Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets

This should not be downvoted and is a legitimate criticism. Trump Jr. has a "special advisory role" in both Kalshi and polymarket. It would track with this administration to deploy a rapid defense of a corruption generation market where the current president's son is getting paid off by the two main competitors in the market.

First, over 90% of the wagers on Polymarket and Kalshi are already on sports (quoting John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on that one). Despite the headlines, Kalshi and Polymarket are mainly just sportsbooks.

Second, while yes, some of the markets available on prediction markets can push people to do awful things, there are plenty that are harmless. I'm cherry picking to make an extreme point, but I would so much rather have someone betting on what the temperature in Los Angeles is going to be tomorrow on Kalshi than betting on who will win the little league world series on DraftKings.

I support regulation saying certain things should not be allowed to be bet on, but allowing bets on morally questionable things isn't a quality unique to prediction markets.

No.

They're not banning prediction markets from out-of-state, they're banning it entirely. A state cannot ban out-of-state alcohol, but it can ban alcohol outright if it wanted to.

They're not going to get rid of them, they're just going to drive them underground, which will make them impossible to regulate, which will make using them less safe. I don't participate in prediction markets, but I would bet everything I own on this outcome.

> 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.