We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by nfin » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #194

jackfruitpeel wrote: post #88

The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'. I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to…

> I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to prey on a subset of humanity This triggers thoughts. I don't like people being taken advantage of. At the same time, I like my personal liberties. It feels like you can spin this idea for nearly anything. Apparently 25% of alcohol sales are to alcoholics. That sucks and you could spin this has the liquor companies taking advantage, but I have tons of…

an added negative aspect of going further down the banning path is:

it lessens the need (or signal) to improve education, or does it not?

Not talking about the theory part of education, more the parts that are not handled well in schools like e.g. (!) habits and understanding better what is behind your daily actions (often “Glaubenssätze” are the reason). Many important parts of education is assumed to happen at home, and only very much later I saw through close friendships to what and what extent (!) some people have to go through… not having grown up in a household permitting learning essentially important life skills (or usually worse… grew up with mindsets that make it very much harder to tackle problems in a helpful way).

TLDR: More banning can result in a weaker signal to improve aforementioned (!) classical education weaknesses, which can spiral into more problems, more need and calling for banning/micro-managing adults, more resistance, more damaging/self-damaging adult actions, … spiral (and bigger threatening fights over the different approaches and the very real felt need to restrict others to feel safe).

That is a topic that I think AND care a lot (!!) about, so very happy for comments pros and cons (but please in a constructive manner). Also very happy about private messages/new insights/blindspots/…

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

#272

Post by AlexandrB » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #252

jakelazaroff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An individual's susceptibility to a vice is an individual problem. Maybe if you're Tom Hanks in Castaway. In real life, people contract lung damage from secondhand smoke; homes are mortgaged to fund gambling habits; families are destroyed by drunk drivers. That's not to say that people can't partake in their vices responsibly. But the idea that any harms are limited to the person with the problem is just not true.

the basis of my view is the observation that homes can be mortgaged to trade financial markets as well all the protective frameworks out there do not prevent someone from becoming a debt serf or excluded from the credit markets if they want to

I think adding barriers to doing something dumb:

1. Gives the person more opportunities to reconsider.

2. Gives loved ones more opportunities to notice what's happening and intervene.

There's a world of difference between refinancing your home by visiting a bank several times over a period of a few weeks and refinancing your home by tapping a few buttons on your phone.

The difference convenience makes to the rate of making errors in judgement is actually so obvious that even military equipment will have additional steps you have to take to enable lethal weapons/eject/etc.

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

#273

Post by kingleopold » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #94

The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.

This goes back to dying for your own country at scale for wars that had nothing to with risking your family, your land, your country. back then if you refused to fight for war that never risked anyting you care, they would literally killed you or made you slave labor.

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

#274

Post by amrocha » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #85

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

"where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position" To wit: where key decision makers in government can get paid to reveal war secretes to our enemies.

Sure, and pay our enemies to reveal their secrets to us. That's exactly the point of these things. Dangle money in front of people who know things we want to know.

[flagged]

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

#275

Post by deviantony » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

Wait, people can bet on bombings now? What the hell man.

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

#276

Post by dugidugout » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

hermannj314 wrote: post #208

themafia wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> said the low of the day was 17 People are gambling on the "low of the day?" Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.

I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running i…

I sure enjoyed reading your account of the experience! Thank you!

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

#277

Post by firloop » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

> And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion.

Bizarre to call trading volume "revenue". Last year, trading fees for Kalshi amounted to about $263 million[0], whereas Polymarket largely did not have fees in 2025 and is turning them on in a few days[1].

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kalshi-fee-revenue-2025-263-1...

[1]: https://gamingamerica.com/news/polymarket-free-ride-over-int...

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

#278

Post by flir » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #94

The entire country seems built on taking advantage of people, from my vantage point right now. Whether it’s attention, drugs, or business/legal leverage, everyone is out for advantage and they’re not even pretending to care about people they affect.

When resources and opportunities get concentrated at the top of the pyramid, people get more desperate to take any advantage that comes their (or their children's) way. In really bad situations, it stops being about improvement and starts being about avoidance of decline. The late Roman Republic is an example - wealth, land and influence concentrated in fewer hands, society just gets more vicious and corrupt as people look for any edge they can get. The reign of Æthelred Unread is another example.

I think you're seeing the impact of our modern Gilded Age - it's turning society into a Red Queen's Race.

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

#279

Post by willturman » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

willio58 wrote: post #97

jackfruitpeel wrote: post #88

The craziest thing here is that online gambling has been legal in the UK and Ireland for many years, and it's been such an obvious negative for those countries — and had been optimized brutally like any other tech product. When I moved over to the US a decade ago, I remember thinking 'well at least they're smart enough to have banned online gambling'. I am very pro personal liberties, but this stuff is weaponized to…

I live in a state in the U.S. that’s had legalized gambling for decades. I grew up seeing gambling addicts walk around my city. It’s always been bad, but in my eyes it’s so much worse now that anyone can tip tap on their phone and gamble away everything they have. At least you used to have to fly to Vegas or something to bet (and lose) big.

Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.

Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.

I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?

It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.

Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Eadington

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

#280

Post by kqr » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #202

slibhb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true if you leave your money in...which you don't have to do. You can play prediction markets by betting on a swing. E.g. I made a few hundred dollars betting on Harris in 2024 when Trump was at ~65% odds and then selling before the election when it was closer to 50%.

> can play prediction markets by betting on a swing The outcomes are still capped. In that respect, it's more like a derivative market than the stock market. You can trade in and out of options. But the value in the system is tightly defined and, after fees, a net negative-sum game.

There are no fees on Polymarket. Not sure about others.