 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?
- josefritzishere 5mo agoThat "facilitating" argument didn't work out for Silk Road.
- philipallstar 5mo agoBecause what the Silk Road did was illegal whether in person or not.
- kube-system 5mo agoWhat Polymarket and Kalshi are doing is also illegal in many places.
- jubilanti 5mo agoNope. "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.
- somenameforme 5mo agoPolymarket doesn't take a cut. Their profit comes in transaction fees.
- FireBeyond 5mo ago"We don't take a cut of your bet, we just charge you a transaction fee on your bet" is reaching a bit.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- somenameforme 5mo agoMy 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.
- munk-a 5mo agoThe mob boss doesn't charge me interest on my loan - he just really likes receiving expensive gifts from me.
- usrusr 5mo agoCan you name the individuals you are betting with on Polymarket? Can they name you?
- FireBeyond 5mo agoGannon Ken Van Dyke has entered the chat.
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- epolanski 5mo agoTo me this is technicality. A bet is a bet, whether it's against the house or other people it's a bet.
- chollida1 5mo agobeing pedantic here but > 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.
- hmry 5mo agoNo no I appreciate the pedantry, thank you for the correction
- compiler-guy 5mo agoThe 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.
- chollida1 5mo ago> The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Yep, we're in full agreement here
- sandworm101 5mo agoUnless 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. Evil, but most everything in real estate is evil.
- emsign 5mo agoAnd that's exactly the problem with Polymarket and such, it gives an incentive to be destructive because that's easy. Entropy is easy. With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing. Polymarket doesn't care.
- criddell 5mo ago> But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine? You can sell your life insurance policy to somebody else. It's a way of getting money to sick people to use while thy are still alive.
- Ekaros 5mo agoRemember 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.
- charcircuit 5mo agoMurder and arson are illegal. Just because there is an event contract that doesn't make them legal to do.
- svachalek 5mo agoIt's also illegal to pay someone to do murder or arson, which is easy to obfuscate as an "event contract".
- selcuka 5mo agoVery true. Someone could place a huge bet for "person X will NOT be assassinated in the next 24 hours" and some lowlife could see the opportunity.
- energy123 5mo agoThere'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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- loeg 5mo agoSome of the prediction markets explicitly forbid payouts based on death. E.g., Kalshi refused to pay out "leaves office" when Khamenei was killed.
- munk-a 5mo agoThere 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.
- loeg 5mo agoSure, I'm not a fan of prediction markets in general either. Just responding to GP's specific claim about death incentives.
- gpm 5mo ago> Kalshi refused to pay out 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.
- epolanski 5mo agoI'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.
- dzhiurgis 5mo agoFunny 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.
- hackyhacky 5mo ago"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
- epolanski 5mo agoThe incentives are not hypothetical.
- petcat 5mo ago> should be illegal globally Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling. Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
- Copenjin 5mo agoSadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.
- bee_rider 5mo agoI 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.
- pimterry 5mo ago> 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 there something specific you're getting at?
- jmorenoamor 5mo agoLudopaths 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.
- amelius 5mo agoSomeone should place a bet on the lifespan of the polymarket founders.
- somenameforme 5mo agoUsers can't create markets on Polymarket, they're all created by Polymarket itself.
- wunderlotus 5mo agoWhich is another reason why they should be regulated as a gambling operation. It’s akin to odds making.
- somenameforme 5mo agoThey play no role whatsoever in defining the odds, those are completely driven by users on the markets in question.
- piltdownman 5mo agoProp 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.
- CPLX 5mo ago> Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years. It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.
- st_goliath 5mo ago> I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
- WarmWash 5mo ago> 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.
- jubilanti 5mo ago> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.
- WarmWash 5mo agoThey 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.
- bluGill 5mo agoThe 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.
- ryoshu 5mo agoThey become hyperstition engines.
- buellerbueller 5mo ago"hyperstition," TIL. Thanks, stranger!
- akersten 5mo ago> they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet. How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
- solenoid0937 5mo agostock markets have very strict KYC
- freejazz 5mo agoHave you ever looked at securities laws?
- AtNightWeCode 5mo agoHistorically 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.
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoThat opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)
- AtNightWeCode 5mo agoIt is marketing money so it is not even for arbitrage. And you don't need to provide all the liquidity. Just enough to tilt the result.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoThey'll be illegal anywhere democracy wants to properly function. How can I bet on this ripe assumption? Is there a market somewhere?
- jmyeet 5mo agoI 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.
- iamalizard 5mo agoI 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.
- super256 5mo agoMaybe we should ban the stock market too. In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
- mr_mitm 5mo agoThat's literally the plot of the first act of Casino Royale. I'm just now realizing the irony of the title.
- throw-the-towel 5mo agoAt 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.
- FabHK 5mo agoYou 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.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoKYC helps here. Crypto based gambling markets bypass this.
- imglorp 5mo agoVery close already. Death threats went to this journalist; seems someone bet on missile hits. https://factkeepers.com/polymarket-gamblers-vow-to-kill-journalist-unless-he-changes-iran-war-report-to-help-them-win-a-bet/ https://factkeepers.com/polymarket-gamblers-vow-to-kill-jour... It also incentivizes leaks from insiders, sometimes endangering others. A soldier was charged for betting on a military operation. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-classified-information-profit-prediction-market-bets https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas... And of course throwing pro sports, but that's been happening for ages. Sports has always been crooked: eg the Eupolus Scandal from 388 BCE.
- mithras 5mo agoI thought this one was the most interesting: ‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-lighter-french-police-look-at-claim-of-sensor-tampering-to-win-weather-bets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
- mschuster91 5mo agoWhoever 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 -.-
- abc123abc123 5mo agoInsider 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.
- specproc 5mo agoHard 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?
- dgellow 5mo agoThose markets are pretty much designed to facilitate insider trading
- kilroy123 5mo agoYup, that idea has been around for a while: https://cryptome.org/ap.htm https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
- littlecranky67 5mo agoThe 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.
- rapind 5mo agoExcept 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)
- littlecranky67 5mo agoPushing 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- toraway 5mo agoThe 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.
- 5mo ago
- irthomasthomas 5mo agoI think they are illegal already in most places under the insurable interest doctrine. Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.
- wanderlust123 5mo agoThat happens already at a much larger scale, without prediction markets. These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
- expedition32 5mo agoUnfortunately 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.
- bluGill 5mo agoThey 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.
- sometimelurker 5mo ago> illegal globally I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
- lxgr 5mo agoManifold tried real money markets for a while and quickly bailed out (I don't know any details on why).
- manquer 5mo agoFrom their FAQ on the front page. > 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.
- podcastradiocon 5mo agoThat market it's real my brother or is real to make some money
- d4ng 5mo agoThis 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.
- somenameforme 5mo agoAnd with many orders of magnitude greater liquidity available than on something like polymarket.
- stubish 5mo agoThese 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.
- solumunus 5mo agoFinancial markets serve a worthwhile purpose.
- solumunus 5mo agoFinancial 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.
- d4ng 5mo agoPurpose and meaning are ultimately subjective.
- saltyoldman 5mo agoCan 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?
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> 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-election 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.
- XorNot 5mo agoIts 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
- bluGill 5mo ago
- epolanski 5mo agoThese derivatives openly violate the Frank Dodds act, but the head of the FTC has said they won't act.
- itsnowandnever 5mo agoin what way do they violate Dodd-Frank?
- epolanski 5mo agoThe 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.
- itsnowandnever 5mo agoDodd-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.
- dreis_sw 5mo agoThey 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.
- qurren 5mo ago> manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet This happens on the stock market on a scale 100x larger than Polymarket. c.f. manipulated earnings reports, taco trades, strait of hummus nonsense
- rburhum 5mo ago[flagged]
- scoofy 5mo ago>We are adults, and we should be able to gamble on whatever the hell we want - even if you don't like it. No. That's not how society works. Prediction markets have externalities that affect all of us. If you want to gamble, you should be allow to do it in a small setting, on games that have no effect on the greater society.
- rburhum 5mo agoAgain, 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.
- scoofy 5mo agoI'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.
- groby_b 5mo agoRelatedly, is it OK with you if somebody bets a few million dollars on your early demise?
- rburhum 5mo agoPeople short stocks for billions of dollars every day the time.
- deleted 5mo ago
- dawah45 5mo ago[dead]
- throwaway27448 5mo agoThere is no such thing as global laws though, and harm reduction is good enough for now
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo agoIs 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?
- mikeweiss 5mo agoI 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.
- lonelyasacloud 5mo ago> 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.
- dandanua 5mo agoWell, 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.
- mrtksn 5mo agoSounds 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.
- nwhnwh 5mo agoYC just funded one of these.
- Hilliard_Ohiooo 5mo agoOh no, gambling bad! And don't forget about the kids and what possibly could happen maybe someday!
- vagab0nd 5mo agoGuns should be illegal because they can be used to kill people.