When 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.
A lot of people made money off the Iran war, through regular old publicly traded stocks.
Publicly 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"
> 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 ?
> 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 ?
"It's not gambling when I can effect the outcome!"
> 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 ?
The defense is that "Bets are placed on uncertain outcomes" also covers all kinds of insurance, the stock market, commodities markets, all kind of derivatives etc.
So where is the line drawn? In the US there has been a tremendous amount of money spent on lobbying to keep prediction markets on the not gambling side.
Kalshi, 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.
The 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 nothing…
Maybe you're right, but your main argument above is circular.
> 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 ?
Will spain ban calls and puts as well?
Will the SEC or CFTC do anything about the blatant insider trading?
When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from th…
> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.
Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.
Again, you can already do this with the stock market.
I am not rich enough to make a difference in the stock market. Some can but only a tiny minority.
>Some can but only a tiny minority.
Anyone who can figure out "how to have an accident" can do it. A fire at an aluminum plant last year tanked Ford stock 6%. For a relatively boring stock like Ford, the right options would have moved 1000%+.
Didn'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...
They've discovered that it's more efficient if the money flows directly from the private enterprise to the politicians without going through tax revenue.
I’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.
Better would be for polymarket to block the purchase from countries where it doesnt have a license.