Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 559 posts

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#421

Post by energy123 »

charcircuit wrote: post #219
hmry wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. 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?

Murder and arson are illegal. Just because there is an event contract that doesn't make them legal to do.

There'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.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#422

Post by pennaMan »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #321
officialchicken wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, gambling isn't illegal here - in fact, it's very common. There are lots of casinos within a few mins walk in any city in Spain. All the prediction markets need to do is comply with existing laws.

What? Maybe you visited a particularly casino-heavy area, but in general there aren't many casinos in Spain. In many regions (e.g. mine) they're restricted to one per province. My city (250K population in the core, metropolitan area about 500K) has one. Madrid (6M metropolitan area) has four, Barcelona (5M) has one. Sports betting places on the other hand have multiplied like fungi in the last two decades, unfortunat…

You are incredibly naive. There is one on every street, they are just called "sports bars" instead of casinos.

You're probably talking about the big Vegas style entire-hotel casino that aren't so popular in Europe anyway outside a niche crowd. The average lower class Spanish person frequents these "sports bars" heavily

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#423

Post by adamjb »

flexagoon wrote: post #127
seydor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

polymarket 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.

I 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 fro…

That already had a name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betting_exchange

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#424

Post by pennaMan »

embedding-shape wrote: post #138
officialchicken wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, gambling isn't illegal here - in fact, it's very common. There are lots of casinos within a few mins walk in any city in Spain. All the prediction markets need to do is comply with existing laws.

For some reason, American companies have a really hard time following existing laws and regulations here. AirBnb and Uber both had the same approach of basically saying "Oops we didn't know" until the law (and others) cracked down on them, I'm sure someone could find older examples too, and surely tons of examples outside of Spain too.

The reason is self evident: central planning regulatory hell is incompatible with inovation.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#425

Post by pennaMan »

embedding-shape wrote: post #301
Zigurd wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big part of the reason we have judges, and why we should not replace them with LLMs.

Also 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.

You have an US-centric (an really naive) view of the judicial systems of the world. In many countries the judges have to follow the exact letter of the law. In others, this "spirit of the law" excuse makes way for enabling systemic corruption.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#426

Post by dandanua »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #7

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.

Well, 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.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#427

Post by port11 »

jorl17 wrote: post #289

I sincerely hope these abominations made to either enrich the corrupt/immoral or prey on the addicted are made illegal during my lifetime.

I 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.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#428

Post by lionkor »

HDBaseT wrote: post #401
embedding-shape wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It'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.

Those companies chose to accept cloudflare downtime and blocking as their own downtime.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#429

Post by debugnik »

TZubiri wrote: post #296
embedding-shape wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 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.

Correct, 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…

"Least destructive"? I can't access many sites and services during matches, but my colleagues tell me their pirate sources have barely been affected. This "least destructive" path is not working but is definitely destroying.

Re: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence

#430

Post by podcastradiocon »

sometimelurker wrote: post #187
solenoid0937 wrote: post #7

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.

> illegal globally I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting

That market it's real my brother or is real to make some money
Post reply on HN