Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
reuters.comThese - 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.
Very close already. Death threats went to this journalist; seems someone bet on missile hits. 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-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.
I 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-l...
Oh man, I thought from the headline that it was going to be about a new prediction wager on the site about whether the manipulator had used a hair dryer or lighter.
That would have been perfect.
Whoever 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 -.-
Also bad if such crucial information is based on a single sensor with barely any physical security
This logic is how we ended up with TSA.
"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"
It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
> It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons
It's impossible. No matter how good of a job you do, there will _always_ be people out to watch it all burn.
We ended up with locked cockpits that the pilots won't open for anybody, plus passengers willing to fight back due to the tragedy of the terrorists. We ended up with the TSA because Karen needed security theatre and the government was all too happy to increase the funding and scope of DHS with the nod of the useful idiots.
And the locked cockpits have been indirectly responsible for a huge number of deaths. Best intentions and all that
Well usually there isn’t an incentive to mess with this type of critical infrastructure, and yet, behold, the externalities.
Even foreign actors during war time wouldn’t go through the effort of messing with individual temperature sensors.
Leaks from insiders are always good.
It also substantially changes the definition of who's an insider. Polymarket has bets for random things like a particular word being used by an announcer. Suddenly the announcer is an insider on that bet.
Throwing in pro sports is at least harmless for people who don't care about pro sports.
Enough people do care about pro sports that someone who doesn't still needs to worry about being caught in a riot should something like this happen. (they already worry about riots for real wins/losses)
There's also known relationship between sport betting and domestic violence.
The main relationship is to all gambling. Sports likely gets assumed to make it worse because people still believe the myth that the Super Bowl is the worst DV day of the year.
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?
being 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.
The 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.
Even if you have an insurable interest, moral hazard may arise - acting recklessly or other abuse, while knowing you are insured/covered. Somewhat similar to friendly fraud in retail/ecommerce.
Insurance normally has fine print about those things. Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide. Fire insurance doesn't pay out if you intentionally burn your house down (the fire department also will investigate because even though it is their job they don't like risking their life fighting fires)
You can get insurance without the above provisions, but it will cost a lot more. Once in a while someone manages to collect on a claim for loss of their expensive cigars after they smoke them - but this is rare and usually not worth the cost.
> Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide.
This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
some life insurance policies pay out for suicide after an initial exclusion period. this is often six or twelve months. insurers can include it because suicide claims are relatively uncommon.
if there is evidence that someone took out the policy with the intention of creating a claim then the insurer may treat it as fraud and decline it.
> The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
Unless 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.
And 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.
I don't think any corporation "cares" about social issues, but, fwiw, polymarket isn't as ok with it as you imply. Polymarket reportedly detected the suspicious behavior, reported it, then worked with investigators to nab Gannon Ken Van Dyke.
> With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
To perhaps be a bit more pendantic.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
you cant take out life insurance on your spouse without them signing the paperwork in most cases
you dont take out cover on your business partner, the company itself does
No no I appreciate the pedantry, thank you for the correction
> I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
Yeah, you are being pedantic. The clear meaning is that you're not just allowed to insure arbitrary properties.
If you wanted to correct a misconception, you should provide a better, more complete understanding, not just express frustration about a misconception that doesn't even exist outside of an uncharitable reading.
In this case, that means refining the point to the more accurate model, that you need an insurable interest -- i.e. reason you don't want the event to happen, even knowing you'd get a payout[1]. Your counterexamples only work as such because that exists![2] If you want to fix all the people who don't have your superior understanding, that would have been a great way to help them out.
>I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It exists because it's approximately true: you can't get insurance on 99.99999% of buildings in the world because you have no insurable interest in them. And any time someone could correct that false premise, they probably just complain rather than providing the complete understanding -- exactly the choice you just made here.
[1] IMO, this is the natural dividing line between gambling and insurance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13916088
[2] Edit: And in your building collateral example, the policy would prevent you from double dipping -- getting both the building and the full payout.
Some of the prediction markets explicitly forbid payouts based on death. E.g., Kalshi refused to pay out "leaves office" when Khamenei was killed.
> 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.
There 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.
Sure, I'm not a fan of prediction markets in general either. Just responding to GP's specific claim about death incentives.
Remember 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.
Well, 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.
> 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.
Could you provide an example?
Nope. "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.
Polymarket doesn't take a cut. Their profit comes in transaction fees.
The mob boss doesn't charge me interest on my loan - he just really likes receiving expensive gifts from me.
"We don't take a cut of your bet, we just charge you a transaction fee on your bet" is reaching a bit.
That "facilitating" argument didn't work out for Silk Road.
Because what the Silk Road did was illegal whether in person or not.
What Polymarket and Kalshi are doing is also illegal in many places.
What 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.
In 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-legalizi...
>Rarely exceed 25 euros.
Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
It was, believe it still is, somewhat similar in Australia, where the game 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.
To me this is technicality.
A bet is a bet, whether it's against the house or other people it's a bet.
Can you name the individuals you are betting with on Polymarket? Can they name you?
Gannon Ken Van Dyke has entered the chat.
> 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.
Murder and arson are illegal. Just because there is an event contract that doesn't make them legal to do.
It's also illegal to pay someone to do murder or arson, which is easy to obfuscate as an "event contract".
I'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.
Funny 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.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
> 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.
> 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.
They 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.
The 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.
Again, you can already do this with the stock market.
> 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.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.
The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.
What fair market price are you talking about? The price decided by the prediction market?
If you compare prediction market implied odds to the actual odds that ended up they match very closely
Do you have an example?
what are these "actual odds" and if you have the time machine that lets you observe the necessary outcomes to calculate them, why are you bothering with making money on betting markets?
The "actual odds" is that if you get, say, 100 bets that were at 10% yes when the bet was resolved, you'll see that around 10% closed yes and 90% closed No.
So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.
As long as he didn't place any bets, I think what he did is totally fine.
If I find out my friends placed bets on whether I'll say X tomorrow, I'm not obligated to act as if I didn't know.
> As long as he didn't place any bets, I think what he did is totally fine.
you might need to take your imagination and critical thinking out for a spin if you can't see where this leads.
So is it also okay if his friends placed a bet and shared the profits with them?
Don't quibble on details. The point is that as long as he didn't profit from the bets, he is free to mess around that way.
This isn't share price manipulation.
Downvotes on HN is always fascinating. Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/coinbase-ceo-s-bizar...
"I don't want to consider possibly living in a world in which this might be true" is definitely a specific genre of downvote.
> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket
They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical
They can take any position they want and do whatever they want, the point is that these oddball markets are very thin so there just isn't much money there to harvest. You can only bet $50M at your chosen risk if you can find enough people to take the other side, and these markets simply don't have many participants betting much money.
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
I don't think the markets are thin, there are some bets that have made people many millions.
It depends on the market of course. In looking it up the only markets that have ever come even close to that sort of payout are things like presidential elections where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
Nobody's making millions betting on things like the weather.
>where the risks of insiderism or gaming are negligible, and there's extremely large public interest in it.
So what's the point of polymarket, then? If at best we get "negligible" "insiderism", how is it that we are supposed to be benefitting from this as a society the way OP and others insist that revealing insider preferences "would"
Because it's the most effective tool we know of for surfacing the true odds of something (Which also includes the fact that insiders will place outsized bets to move the needle towards the truth.)
An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
>An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
Trump didn't win by a landslide and he barely won the popular vote...
>The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
Praying someone has an example besides the election, to which it seems to have made absolutely no difference at all
When they're not thin they're popular (sports, awards), they favor insiders and/or various levels of manipulation (throwing dildos at a match), or both (military strikes, stock market, etc). They're full of natural or artificial drama, and people love to throw money at that.
I have a bot betting on a handful of what I consider (so far) markets that are impossible to cheat (bar UMA shenanigans): nobody has any control over the outcomes, previous knowledge is very limited. It makes some money, but looking at the depth, the volume, and my metrics, even being the fastest 100% of the time without worrying about bankroll, one of them would gimme roughly $1-2k a week.
Correct, but there is a direct correlation between the size of the market, and the power of the people determining the outcome.
Then there is also the fact that the power of the people determining the outcome is inversely proportional to their care about betting markets.
Put this together and you get "The larger the size of the market, the less the people who can single handily swing it care about doing so".
If you are someone who can command hundreds of thousands of people to bet millions for or against you, you almost certainly lose more than you would gain by gaming it.
Mind you the market also naturally prices in this risk of the one person going rogue and taking them winnings for themselves. You will never find a market for "WarmWash will post nothing for 3 days straight on HN" because no one will take the other side of it.
It seems like it's a huge assumption on your part that the bets you are describing are in the "0.89" range and not something significantly higher, even disregarding what others pointed out about this having already provably occurred.
Yeah, they unironically just attacked a strawman and sat of their laurels
Half this board makes way more than the head of the federal reserve or the CIA director (225k/year).
There's plenty of people able to influence events to whom these barely liquid bets can still amount to huge pay offs.
That includes many CEOs whose compensation is tied to stock performance.
> 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_bom...
I 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.
Is 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?
There is no such thing as global laws though, and harm reduction is good enough for now
Someone should place a bet on the lifespan of the polymarket founders.
Users can't create markets on Polymarket, they're all created by Polymarket itself.
> 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
Yup, that idea has been around for a while: https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
> 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?
stock markets have very strict KYC
They 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.
This 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.
These 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.
And with many orders of magnitude greater liquidity available than on something like polymarket.
They become hyperstition engines.
"hyperstition," TIL.
Thanks, stranger!
> illegal globally
I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
Manifold tried real money markets for a while and quickly bailed out (I don't know any details on why).
From 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.
Historically 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.
That opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)
It 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.
Can 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?
> 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-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.
Its 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_tur...
The problem is if you are a criminal you need to cover your tracks and your client tracks. Someone can meet with an assassin to kill so and so on a street corner. However how do you get a large amount of cash to the assassin if they pull the murder off. Large amounts of cash are too often tracked, and most other electronic payments are as well. Bitcoin has a public ledger that is not as anonymous as advocates like to claim (and the police are presumably getting better at understanding it)
I don't know if a contract is a good way, but it gives some deniability.
These derivatives openly violate the Frank Dodds act, but the head of the FTC has said they won't act.
in what way do they violate Dodd-Frank?
Unfortunately 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.
They 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.
That happens already at a much larger scale, without prediction markets.
These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
They'll be illegal anywhere democracy wants to properly function. How can I bet on this ripe assumption? Is there a market somewhere?
I 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.
I 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.
> 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.
> 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?
Ludopaths 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.
>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
In practice La Quiniela works more like a lottery than betting, though. No immediacy, no lights and sounds, no adrenalin rush. I don't think there's much risk of people falling into severe addiction by playing that.
Maybe a bit out of scope for this article, but seems like in every country “Younger millenials and Gen-Zers” are turning to gambling online while traditional gambling (like Vegas) dies.
I feel like this might be a net negative from the pure speed and access in which you can lose money online vs real life, but idk.
I 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.
Sadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.
The 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.
Except 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)
Pushing 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.
The 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.
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.
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, unfortunately.
Maybe 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_bom...
You 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.
At 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.
Or maybe we should somewhat regulate the stock market, require identification of traders, have a regulatory body that can retroactively investigate suspicious trade patterns and determine the identity of who's behind them?
KYC helps here. Crypto based gambling markets bypass this.
That's literally the plot of the first act of Casino Royale. I'm just now realizing the irony of the title.
Insider 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.
Hard 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?
Those markets are pretty much designed to facilitate insider trading
Prop 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.
> 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.
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.
I don’t think they allow bets regarding if someone is going to die or not?
All of these "politican out" markets will resolve to true if the politician dies: https://polymarket.com/predictions/out.
The language is usually "This market will resolve to “Yes” if <politician> ceases to be <Prime Minister/President/whatever>".
Or for another example: https://polymarket.com/event/will-neymar-play-in-the-2026-fi.... Will Neymar play in the world cup? Not if he's dead. Any kind of "will celebrity appear in X in the future" can be reduced to an assassination market.
Kalshi supposedly does not pay out if a death is involved
https://xcancel.com/mansourtarek_/status/2029996077554815268
Not sure if Polymarket does the same. Also not sure if I really trust these people to be the arbiter of morality and adhere to their own rules when it doesn't benefit them.
Yeah, Kalshi can't pay. 17 CFR § 40.11
> A registered entity shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any of the following:
> (1) An agreement, contract, transaction, or swap based upon an excluded commodity, as defined in Section 1a(19)(iv) of the Act, that *involves*, relates to, or references terrorism, *assassination*, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.
Polymarket doesn't seem to care too much.
> Polymarket doesn't seem to care too much
Polymarket is now two separate entities. Last year they were banned from the US and stopped taking on new US customers and made their site withdrawal only for anyone based in the US. You could bypass it with a VPN, but they did enough to at least look like they were complying.
They've now created a separate company that I believe is called Polymarket US which has it's own version of the site/app which they are using to re-enter the US market. This switched from invite only beta to open sign ups a few months ago.
Polymarket US is mainly just sports betting with a small number of crypto, commodities, and political election based markets, although they have said they plan to expand their market options. Their US based site almost certainly doesn't violate those rules. The version that is used outside the US is the one that has markets that violate that, but since they're not in the US, there's not much that can be done.
I can't find any evidence that Polymarket has a rule like this, and they have paid out for assassinations in the past: https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...
Sounds like this could easily be worked around by placing a bet on something that will definitely happen as a result of a death, i.e. "bet $X on whether Iran will close the strait".
well I see more problematic the people actually doing the Iran attacks and murder of heads of state. Betting on those is distasteful, but doing those things is where the damage lies.
It's not because specifically with these markets there is an amplification effect where the one doing the bet creates incentives for what it's betting in favor or against to materialize in the world.
In other words the money spent on bets that involve killing directly foments more killing.
Military insiders can also buy oil futures...
the entire point of the argument is that they're the same people. Military bets appear to have significantly higher rates of insider trading than baseline[1], which implies two things, both catastrophic. One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone) but the even worse scenario is causality in the other direction, that a bet leads someone to take a military decision.
[1]https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/30/polymarket-s-mil...
Sorry what. Whats wrong with knocking out mass-murdering dictators?
Ali Khamenei was recently murdered, at a price tag of several tens of billions of dollars, so far. His more radical son now occupies his former position. As a result, is the world a better place?
IDK but people in Iran were celebrating. Do you hate Iranians?
Maybe drop the obviously bad faith loaded responses.
> I'm all for banning these evil sites
Fortunately we have big beautiful crypto that separates us.
something is deeply wrong with some humans
Its just a dark mirror episode. I can't imagine waking up and thinking "boy I'll really make some money if we kill Ayatollah Khomeini today"
It’s worse.
There are the people from the kill command who bet on what they are ordered to do.
There could even be a bet by someone with direct influence on the government who convinces them to do it to make some money.
The other side of that argument could be something like: "Dude, Khomeini better not be killed, it'd suck for me, an average iranian dude. I'd probably bet he dies so I can hedge my personal financial wellbeing for that case"
> so I can hedge
There are several things about the "these are good because people can hedge" argument which bother me and I struggle to disentangle them, but one facet is this: These betting-markets may be an inferior form of hedging, especially for non-trivial scenarios that are intended to evoke sympathy. (Civilizations have a lot of prior art in risk-management.)
For example, our statistical Iranian Dude may be much better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on useful imported durable goods that may become unavailable, ideally ones that would have resale value even if nothing bad happens.
The convenient online casino doesn't require any more than a vague sense of anxiety to bet, but that generality also limits how well you can use the money to protect yourself. If you're specifically worried about famine, better to arrange a future result of food, versus a payout of cash when nobody is selling food. If you're a factory that uses X as a manufacturing input and worried about a geopolitical blockade, you may be better off investing in alternate supplies or futures contracts for X.
The average iranian dude is not going to send money to a company that has donald trump junior on its board of directors to 'hedge their bets' around the Iran war situation.
Which is also hardly imaginable.
How is it evil? CNN makes money on Iran attack and murders, are they evil too?
Which is more likely: CNN commits murder to increase viewership; or any one of billions of people commits murder to win a bet?
Taking bets, long odds on CNN committing murder
Funny how people take journalists as some sort of most moral form of human being. Meanwhile they are most likely to take bribes for editorializing, silencing, ads or completely making up stories. All while they are most likely to get earliest information on markets ergo most likely to rig markets themselves.
You've been so busy straw manning with the ridiculous and unstated claim that journalists are the "most moral form of human being" that you have conspicuously failed to answer my question.
Good.
Just naming things differently does not work in other countries.
If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
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.
Counterargument: Any "specific" wording of gambling would have condemned this activity. On average, vagueness in law generates more loopholes for corporate criminals to hide behind than it generates discretion for judges and juries to rule against them.
I don't usually see advertisements, but I was in a position recently to see a real-life television stream, and I was quite surprised to see them run an advertisement for Kalshi. I was pretty surprised that something like this would be advertised to normal people. I'd half expect the next ad to be for a hitman, or for beating your wife, or something. Seems crazy that this is tolerated whatsoever.
in Chicago near Wrigley Field (the Cubs stadium), the closest train stop (Addison) was basically wall to wall (some on the floor too) DraftKings advertisements until recently because they have a physical sports betting bar adjacent to Wrigley Field. After the latest round of elections they're closing that location so the ads came down.
It is mostly just sports betting
https://closingline.substack.com/p/the-takeaway-kalshi-non-s...
In the early 2000s major sports didn't even want to run "enjoy a vacation to Las Vegas" ads because of the loose connection to gambling.
Now they encourage users to bet as part of the commentary.
You know how a clear sign of a “bad neighborhood” is when you see a large percentage of payday loan buildings, liquor stores, gun stores, etc?
I see the percentage of advertising devoted to gambling to be a similar bellwether to the decline of my whole country. And it’s getting worse all the time. I can’t turn on the tv, look at billboards on the freeway, watch a sporting event, or even walk down a supermarket checkout without getting constantly reminded of how far we’ve fallen.
How is it any worse than ads for beer or sugar water?
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...
You have to complete the cycle to make sense.
gambling happens, tax comes in, crime goes up, police get hired, politicians get the police vote
U.S. citizens still need to pay taxes on their winnings.
Kalshi and Polymarket require you to provide your SSN.
Yet blocks the internet completely decimating all necessary services for a couple hours for La Liga futbol. Spain is a backwards country
> 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.
I'm still astounded that Polymarket, as a feature, is embedded inside Substack. Not a third-party plugin but baked into the platform. YouTube is one thing. It's practically ubiquitous in terms of video sharing but Polymarket?
I sincerely hope these abominations made to either enrich the corrupt/immoral or prey on the addicted are made illegal during my lifetime.
I find it humorous that these are simultaneously attacked as being gambling and attacked because some people know more than others and are "betting" on a sure thing.
Both can be true: insiders bet on a sure thing, outsiders naively gamble, the house gets a cut no matter what.
Not sure I get the joke. Should "we're crooked" be a defense against illegal gambling charges?
please stop calling them prediction markets. It's not even accurate, you do not buy a prediciton
Can you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?
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 from nowhere)
sure, a bet market which is gambling, not a 'prediction market'. those are not predictions
You can gamble on the stock exchange, just like you can "non-gamblingly" hedge certain risks by buying/selling certain financial products such as event futures. (Many insurance policies are structurally just that and are used for very boring non-gambling purposes!)
I don't think you'll find a simple/useful answer by slicing the problem on that axis.
At least when I put money in the stock market, I own a piece of the companies I'm invested in. I get some small amount of voting rights.
You don't get anything outside of winnings or losses from your bets on a "prediction market".
Sure, but most retail shareholders don’t make use of that right, and it’s severely diluted compared to preferred shares to boot.
That’s what I mean: Many things can be used in very different ways. These incentives usually matter more than the underlying things in finance.
That's just gambling with frills.
> they are not being sold by people.
I think you might be mistaken about how Polymarket works. They are indeed only a platform operator; all trades are directly between participants.
You don't literally buy the future on a futures exchange either. What name would you suggest instead?
The futures market is essentially about selling now but delivering in the future, so the naming kind of works.
For commodities futures, sure. But what about e.g. index futures or weather futures?
Could they be called that if they sold fortune cookies?
fortune cookie vendor would be more accurate
People wonder how bad prediction markets are going to get. I think it's going to get a lot worse. If left unchecked it'll en up like the 1997 paper "Assassination politics" describes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Poli...
Interesting comments here. I'd rather have prediction markets than casinos or sports betting services, because in the latter, you're playing again the house which can and will ban you for winning too much, while prediction markets are simply market makers taking a fee.
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
Seems like you're still betting against the house, you just can't be banned for winning too much
Good
The main way betting markets can increase accuracy is by making it profitable for insiders to leak secret information.
good
Basado.
It ought to be illegal everywhere, the only reason it won't be in the US is the president is on the grift with his kids operating on the boards of them.
Are they still doing blocks so configuring either Google's DNS or Cloudflare DNS will still unblock the sites?
Seems the blocks aren't in effect yet, I'm on Spanish ISP (Vodafone) here and can still access polymarket.com and kalshi.com. Traditionally, Spanish ISPs tend to do DNS blocks yeah, at least when it comes to long-lasting piracy and other "clearly illegal stuff" like Women's rights.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
I'm on Movistar and can't access it without my trusty VPN that I have for football match times :)
Interesting, added my ISP to my previous comment (Vodafone). Do you have a lot of stuff you use daily that goes away during the games? Personally the only thing that seems to stop working is Docker Hub, everything else seems OK, trying to figure out if it's just my ISP that is lenient or what's going on...
It changes depending on the day. But yes, some days it's really a lot (affecting forums, news sites, etc.). I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason, in fact I've been seriously consider changing ISP for that reason but I'm too lazy (plus in 12 years with them I think I've had a single outage which was solved in an hour or two, so even if I oppose them morally, it's convenient to stay...)
> I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason
They've got a license to stream LaLiga on Movistar Plus so they're particularly interested in blocking piracy.
am i understanding correctly that Docker Hub is inaccessible in Spain during football matches? do sports get bandwidth priority?
Not bandwidth priority. It's just that our brilliant judges have let the football league implement IP blocks to combat piracy of football matches. These blocks affect CloudFlare IPs that host many websites and services unrelated to football, so we can't access them during matches via VPN. (And by the way, I'm not interested in football but people I know who are say that they still view pirate match broadcasts just fine).
Well, that makes perfect sense. The whole world will eventually do the same. gambling with software is still gambling, just like accounting with software is still accounting.
You are stunningly more optimistic than I.
I thought I was being cynical. Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states.
> Classifying these services as gambling means they become a source of tax revenue for nation states
I mean Spain blocked these markets for now, to investigate how to deal with them, I don't think it's for sure they'll be classified as gambling and allowed, might very well be outlawed. Probably parent got confused you said "The whole world will eventually do the same" (about blocking/banning) but then seemingly you thought these were "classified as gambling" already.
Oh so finally someone is calling a spade a spade.
Good. Now take the next step and ban them outright.
well, it's gambling.
Lol it could not possibly be the coincidence that there were bets on ex prime minister Zapatero going to jail before the 30th of June or other meme bets making the rounds in Spain in the last couple of days.
There are bets everyday, so no matter when the ban is announced, you can always attach a conspiracy to it.
Most of Spain did not even know polymarket existed until a couple of days ago.
Also, most of Spain can walk to a functioning casino which will be more than willing to take all sorts of odd prop bets.
Not sure how you want me to respond to that. Are you getting that from a feel of yours or some statistical analysis of familiarity with polymarket in Spain? I don't think it matters much anyway, I bet most human beings don't know what polymarket is. But still, you think it warrants a conspiracy? To what end? None of this makes much sense to me.
I'd say based on vibes too, it seems to have gotten more common subject to talk about, also on TV, news and so on. It was virtually not talked about a year ago, compared to today.
Google Trends seems to agree too: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=polymarket&date=today%20...
Polymarket is a casino. A roulette wheel is not a "market". You can't beat the house.
There is no house? Betting is against other players
The service is the house, and they take fees on bets, so they are the only ones guaranteed to win.
By that logic market makers in the stock market are basically like a casino too. No one is of course guaranteed to win in anything but at least the stock market doesn't ban you for making too much money like a casino does.
The casinos won't ban you if you take too much from other players. They ban you because you take to much from the casino itself.
If you somehow caused some exchange to consistently lose money, I'm sure they'd cut you off.
I mean, yeah, pretty much.
I can actually consistently make money in the stock market, not so in a casino.
There is an entire profession of Poker players that consistently make money in casinos but not from casinos. You simply don't understand how this all works.
You are betting against insiders, or rather giving money to insiders...
Ok, who are insiders for these bets:
* What price will Bitcoin hit in May?
* SpaceX IPO closing market cap above ___ ?
* Highest temperature in Amsterdam on May 26?
* Presidential Election Winner 2028
There is a house and the house takes a rake just like a poker room. And a poker room is clearly not a securities exchange.
You're not betting against "other players," your betting against institutional players that have an edge... A house edge, like a casino.
That's not the definition of a casino. If it were, Poker wouldn't be played in casinos.
These services run on the blockchain, right? So in effect, there is no blocking them.
Off-ramping to fiat would be criminalised and pursued beyond the wildest dreams of La Liga/Cloudflare. A gambling site you can't withdraw your winnings from is of no interest to anyone.
how's it related to the Cloudflare ?
spain also blocks cloudflare for copyright infringement
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 destructive block which is to block based on time.
bitcoin
You can block the web user interface and effectively block Polymarket for 99.9% of users. No ban is ever 100% effective.
Prison bars are an unpatched DoS vulnerability that affects all blockchains.
They require no gambling license to be a stock broker on the Bolsa de Madrid stock exchange.
How do you defend these slimey companies? They’re actively running a mob casino and you still have people acting like government is the bad guys here. That doesn’t mean there can’t be better regulation of other markets, but comparing prediction markets to stock markets is a huge stretch.
Disagree, I find their product valuable and use them daily as a source of unusually high quality predictions. When used for this purpose insider trading is a feature that improves the quality of predictions. I see some fraud as in any market, but the overwhelming majority of transactions are voluntary, open and relatively informed within a highly transparent system.
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
A thought experiment: how would you feel about betting on a market that is an the outcome of a medical procedure? On a negative outcome? On a market for a negative outcome of your own procedure?
Is it bad to take out a life insurance policy right before you have a medical procedure?
If the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
This is why people who work in sports can't bet on sports. This is literally a solved problem. The current laws outlaw your examples already.
Not if it's your own procedure.
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
But killing someone is a crime, and fraud is a crime, the insurance in itself isn't.
You lived all your life without these evil companies. Life will go on when they are banished. I don't think you will miss "unusually high quality predictions" after a week.
What predictions? Why is it useful to know what the odds are for Trump to the word “postage stamp” in a specific speech?
Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.
Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.
When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.
You can look at who is likely to become the next president for USA etc, it helps a lot to see what people who spent some effort looking into it thinks.
Bad example. Americans can only very recently even place trades on PM and even then its through other companies and most people don't know about this. Those markets are often very thin and manipulated by the campaigns themselves.
A better example is wagers on things like when the Iran war will end. That's actually useful 'wisdom of the crowds', and any insider trading is already illegal. Maybe someday those markets would get big enough to allow companies to hedge risks. That's an actual useful application of PMs.
Show me the insider trading on polymarket that is providing you with this crucial info. Show it to me now.
It's not a casino. You aren't betting against the house with polymarket, unlike with gambling sites. You're betting against other players.
Equities are underlying collateral. Prediction markets are literally just betting on an outcome, no underlying asset exists.
Prediction Markets act the same way as Gambling Exchange - the assets are denominated as both sides of the book minus the spread.
Collateral is not uncommon in gambling (e.g. pink slips). That does not seem to distinguish gambling from speculating.
That's not collateral, that's the thing being wagered.
What collateral is underlying the massive, state-sponsored, Spanish lottery ticket and scratch off racket?
I don't think you'd find anyone arguing that the lottery isn't gambling, so I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
A casino is by definition a house that takes rake and is not the government or one of its subsidiaries ...
Even if it was the same --I think it's not-- you'll need a "SIBE operator license", and cannot do it solo, you have to be an employee of an authorized firm (bank, broker or dealer).
It seems redundant to have two different regulatory systems for slightly different kinds of speculation.
I think it's fine. Here renting (or teaching) light sails (light catamaran) needs a different license than renting (or teaching) any sail cruiser, including catamarans, despite being basically the same object (boats with sails). Feels that the small differences are enough to justify a different regime.
There are all sorts of different regulatory systems for all sorts of slightly different kinds of things.
It's not like equities markets are unregulated, be serious.
Right they require a brokerage license instead because it's a different industry. Not sure what your comment is trying to say here.
Your comment explains long queues to lottery ticket offices every time I visit Spain:)
I see a lot of comments like this is the blocking of prediction markets about politics, war, etc.
It's important to remember that ~80% of activity Polymarket and ~90% of Kalshi, by volume, are sports. These are effectively sports betting websites with prediction markets on the side.
It's not cut and dry to differentiate between the act and the wager.
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.
It's a roulette that you can actually manipulate. that 's why it's worse.