I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.
I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
Back in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.
This was with their credit card. You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
I'm guessing that at some point, probably not very long from now, credit cards are going to cut down on this. They don't want to be held responsible for a bunch of debt from gamblers, when they've already paid the sites.
At some point, the fees won't be worth the combination of PR and actually losing money from bankruptcies / delinquencies.
Most of those gambling sites don't have merchant accounts and aren't able to accept credit card payments directly. Customers take out cash advances or buy cryptocurrency through various shady intermediaries, then transfer the assets.
> You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
If you do not have assets or high income, you can just ignore debt and it will drop off you credit report after 7 years. They can try to sue you (unlikely for <$5k debts) and then try to garnish wages (max 25% of aftertax income) but many states outright prohibit garnishment for consumer debts (like Texas) or limit it (like CA - just show that you have high living expenses to avoid garnishment).
Loan sharks that use threats still exist, non-bank personal lending funds use cold calling and connections with bankers and use non-staff third party callers to distance themselves from the consequences and reputation of threatening with violence.
So it's not like people need to go to shady lenders in the first place, they can be pipelined from normal credit card debt into less scrupulous debt collectors.
Does cold calling still works? I get so many spam calls that unknown numbers just go directly to voicemail that I check every other week or so. Pretty much everyone around me does the same. I do not remember when I got last legitimate call - it's all spam now.
The link you have is about business debt - that's likely much more collectable than CC debt.
I read a book this year about sports gambling in the US [1], and it points out how nasty and predatory it is. I think "prediction markets" have even less regulation? I would talk to my sports fan buddies at work and they would say "oh, just how sportsbooks in Vegas operate already", but this is on-demand, in your face, constantly nudging you to bet with dark patterns and "comps". I used to want sports gambling legal in the US, but the way it has gone is incredibly disgusting and is starting to make watching sports almost annoying. The crawl on the bottom is no longer scores, but moneylines...
[1] "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling" (2026) by Danny Funt
Predictions markets are more regulated than sports betting, because the events being predicted are wider, so they will naturally touch on a whole lot more regulation.
For example, can someone place a bet on an event that X person will be shot? That question now touches on a whole range of laws regarding murder, life insurance, incitation to violence, free speech? That you just don't touch at all in sports betting.
I'm not a lawyer, and I originally made a claim about sportsbetting covering a a subset of prediction markets, so just being covered for more laws that are not necessarily related to bets.
I can see the argument that they are piggybacking off a body of regulations that wasn't designed for this. I'm not an attorney, so I don't know if that holds, but even if it does, it's undeniable that there are enough parallels between commodity futures and prediction markets and that's why it's being used to regulate so far.
If you argue for more or more specific regulation, it's probably going to be a fork, not regulation from scratch.
And as mentioned in other comments, there's existing laws around the subject of bets themselves that mean that there already exist loads of regulations around these subjects, in the end they are just contracts, which is one of the main branches of law and has a huge body of law and jurisprudence, so either it's inaccurate to say they are unregulated, or it regulation means something much more specific that I'm unaware of.
I read your statement and my reaction is what you describe is less regulated than sports betting. For example, in sports betting there are laws by major leagues that players can not bet on games they are in. On prediction markets, if someone has insider knowledge, or can control whatever verification source is set for a bet, they can win (I believe there was an article posted earlier about some journalist reporting on a bomb that fell on an area and was pressured to change the wording to say it fell or was bombed). Additionally, as some of the prediction market wagers have weird grey areas, there are predictions that have additional sub text added after a market has been open/wages have been made which completely change the bet - that is just fast and loose and less regulation IMO
My main proposition was that prediction markets include sports betting as well as a bunch of other things, and they are therefore more regulated.
Did some research, and Kalshi (US based) is regulated by the CFTC, so they are already regulated by the same stuff that regulates securities, including price manipulation.
The subject of insider information is different because these are not public securities, there's no fiduciary responsibility. But it's not that there are no regulations, it's just that that specific regulation that we associate with the 2008 crisis just doesn't apply. But that doesn't mean there's no regulation, there's heaps, feel free to check out the CFTC website.
But ok, let’s follow your thought process. Couldn’t someone place a bet on a sporting event and then murder a key player? Wouldn’t all the same laws be triggered?
Laws against criminal activity aren’t regulations. Regulations are limitations and oversight requirements on business activities.
>Re: 1b “public policy” is not law, so no it’s not “illegal” just against the betting site rules
Not a lawyer, but jurisprudence (case law) is law, especially in Common Law jurisdictions like the US it has even more weight than actually codified law (unlike for example napoleonic Civil Law like in Argentina or France).
"Restatement (Second) of Contracts" (1989), Chapter 8, has a pretty extensive list of restatement and examples of case law of contract nullity by being against public policy.
Additionally, it's even a more basic rule that contracts are void ab initio if they are about breaking a law, I can see how it might be argued that a contract about a murder is not about breaking the law, but it's debatable and probably fact dependent.
There's also probably statutes or UCC that explicitly state such rules, but that's secondary.
Worth noting that polymarket is not in US Jurisdiction, so no, it's not regulated. Kalshi is in US jurisdiction and is regulated by US laws.
There was a case that reached some appeal court about election bet in Kalshi, and Kalshi won, you may agree or disagree, but it is under regulation.
>Re: 2c also applies to scenario 1, if you get caught you can’t retain the money.
Not necessarily, because both parties would be at fault in scenario 1. In scenario 2, the law would not declare the contract void, but award the payment to the non murdering party. In case 1 the whole contract is void, and the court will probably not get involved in any action whether forcing award of monies, nor forcing a party to return money, letting "the loss lies where it falls", in pari delicto.
>So, to your point about which is more regulated - there is no difference in the amount of regulation between the two scenarios.
It was a very basic mathematical claim, prediction markets include sports bets, so therefore they touch more regulations. The regulations the prediction markets touch is huge, as it can be about anything really, it must follow the regulations of almost every branch of contract law.
If Poly and Kalshi were actually prediction markets, then betting on a person getting shot and then murdering them yourself would both be allowed (by corporation only) and even encouraged. Because this is exactly what a perfect prediction is - you predict and then that happens with 100% guarantee. You are the best predictor and win.
But if Poly and Kalshi are gambling joints, then of course fixing gambling bets is no no, and that is what actually happens. They ban wins of market predictors who actually correctly predicted something but did it by fixing the game. A market prediction service wouldn't care about that, but gambling joint would.
A bit of a tangent, but many like the moneylines isn't because of gambling but because it tells you who's the favorite/underdog and by what margin. It's like in the equivalent of a chess game of knowing the player's ratings, which itself can directly lead to a nominal moneyline, but in most sports there's no formal predictive rating system.
It’s the kind of thing that would suck all enjoyment out of watching sports for me personally. I may well be in a minority though, possibly an old person thing too
Fellow old here too. I enjoy it because there's a lot of sports I follow intermittently. For instance I enjoy watching UFC on occasion, but often find by the time I catch another fight I often have no clue who the guys in the main event are!
I think I enjoy the odds because it adds a sort of unspoken storyline to a fight, because those fighters themselves also know who's the underdog and it adds a bit of a psychological edge to the contest.
It's a lot like watching a chess game where the same stuff unfolds where you expect the favorite to push. Will the underdog look to survive, try to come and prove he's not to be taken lightly, and so on. Good times.
I feel the same way, the odds are part of the story. The UFC has removed them now, I guess as part of the Paramount deal. This actually makes the events less interesting.
By the way, the UFC chews through athletes so fast (part of their somewhat exploitative business model), it's no wonder it's hard to keep up with the latest names.
There could easily be. There's no reason you couldn't publish some Elo-like thing on teams or players, if that was your interest - you don't need gambling to get a good idea of who the favorite is. But the interest is in gambling, so most people inclined to publish such a thing probably bet themselves/sell it as a product to gamblers.
But this is where stuff like prediction markets shine. In chess, for instance, the prediction market odds are going to be way closer to the outcome than might be expected because of the players' ratings. This is because skilled bettors are capable of considering things like exact matchups, history, short-term performance/form, and many other factors that a static rating can't really account for.
Incidentally this is also what makes chess games relatively profitable. Moderate-info bettors will do things like flip on their chess engine, look at the eval, and then bet on that. But a computer might say a position is a dead-draw when a stronger player can tell you 'white has big practical winning chances'.
You can build a model accounting for all the things you like, you don't have to limit yourself to Elo (its main selling point is that it's easy enough that players can easily calculate how many rating points they stand to lose/gain) or Glicko (almost as easy).
Even in the most optimistic case, betting market accuracy will be limited by the commission (if you have a better estimate than the market, but not sufficiently better that you'll make money on it, you don't bet), and I think even a not-terribly-smart model can get you there for chess games. We don't need betting markets for the prediction's sake.
Polymarket not only doesn't charge a commission for market makers (the people who put out offers), but actually gives them a percent of all fees collected from market takers to help ensure and incentivize market liquidity. So if you could create a model that offered even slightly worse than market accuracy, you'd have an infinite money machine. It does not seem to exist.
And I think the reason for that is because a lot of these factors are unquantifiable, subjective, and non-fixed. For instance determining the winning chances for a human in a chess position is surprisingly complex. There's even a huge chunk of profit to be made for somebody that could create such a model outside of printing money in prediction markets - it'd be an invaluable tool for players to use during opening preparation since positions where winning chances don't correlate with computer eval are sort of the money-shot in human prep that's often motivated by a desire to avoid computer prep. And that factor is just 1 amongst many that can weigh in on an expert bettor's opinion.
It only really struck me in adulthood: the professional sports, particularly baseball and American football, are basically gambling delivery vehicles. They’re packed with nonstop betting opportunities for the duration of the events. Football games ceremonially start off with a coin toss, which is very much on the nose. The ‘fun game’ aspect of the sports are very difficult to find among all the bettable events.
This was my experience trying out "traditional betting" for the first time with Betfair last Worldcup, and some other platform I tried out before as well. Not sure what Kalshi/others are doing that is so different?
If you're going to gamble, it's probably for the best that your counterparty doesn't also control the platform. I'm not saying that justifies being able to gamble frictionlessly, but it is marginally less exploitative. Eg, back in the day bucket shops (which sold binary options, like prediction markets do) would increase the spread in proportion to their assessment of your skill such that you would lose even if you were more skilled. In a proper market the platform makes the same amount of money whoever wins.
So, not all that different, but marginally less exploitative. I've never looked at Polymarket but Kalshi and PredictIt slid steadily from things of at least plausible real economic value (a market where it was conceivable [if unlikely] someone would be hedging their insurance contract or something) into total nonsense with no non-gambling function like whether someone would tweet a certain word.
I think prediction markets could serve a similar to a futures markets and have a functional purpose in the economy. It could be useful to generate real time estimates of the probability of some events that no one can control and have real economic consequences, like a hurricane. But evidently that's not where the money is.
> it's probably for the best that your counterparty doesn't also control the platform
But doesn't Polymarket et al own their own platforms, just like Betfair owns their platform? There is no P2P going on, even if some markets seem to advertise themselves as such so again, seems like the same just minus gambling regulations?
As far as I know it is "P2P", a continuous double sided auction like any proper exchange. If there's something fishy going on with the order book I do not personally know about it. (I don't think there is but I'm also not going to stick my neck out for them.)
Tl;Dr there's an order book with prices set by supply and demand. So you're at the whims of the market rather than the whims of someone who is your broker, exchange, clearinghouse, and taking the other side of your trade. I don't know much about Polymarket but iirc Kalshi is only your broker and exchange, so dealing with them is materially less risky in my mind.
> I think prediction markets could serve a similar to a futures markets and have a functional purpose in the economy. It could be useful to generate real time estimates of the probability of some events that no one can control and have real economic consequences, like a hurricane.
Even though nobody can control them, some people can predict them better than others. (Meteorologists with good models and supercomputers, etc.) In general it's impossible to prevent the appearance of insider trading in prediction markets, and it's also impossible -- unless you massively restrict what people can bet on -- to prevent people from doing things for bets to resolve in their favor, which turns those "markets" into "bounties." (The same guys who theorized prediction markets were the ones who theorized assassination markets.)
They're fundamentally broken and the fact that they're allowed is a sign and symptom of a dysfunctional society.
Insider trading by, say, having direct access to the particular wind vane that grounds the market and being able to manipulate it is a problem. Being better at trading because you have better models or better computers isn't per se a problem. Any more than it's a problem if someone is a better poker player.
In a broader context this may contribute to income inequality and regulatory capture, it can have negative externalities. But it isn't on it's face a problem. And the alleged positive externalities (realtime forecasts and a liquid market for hedging) are driven by such skilled traders.
Not all prediction markets are equally easy to manipulate. The bar was supposed to be (according to my hazy recollection) that a market had to be run in collaboration with an outside authority who, along with delivering a verdict that was already part of their normal duties, would help you exclude insiders from the market. That's a defensible position (not morally, tactically).
But "will so and so tweet about such and such" is a total joke. That's indefensible. That I do think that should never have been allowed or should be regulated as gambling. If there's no conceivable natural hedger, it isn't a real financial market and doesn't have a function (or the function is gambling, whichever).
Don't get me wrong, I think this turned into an end run around gambling regulations (that's certainly what happened with PredictIt), but I don't think that was always inevitable or will necessarily always be the case. That's a strong attractor for sure but it was pushed that way by the COVID era meme stock frenzy, the deregulation of online gambling, and ultimately competitive pressure from the sketchier markets. Once those forces were aligned it was inevitable, but it's possible that in 10 years there will have been a crackdown and tightening down of regulation and things will be very different. I'm not that optimistic, but it's a real possibility.
> They're fundamentally broken and the fact that they're allowed is a sign and symptom of a dysfunctional society.
There are two ways to view a market (prediction or stock): as socially accepted gambling for posh elites (and now every wannabe rich), and as a prediction engine that refines people's opinions, beliefs and information into a most accurate estimate possible.
If you take the first view, insider trading is dysfunctional and unfair. If you take the second view, insider trading is the entire point, it's how you get strong signal into the system.
Prediction markets were conceptualized by people taking the second view.
Other insiders and people who think they know better?
For large/complex enough bets, you won't have a single group of people who know how things truly are - you'll have multiple groups of people who each have (or believe they have) a critical piece of the puzzle, possibly by proxy, that makes them think they have a crucial perspective - and those points of view will conflict, giving each such participant a reason to bet. Taken in aggregate, you get a system that pulls in all those perspectives and distills a single signal out of them.
I don't think we have the same understanding of "insider". There are dozens to several hundred insiders at any one time. There aren't enough for them to reliably trade against ones another. To day nothing of how this system would fail when a company decided to raise capital. Like, is the CTO going to trade with the CEO because they have different views on the company? When they need to raise capital, are they going to get it from an accountant at E&Y who's auditing their books?
Why would prediction markets do a better job of predicting hurricanes than, say, meteorologists, weather stations, and satellite information?
All evidence I’ve seen shows mainstream prediction markets devolve quickly into gambling and related corruption while predicting nothing other than conventional wisdom. especially about real-time facts. The prediction markets on the NBA Finals game four this year were completely useless.
"Better" depends on the application but more precisely it would be "real time" and may include things that are measured but rarely if ever published. A prediction market doing poorly might be a negative result, "this is a martingale and our ability to forecast is limited." That would be my suspicion for a sports event but it could also mean that the participants are gamblers and so not making useful predictions, entirely possible.
The other value proposition would be that you could hedge your risk against all sorts of things that would otherwise be very difficult, like someone who sells funnel cakes hedging the risk of poor at the state fair due to rain. I think that's potentially interesting but was always far fetched and is definitely not as common as gambling.
Futures role is not "generate real time estimates of the probability" and never was. They have two roles: actual contracts to deliver later at set price and high risk trading (yes, some peoples use of it is gambling). Futures markets at do in fact have the actual market component. Prediction markets don't.
If you want meteorological prediction, you are way better off buying meteorological prediction from a company that sells meteorological predictions.
I said similar, not identical. The primary role of a futures market is for consumers and producers of commodities to hedge out their risk so that they don't go bankrupt if there's volatility in the market. Speculators (by which I do not mean gamblers) make money in futures markets by acting like insurance companies and absorbing that risk. Hedgers take "losing" trades that are equivalent to paying an insurance premium.
Prediction markets could be interesting to hedge a bunch of weird little things. Alas, not how things have gone so far really.
It's a market in the same way that poker and blackjack are "markets" on which cards are most likely to appear. You don't need to redefine what gambling is.
If it's a "market" then why do they enforce "fair bets" and disallow actually participating in a market to prevent influence on the totally-not-gambling-bets? If it's a market I can go play there and maybe even win it completely if I'm that good. So can I go to Poly, make a bet on a market state and then go change that market to satisfy my bet, aka "predict" it successfully? No? Why? Oh, because it's not actually predicting, it's gambling, and fixing gambles is a bad sport. Poly and Kalshi are biggest hypocrites ever.
The U.S. is quite far behind the rest of the world on sports betting, which means you don’t even need to imagine, we know from other countries that it doesn’t end well. The most worrying aspect is, the current U.S. government has no interest in the regulations that have helped minimise the problems in other countries.
The U.K’s highest earner for a few years running was the founder of a U.K. betting site, she had something like a 500 million salary and there is an entire town’s economy supported by her business.
I personally never met her but Bet365 is one of the most protected sites on the internet when it comes to antibot protections. When I started my company in 2025, I had two customers from UK, they were very much interested in odds for horse races from bet365, mostly realtime. Bet365 knew I was coming for them.
Whilst it is technically a salary, since the business is wholly owned by her and her family it is effectively a dividend, so it isn't quite accurate to compare it to CEO's of non-wholly owned private or public companies. Other CEO's might have gotten paid more since they might own enough stocks in the company to receive dividends, or share awards etc...
That's a fair point, it would be more interesting to compare the salary to equivalent, family-owned private companies (although I'm sure most of them don't disclose that sort of thing).
It's really telling about the state of the UK economy that the highest earner's business doesn't make anything but literally drains money from the masses.
They call it 'onramping'. Moonpay is a big one, coinbase has one, onramper is another. Basically Applepay / credit card -> ETH or SOL or USDC, etc, then lose away!
A cash advance is taking physical cash out with your credit card at an ATM or bank teller. Making an online purchase (which depositing money into your Kalshi account is) is therefore not a cash advance.
Not necessarily, I mean if you buy a in-game item or currency that wouldn't be a cash advance so with this they could just say you bought $20 worth of credits and since you're buying credits that could be considered a good.
What if the site allows you to purchase a digital asset such as a CS2 skin which you can then immediately sell back to them at the same price you to get credits in your account to gamble?
I'm trying to understand which part exactly is fraud? If this site offered a legitimate marketplace for these items as well as gambling then in certain jurisdictions of course that could be illegal (due to the gambling aspect) but where does the fraud come in exactly?
Depending on circumstances, many activities under the same banner of analogy are actually fraud as well. I suggest talking to a lawyer before making any plans. Fraud is more about intent to circumvent, and chaining together individually-legal activities is the most common path to a fraud conviction.
If done at scale, you will get complaints/chargebacks that will trigger an audit followed by fines and/or account closure. Banks and underwriters have standard procedures in place to catch this.
There are many kinds of "cash advance". You can't buy lottery tickets on a credit card (or in jurisdictions where you can, it's a cash advance). Credit cards also treat things such as buying dollar coins online from the US Mint different from a normal transaction.
In Australia any sort of gambling payment on a credit card is treated as a cash advance. If you use PayPal on top of your credit card, the credit card company still manages to introspect it and apply a cash advance fee.
But if you somehow have a 100% correct prediction you are now "insider trading" and that is not allowed because all gambling.. ahem, all betting... hmm... All predicting much be "fair" and "random" and definitely not too good.
I saw this for the first time in NYC at a dispensary, i’ve never seen a payment terminal charge me $4.75 for an atm transaction fee but it was pretty smooth.
The off-ramp of nearly all of my crypto endeavors has been very easy in my experience. Not always simple, because a lot of parts of moving money on various crypto chains is unintuitive and well in-need of improvement, but definitely easy once you know what to do.
The most annoying part, somewhat surprisingly, is always with regards to United States KYC restrictions. I've had a fair bit of annoyance trying to move crypto off of services that were once accessible to US customers and no longer are.
I personally cant wait to start seeing sob stories of how people are having thier account permanently locked after making big wins. Thats what happens when you bgive money to unregulated casinos every tine and is the exact reason there are so many gambling laws and restrictions.
have you tried to turn crypto into cash money in a real bank account? have you tried to do it with large amounts? would you describe that process as easy?
yes. For crypto platforms specfically, those "large amounts" can be pathetically small. Ive had no end of trouble even with amounts as low as $50 getting my card blocked until I call the bank
Making paper airplanes from dollar bills, and setting their backs on fire to give them jet engines, is likely cheaper and more entertaining, so if you're gambling anyway, you've already lost, period.
Cheaper, yes. More entertaining, not for a lot of people. Many play the same way you'd play a video game, with the actual stakes giving it a bigger rush. Enough that some become addicted.
If it weren't fun it wouldn't be nearly as big a problem.
I'm not sure about Kalshi, however on most sports betting sites you actually are betting against the house. The betting sites all have in-house models (or piggyback off other sites) that are much better at predicting odds than the general public. If someone is making money then the sites just place limits on that account so they're not losing money.
There's an old phrase that says something like "Look around the table, if you cant see the mark you're it." - if you think you are not betting against the house on a gambling site, you're VERY it.
I haven't used Kalshi, but I expected it's actually easy because it's technically a futures exchange, so it'll be regulated more like a stock brokerage than off-shore gambling.
We used to debate things like the harms to society of gambling, now it’s a silent decree that it’s not only legal but the basis for our economy. The same group who used to preach family values turned out to be the biggest casino pimps and pornographers.
You know what earns a lot of money rather effortlessly? Harvesting organs. I mean its just a cash flow, anyway for sure from sinners. Look at Chinese, always ahead of the curve.
Bonus points for saving lives of some wealthy folks. Everybody (who matters) wins.
I have some other ideas, all one needs is to flush morals down the drain for good. Clearly some folks are there already, we need to quickly jump on that rat race or FOMO would catch up and thats a big NONO.
all of it. We are by volume of growth a 'narrative' economy not a 'production economy' which for many years now is about gambling on future outcome over pay from realized production.
There are of course solid arguments for this, but the issue is the narrative part of the economy needs to be a mix with follow on production returns -- which... according to our current GDP growth mix is not. As most even realized production is backed by narrative bets.
They actively encourage addicts to "self-exclude" themselves from winnings, meaning if they go to a casino and win, the casino will bar them from collecting those winnings.. but they don't appear to stop that same person from placing bets in the first place.
Yeah, and also inevitable that a product designed to so efficiently separate people from their money would be overrun by grifters and scammers from the influencer/creator world.
What does make this instance perhaps a bit surprising is that it's Polymarket themselves who are paying those grifters.
They're an incredibly well known US based company targeting US based consumers in a way that is patently illegal. It seems almost unbelievably dumb that they would do this even by the often grotty standards of gambling companies.
They must have realised this would be found out and that, when it was, an investigation and enforcement action would follow? I guess maybe some of the creators will find themselves in hot water as well?
I really don't understand what the long term play is here, other than to be litigated out of business.
Let's compare and contrast this to how credit card companies treat sexual content vendors. Remember when a raft of games got delisted on Steam because of pressure from cc companies?
This is my biggest takeaway, and I really wonder what payment processor(s) they're using, because the chargeback and fraud rate in filling 'real money' into an online gambling account using visa or mastercard must be through the roof.
Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors (alluded to in popular fiction in Industry season 4 recently, for instance).
The back end of how they're able to get money "instantly" into peoples accounts must be fascinating, in a how the sausages are made kind of way.
> Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors
They're called high-risk payment processors and they usually handle all sorts of "legal but sketchy" sectors like porn, gambling, crypto, legalized drugs/vapes, MLMs, etc. It's not even some shadowy darknet industry, if you just search for "high risk payment processor" there is plenty of them which look very professional and even provide official Shopify integrations and stuff.
Interesting that if you go to one of their websites they also handle some pretty normal industries like "furniture" or "travel" just because of the high chargeback rate in them.
I wonder what the chargeback and fraud rate actually is in practice given they do ID verification. Pretty difficult to claim you didn't make the purchase depending on what they collect.
Once information stolen its easy to produce a digital fake ID with the info thats sold on the dark web and used everywhere. Private KYC collecting merchants rarely have the ability to authenticate the full gamet of valid types of government IDs.
Contrary to incredibly popular belief (at least in the US), asking for a photo of somebody's ID is actually not a sane way to do KYC. The point of an identity document is to check its security elements in person and compare the photo to the person standing in front of you. (Part of this can be replicated by doing a live video call, but that window is quickly closing due to deepfakes.)
Yet countless times in the past years, US and a few other companies have asked me to "identify myself" by sending them a scan of my goverment ID via chat/email/web form attachment, with absolutely no liveness check. This is just insane.
Having verified somebody's government ID doesn't actually factor into chargeback decisions and outcomes, not least because many forms of online KYC practiced today in the US are pretty laughable from a security point of view.
True, but for merchants that ship high fraud risk physical merchandise, it's becoming increasingly common to ask for a copy of a drivers license or other government issued photo ID (from a recognized US state or Canadian province, in the North American market) before a product gets shipped. I've seen this from a number of persons adjacent to a completely different forum who frequently buy things online like rifle scopes, spotting scopes, rangefinders, camera lenses, etc.
Getting a copy of the ID, only shipping to card billing address, using a signature on delivery required shipping option considerably cuts down on the number of fraudulent orders.
> It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.
My worry is that social media surveillance could be combined with Polymarket to tailor bets to individuals.
This could be very subtle. You don't really need your punters to always be wrong either. Meaning that sometimes they'd win at the expense of other punters with the illusion they can make money.
You just need them to be wrong, say, 15% of the time and to keep coming back compulsively and consistently over time. The longer the better.
If you're ever around fruit/slot machines you'll notice that they do payout and when they do they make a lot of noise. That hides the fact they slowly cream off a percentage of the money that goes in. In the UK the legal limit is around 30%, keeping it low for new gamblers and ramping up when they're hooked.
With detailed information about punter's lives and no regulation you can weaponise that.
With "AWP" (Amusement with Prize, as opposed to SWP: Skill with Prize, i.e. quiz machines), they're often set to payout 80-85% of money taken in. (SWP's are usually around 30%).
And at that level they're still pocketing hundreds of pounds per week per machine.
The most lucrative ones I've seen (admittedly ~20 years ago now) were being emptied by the operator twice a week and taking out £600-800 every time, per machine, with 3-4 machines per location.
An eye opening industry - I'm sure there are businesses out there that pretend to be one thing (pub, club, etc), but their primary profit source is gambling.
> An eye opening industry - I'm sure there are businesses out there that pretend to be one thing (pub, club, etc), but their primary profit source is gambling.
Having worked in such a "business" - the problem is rents. When everyone else around you has a slot machine or two, landlords raise the rents (because they see what their neighbor landlord can get away with). And now, you as a legitimate pub owner have to choose, do you raise the beer prices yet again, or do you put up a slot machine yourself?
And sooner or later, depending on the greediness of the landlord, you have to choose between putting up a slot machine or closing down outright.
Gambling is an incredibly corrosive force. Not just to the gamblers themselves (wtf, I heard there are triple-zero roulette tables in Vegas these days?), but also to everyone and everything surrounding it.
I agree, some level of allowing gambling makes sense, gambling can even be observed in the animal kingdom, but it absolutely needs to be regulated.
>it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.
"Would you like to make decisions that are bad for you?" The future is indeed wild, and personal weakness is for sale. This isn't meant as an attack on you, but a lot of people will not be able to manage this sort of reduced friction. People with MBAs will call this "providing value."
Key point though is that Kalshi and similar prediction market betting apps are parimutuel, unlike traditional sportsbooks/Draftkings etc where punters bet against the house. This greatly changes (improves) the incentives for the house, e.g. they don't ban sharks and search only for dumb money punters, they try much less to prevent you from leaving with your winnings etc. The parimutuel house just takes a flat rake percentage off the top of the sum of all bids, so they just want to maximize the amount of money wagered overall instead of doing shady shenanigans.
I'm not a prediction market user/booster nor a sports gambler, but this is a key difference and a strict improvement from traditional sportsbook apps. If our society is going to have widespread legal gambling, we strongly want it to be parimutuel.
So too has nearly everyone else who is peddling someone's interests. Social media currently exists to bend you to someone else's will. This was always true in some sense: newspapers, television, radio, etc, but I'd point out a few things:
- This is precisely what made television such a bad experience. You could really feel the hand reaching through the screen to shake you. Demanding that you feel one way or another. Particularly with commercials, but of course with everything else as well.
- The mediums of television and radio were heavily gate-kept (even with the advent of cable) compared to the internet and social media. You didn't have the insanity of Twitter accounts from east Asia spamming BBC (not the news channel) propaganda, or Russia, Iran, and others attempting to inflame racial hatred, etc.
It's not a wholly brand new thing, but the reach, scale, and variety are so much greater that it might as well be brand new.
The WSJ ran an earlier article stating that unless you have access to a lot of data, computing power, and statisticians, you're going to lose on those bets.
Not true, polymarket and kalshi have a lot of system bets, basically bets where the other side is the market, and further they take a cut from the money gambled.
There are other things as well, like they control which side wins, so they can leverage trade or even swing trade internally with a few bot accounts, not saying that they do but I don't see a ToC that says they can't.
Polymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance.
They don't control which side wins (UMA voters do). You should read up about prediction markets and in general sport gambling. Sport gambling platforms with a "house" usually derive their odds from pvp markets. Polymarket is similar to a classic order book market.
1. Kalshi doesn't use UMA.
2. Yeah spend more money to get UMA votes to decide controversial decisions. That's how polymarket works.
I have a lot of experience with similar systems, that's what we call rigging the election.
Imagine a handful of anonymous UMA wallets dominate Polymarket’s contested resolutions, and reporters have linked some deciding wallets to positions in the very markets they judged.
> Polymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance.
That's like saying Elon can be a trillionaire, but so can you, I mean sure, anyone can, but how lucky do you think you have to be for your market to actually get any meaningful traction and for you to make any money. And even when you do, you are basically suggesting you should insider trade or rig bets to make money... I am certain that might be a flex for some but man I don't think that's the dunk you were looking for.
At the end the only folks making money are the markets, but who am I to stop the blind. Best of luck, hopefully you don't regret it. I only hope people don't get addicted or robbed by this stuff, rich people can have their own fun I don't really care.
Of course there is a house. You have a spread and probably a ton of other not so obvious fees. The house always wins by design, especially on polymarket.
No not really. Polymarket collects fees which are simple and deterministic. Bets on outcomes are tokens on the blockchain and can be "split" ($1 into YES/NO outcome tokens) and "redeemed" (YES & NO outcome tokens into $1). Placing a bet is simply a market order on a plain ol' central-limit orderbook for these tokens. The only house there is maybe the market makers, which isn't a house. If it were a type of "house", then NYSE/NASDAQ has a house too.
In general, so is sports betting at a casino. It seems many people don’t understand this. You aren’t betting against the casino, you are betting against the other gamblers. The house “wins” because of the juice, eg. even odds past out -110. A smart book is going to try to keep the money balanced, but that’s not always the case in practice
You don't need Colossus-level compute or a genius-level IQ to evaluate the question "Will the steam machine cost more than $700 at release", or "Will 2026 be the hottest year on record".
Sure but that level of confidence is what would also eventually wipe you out because gamblers are not necessarily known for proper risk management. You could win 10 bets in a row but then it would only take one bet that you had 100% conviction on for you to lose and you get wiped out
I don't know much about gambling but is it not common to set for yourself max bets so your pool of cash doesn't deplete like you do when buying stocks or trading options so you can leverage up or down. I know it's a little different, but there is a similar principle.
Maybe only allow people to spend 1/5 their pool of cash per bet so it never reaches zero
You're sneaking in a prior assumption that people will act stupidly, and then make the argument "Well since they act stupidly they will have bad outcomes". That's like me claiming "Your startup is gonna fail, I can tell, because you'd need to be able to read and write to make it in business!"(sneaking in the prior assumption that the person in question is not in fact able to read or write)
Your strategic consideration is wise, though. 'Diversification' is one of the first things people will teach wrt investment literacy.
>just to be clear we are discussing gambling and not investing
Where's the demarcation? The whole point of this sub-thread was "you absolutely can predict the outcome of some of these markets". If you do your due dilligence/leverage your domain knowledge to buy a thing you expect to pay dividends at a later date, how is that not investing? Are government bonds gambling in your thinking?
Your prior about people acting unwise is still sneaking in via the assertion that we are talking about gambling.
What's wrong with me is I'm autistic enough to expect people to be able to follow arguments. I did not say "There are no differences between Government Bonds and Prediction Markets", what I said was "Let's find where the line between gambling and investing is, here's an example from which to pick apart the features that make gambling vs investing".
> I did not say "There are no differences between Government Bonds and Prediction Markets"
I never said that you said that, so now you are just arguing with a straw man that you just created, and your lack of ability to understand that is going to make a productive conversation impossible. Good luck with your gambling.
You haven't been putting in any good-faith effort into having a "productive conversation" for at least three of your responses, setting up "This is how things are" with no attempt to support this with any arguments, and have equally refused/dodged out of engaging with any of mine.
Your brain has just had your mental block up very obviously starting from your knee-jerk "what is wrong with you?" comment, isolating you from the scary prospect of being convinced by a consistent chain of logic, and now you're looking for a face-saving way of ejecting from the conversation.
You are not evaluating those questions, you are evaluating the probability of that two things happening, and you need to evaluate it better than the other people to win.
There are no easy questions, the difficulty is set by the skill/investment level of your competition.
I'm confused by how you're modeling these markets.
Let's say I am quite sure that the Steam Machine will cost more than $700 dollars, and I buy a 'yes' lot for 65 cents on the payed-out dollar, those are the odds at my buy-in time.
Where exactly now do the other participants' bets on the same market influence my chance to win/lose? How am I up against them and not the question "will my prediction come true"?
Sure, before my buy-in the odds, and thus the value fluctuate on account of the market movements, but once I'm in I'm in?
How exactly do you think the price is set at 65 cents, if not by the other market participants? When you win, who do you think is paying you out from the other side of the bet? When you lose, who do you think your money goes to?
Not only did you miss the point of the conversation entirely, you're attacking a point I explicitly addressed in my comment. I well understand how the system works, ggps comment had me confused about their perspective.
I didn’t miss the point at all. Once you’re in, unless you want to sell your stake, you’re in. But the entire point is that at the time of your bet, you’re taking a position that’s inherently disadvantaged. If there was any more EV to be gained, people with more money than you would have exhausted it. So without insider information, you’re flipping a coin but the house takes a cut.
>if there was any more EV to be gained, people with more money than you would have exhausted it
In a perfect market that everyone participates in and in which everyone has perfect information, but not down here in messy reality. Your logic would have you you seeing a dollar on the ground and without further investigation go "Oh that can't be real, if it were someone would have picked it up already!" Or refusing to play chess against anyone because Magnus Carlsen could beat you.
The stock market isn't perfect and not everyone participates in it, and the data is extraordinarily clear that essentially nobody is capable of extracting a durable edge. Of the people who do beat the market in a given year, those who beat the market the next year appear to follow the exact same distribution as the market as a whole.
Prediction markets are worse, both on the surface and by the actual statistics. The house takes an enormous cut, and then you have the issue of trading against insiders. Only an absolute rube would put money into a market rife with insiders, when they don't have comparable information. And the statistics bear this out. Something like 80% of all profits are captured by the top 1% of profitable users, which are only 30% of the total user base.
Anyone who thinks they will consistently make sound bets in these platforms without actually having private knowledge is a complete fool.
The betting topic is only a part of the equation. Should you bet $100 to win $5 on the Steamdeck price? Should you sell your bet before the Steamdeck even comes out?
But that's about juicing the maximum amount out of each bet, not about the matter of simply winning or losing(which was what I was originally responding to). If any situation one doesn't take for all its worth is a loss then I agree that it's damn near impossible to win, but this would be true everywhere.
I am intentionally flattening these trades to simple win/loss affairs(not just for the sake of this argument).
You're playing the game at a higher level and "complaining" at the increased complexity(I don't mean to say you are complaining, I just couldn't think of a better word). You're talkkng about the 80% that get you the last 20%, I'm talking about the 20% that get me the 80.
You cannot bet 50/50 on that question. Hence, you aren't actually asked to evaluate whether the answer to the questions you posted is 'yes' or 'no'. You are instead asked 'is the actual chance of it happening higher or lower than the current breakeven chance as posted on Kalshi / Polymarket'.
Can you help me better grasp this? My intuition is thus: Sure, if I'm going at it like a proper rationalist, I'd have to do things like calculate expected value or whatever(I fully admit my lack of foundational knowledge when it comes to statistics), but at the surface the questions I feel I'm being asked is: "Is this a winning ticket?" and then "How much would you pay for a ticket set to win $1?" The latter question being obviously meaningless except for the obvious: It does not matter in the slightest, as long as I don't pay 1$ or more.
So you could see how the face odds are irrelevant to me, only my internal yes/no intuition? Obviously this is not optimized, opportunity cost etc etc, but is there a big hole in my thinking you could point me in the direction of?
Its not the only defence, important and necessary, but also I think educating children about these risks in school is important (my kids' school does okay at this), and government regulation and criminalising such activity is useful too.
"Parenting" is a nebulous concept and at least to me, it also includes pushing for better laws for children. Nobody would think it's reasonable to allow stores to sell cigarettes to children and tell parents "if you don't like it, just don't let your kids smoke".
Why is it the worst example? Sure, the laws don't 100% prevent children from smoking, but certainly they have an effect. I'm not using it as an example of a perfectly effective law, I'm using it to make the point that it wouldn't be reasonable to say "parenting is the only defense against smoking" and scrap the law.
It's a bad example because the last 5+ years in UK/US have seen an epidemic of child vaping and nicotine addiction when it was illegal for them to have it, while the Tobacco companies fight tooth and nail against regulation on fruity flavours and bright colours.
I don't want to scrap laws. In Britain we're 20 years ahead of the US on this (see Gambling Act 2005). Gambling laws are written by the gambling industry so no parent should think that the law will do anything to help their child.
It is disturbing what has happened to pokemon cards in recent years. I remember as a kid no one wanted those packs because it as basically acknowledged by everyone the shit odds of getting something cool like a charizard vs a bunch of stupid cards. If you wanted a charizard, you'd just go to a card show with a dealer who has dozens of charizards and pay them like $20. You would never pull countless packs in effort to get one, everyone thought that was extremely stupid.
I was baffled to see gambling completely take over advertising in CSGO years ago with no one batting an eye, Valve also had its share of responsibility with loot cases but they have such a great reputation it's difficult to call them out on that.
The alternative would be to ask both sides of the bets to record a video, and tell them to only post winning bids, but to pay out to both sides. Is that really better? Classic tactic by the bet picking gambler gurus and is impossible to confirm.
I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.
Yes. That's not an argument against my point: they could achieve the same biased result using recordings of real bets. Be happy they (maybe) haven't yet, because that conartistry is much harder to show.
Don't trust anything anyone says about probabilities of real-world future events. We still can't even predict the weather a week in advance, despite huge computational resources being thrown at it.
I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.
Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?
edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?
Honestly, calling it "personal responsibility" when a powerful group is actively working to exploit that flaw seems a little weird. But even accepting that, we outlaw plenty of things because we think society isn't currently responsible enough to handle them.
Personal responsibility is an excuse for lazy regulation. These things are designed to be harmful, for the express purpose of squeezing money out of people, as efficiently as possible. We know that some people are psychologically and genetically more prone to addiction than others, and that people like that will be extremely likely to form addictions with gambling or drugs when we make those things easy to access.
What would you rather have? More regulated gambling and less addicts, or unregulated gambling and more addicts? Personally, I prefer the former.
You are promoting gambling to young people, easily manipulated.
That's why you see so many college boy on their marketing video.
It's completely fine when you're old enough to be responsible, and to know that gambling is a degenerate behavior that you can allow yourself sometimes to release the steam, but these companies don't make money from us.
They make money from the kids overspending because they are convinced they are going to get rich doing that. That's manipulation.
It would be like showing McDonald ads to starving African kids, of course they are going to make the wrong choice when offered food. They can't think rationally in that state.
> He compared the videos to fast-food commercials, where food can appear more appealing than it does in real life.
> “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.
The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger
The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives. But with burgers most people blame the victims. In my opinion it's all the same. Gambling, junk food, drugs, guns... Lots of money to be made, lots of lives destroyed.
Online betting was huge in several other developed countries first. America got late to a trend. If anything, a Great Firewall in the USA would have protected it from the trend.
America banned international countries from winning the betting market to protect Vegas and casinos in general. Some sort of protectionism they said the war on Terror was the reason to ban it if I remember correctly(just after 9/11).
Except in Macau, where casinos remain permitted. Chinese can also cross to Cambodia, where Chinese casino tourism is probably the bulk of the country’s economy.
All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
We should just make gambling illegal online again, things were fine back when you couldn’t gamble online then, at least in the USA, the fucking supreme corpo guzzlers (formerly the Supreme Court) interpreted the laws according to their owners will and now we have gambling online.
Most states had lotteries before this though. At least those brought in tax money and were designed to be relatively fair. Online gambling can shut down your account and refuse to pay if you get too big of a payout, and their money isn't going towards public schools.
There wasn't some mass movement of people doing online gambling that led to the dam bursting and it getting legalized, though. Courts just made a different decision and opened it up one day and as far as I know there wasn't even mass lobbying about it?
>The Court announced a 7–2 judgment in favor of Murphy on May 14, 2018, reversing the Third Circuit.[25] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch and in part by Justice Stephen Breyer.[26][27][28] The majority opinion agreed that §§ 3701(1) of PASPA commandeered power from the states to regulate their own gambling industries and thus was unconstitutional. It followed New York v. United States and reversed the Third Circuit decision.
Exactly. Gambling in the real world involved friction. That plus a certain social stigma if you gambled outside of “mainstream” casinos.
And this helped weed out all but the most addicted gamblers. Now there is no friction, the platforms are free to create dark patterns to encourage problem gambling, and the vice has zero social cost.
The dark patterns aren't just in online gambling. Nowdays, a lot of brick-and-mortar casinos encourage, or even require, clients to create an account (often framed as a "members club" or "rewards card"), which is used to track the client's activity at the casino and target them with promotions tailored to their behavior. These can be used in some really troubling ways, e.g. by identifying clients who may have a gambling problem and targeting them with promotions to come back to the casino more often, to stay longer, and/or to start placing larger bets.
The worst dark pattern I saw for gambling was in Lithuania: in supermarkets, they sell scratch cards right next to the credit card terminal. If you are a recovering addict, you just can't avoid the trigger, at the worst moment.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This comment was unnecessary and very distracting from a far more interesting discussion in the replies to the commenter you are attempting to condescend.
Usually I agree with your calls on things being unsubstantive, but this one kinda seems fine? I don't think it's flame bait, just emotive language? And the substantive point being made is that online gambling should be illegal.
(apologies if arguing about mod decisions is frowned upon, I didn't see anything in the rules about it)
You haven’t said anything, or at least I haven’t seen it. There’s no inbox here and I don’t always read old comments. If you have pointed it out before I don’t care, I haven’t seen it. If you want to point something out, then maybe email me about it the just time you see it, otherwise I’m not trolling through my old threads that often so you’ll have to accept that this is the first I’ve seen you ask.
I’m respect your wishes but you can’t say you have told me anything if I didn’t see it here, sorry Dan but that’s only fair since there’s no way for me to see your message unless I randomly go back.
If you want to ensure people see these messages, then that’s a feature you’ll need to add. I’m fine with you using the email on my account for this purpose, too, but I’m not fine with getting a single message from you here and you expecting me to have seen anything else you’ve said in the past. As far as I’m concerned this is the first I’ve seen you ask me about this.
These are the previous moderation replies, and you certainly saw some of them, since you responded. Interestingly, sometimes your responses were positive and sometimes rather hostile (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877994). But we're not asking you anything different than we ask of others here.
There’s no flame bait here just some swearing and rough language. I’ll cut back because you asked (once, I’ve not seen your responses other than this one), but I don’t think I’m out of line.
Also if people were downvoting my comments it’d be different but it’s just you for a frw recent ones down modding then, because before you get here they were up or even. Moderators should focus on those truly displaying bad behavior, I’m just swearing and saying relevant things.
I have a very long history of good comments here, arguing otherwise seems suspect, honestly.
I’ll back off like you say but I don’t agree at all. I’ve read the guidelines and tend to follow them.
Edit: I see like 3-4 questionable comments from me, two of who’ve are barely questionable. I get what you’re saying about the language but it’s really amazing you’ve targeted me here today, this us such low hanging fruit here, don’t you have better things to deal with? I’ll write better comments but I’m just really annoyed at your characterization of my behavior, it is very unfair in my eyes. I’ve done very good comments for ages and emotional language like this is rare for me. I expect better from mods here.
I appreciate the expression of feeling here! I know it sucks to get upbraided by moderators (and we don't enjoy it either). But it's definitely not personal. The moderation response would have been the same regardless of user, since we're not focused on usernames to begin with.
What attracts our attention are, in this order: (1) a post that breaks the site guidelines; (2) the other comments by that account; (3) whether we've posted moderation replies to that account before. It's true that that the username is what links (1), (2), and (3), but what we're paying attention to is mostly the content.
I think one factor here may be the tendency, which we all have, to underestimate the provocation in your own statements and overestimate it in others [1]. Those two distortions compound into quite a skew [2], and makes it easy to feel like one is being singled out or treated unfairly [3].
Beyond that, when you run across other posts breaking the site guidelines and going unmoderated, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the moderators are biased or secretly agreeing with those other posts. But this is a mistake. Overwhelmingly the reason for this is simply that we didn't see those other posts. We can't moderate what we don't see, and we don't come close to seeing everything on HN (or even 10% of it) - there is way too much. [4]
The court ruling was a good one, and anticipated. The federal government can either allow all gambling, or ban it all. They can’t pick and choose states where it may be allowed.
Before online gambling went wild in the US, most brick and mortal gambling was one of three sources: (1) Nevada (Las Vegas, etc.), (2) Atlantic City, New Jersey, (3) Native American tribes. There were also some other odd locations, like river boat gambling on the Mississippi River or "cardrooms" in California. As a result, most Americans did not live close to a casino. Now, you can do it from your smartphone.
And federal law said states other than Nevada and New Jersey had to ban gambling. The court said they can’t do that. They could ban gambling nationwide in federal law.
Just another hearty dividend thanks to corporate personhood and Citizen's United. Rarely has a single decision so thoroughly broken our system, but the regulatory capture is plain to see these days.
Citizens United gets a lot of flak, and it wasn't good, but it's far from the only factor here. We can at least go back to Buckley v. Valeo which gave us the idea that "money is speech". Corporations are a problem, but money is a bigger problem.
Most of their practice are illegal already. The problem is lack of enforcement.
We are not suing polymarket.
We are not suing the marketing company.
And we don't want online censorship.
IMO, the marketing company / media company should be sued. -- They are (relatively) easier target to sue. Many are US based and not going anywhere. With enough luck, this might give us a better internet with less SEO bullshit.
make this severely illegal with minimum two decades behind bars and what how they disappear… this is a very solvable problem which no one wants to solve
Also the operator is completely legal/compliant with it's jurisdictions laws as they allow us players (many now blacklist the us, but some not )
So they won't accept any foreign judgement .
That's why most countries rather target their infrastructure (psps/banking etc ..)
Even Eu countries had/have severe problems with Malta (due e.g Article 56A of the malta gaming act, which shields the operator from foreign judgements)
Make the websites unconnectable from the US. Make domestic ISPs not route the traffic to the site else jail time for the executives. Make VPNs not route traffic to the site else jail time for the executives and being null routed by domestic ISPs.
If you really want to crack down on it, then it could be done.
People have spend decades in prison for selling weed. Now it's legalized in more and more countries. Making things people like illegal rarely works, and it's far from a "solvable problem". Don't get me wrong, gambling is very bad, but if we were to analyze it statistically I think alcohol is way worse for society at large. And we all know how making alcohol illegal went.
Note that I'm not in favor of either weed or alcohol being as readily accessible as they are now, but there are a few things making that claim a bit dubious. The first is that obviously people are less reluctant to self-report using weed if it's legal. Secondly, the causation could be reversed, i.e. there are other factors in society contributing to both higher usage and larger general support for legalization.
In any case, my point was that simply making something illegal with the threat of "decades in prison" isn't a very good solution. Gambling, drugs, social media, etc. are all "big business", there's money to be made because there's a demand for it. How to solve that I don't know, but just prohibiting it doesn't seem like a good fix.
You made that claim up. There was a study of Some 22 million people around the world being dependent on marijuana. You are severely overestimating US addicted people.
What about this: that policy was huge success, because unlike gambling, weed is fairly harmless.
And the disaster part is where exactly? Their or their close ones lives being negatively impacted are where exactly? The original claim was "addicted" and "disaster".
The world has 22 million of people who are addicted and their lives are negatively impacted. The logical implication here is that these people are not negatively impacted.
These comparisons misunderstand, or perhaps underestimate, how markets work.
Demand for cannabis and alcohol is ubiquitous, strong.
Demand for each individual betting market, diminishingly rare.
Good luck finding the bookie at work or in your college class taking $10k in action on whether the Shah of Iran is still the Shah next week…
Banning the clearnet-based convenience, scale and breadth of market participants these services offer would immediately put a huge dent in most markets - non-sport especially.
Whether the black market and cryptocurrency-based sites outside of the clearnet would start to fill in, remains to be seen.
There has never been anything near the scale of Poly or Kalshi on “darkweb”.
I think I’d probably go farther. Next time you’re in a corner store or gas station, pay attention to who is wasting their money on scratchers or other lotto tickets.
You shouldn’t be allowed to gamble unless you can prove it’s disposable income.
we prevent people from gambling on early stage startups and risky investments by limiting investment to "accredited investors". same thing should apply to gambling.
I believe some countries/casinos in Southeast Asia have policies that you either have to show a foreign passport, or put a deposit of $500-1000 down to enter the casino, that you get back when you leave, with the theory (easily exploitable, I'm sure) being that you can't leave the casino penniless.
for a while i was using the sports gambling apps to make lots of little bets.
it was fun to put $0.50 on a game I normally wouldn't watch and tune in with a real rooting interest. i never bet more that $1 on a game because I knew that I would really dislike losing 'real money'.
the fact was that the stakes were completely irrelevant to me. the value came from definitively and publicly taking a side. if you're the fan of a team, you do this in every game. but with these little bets it's a way to sign-on for a little slice of being a fan in every game.
and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform. people love chasing worthless internet points (reddit upvotes, HN karma, etc), so why not build a platform that gives you points for betting?
you could let a chunk of the population scratch the itch they get to gamble without creating financial risk. they can still brag about their wins.
I'd do something fairly similarly, but in a sort of emotional hedge. If in a fight I was really rooting for one guy, I'd put a relatively small amount of money on the other. Ok 'my guy' lost, but hey - dinner's free tonight! It's also quite remarkable how often arbitrage opportunities come up where you can put bets on both sides with a guaranteed win. You'd think they'd all get eaten up by bots, but that's not at all the case.
Give a player that is hesitant a good opportunity to place a pretty much guaranteed winning bet and try to get them to cross their threshold. Once crossed, it’s much harder not to cross it again for most people.
> and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform
We have that in the Netherlands and we do it massively for every World Cup and Euro. The app my friend groups are on, Scorito, has 1.5 million competitors for the current WC, in the country of 18 million, and that's not the only app.
Normally a group would make a small buy in, like €5, where the winner takes all, but this year the legal department at work forbade that, se that sort of gambling Is actual illegal.
That will make things worse unless you reign in crypto. If you regulate Kalshi, people will use the unregulated polymarket which is already illegal in the united states.
It's a bit hard to find good stats, but it's at least 1 or 2 a year, it could be more like 10 - plenty of domestic violence is caused by money problems, and those problems can often be gambling related.
Have to remember that regulated gambling also has lobbyist so unless regulated gambling is invested in these apps they are likely trying to get them banned or also regulated
I'd say this goes for more than gambling. Since digitalization, we've removed a lot of friction from depraved behavior, and regulation hasn't caught up to it yet.
I was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad.
There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging."
Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA.
So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.
I agree with your point in general, but doesn't that disclaimer apply to any kind of supplement? As far as I know that sort of thing has been allowed for quite some time. For whatever reason the FDA allows for an almost completely unregulated vitamin/supplement industry.
They used to be vague and not make specific claims because that wasn't allowed. They'd say "Vitamin K helps promote healthy eyes." They can't say "our chewable will cure your glaucoma. (claimhasnotbeenreviewedbytheFDA)"
But apparently they can do that now, or at least they are doing it.
It's not up to the FDA, their hands are tied thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah on behalf of the supplement lobby.
Would it matter if the bets were real and they picked the 0.00001% big winners to feature in the ad? Would that be less fraudulent in any meaningful sense, would it have a different impact on the world?
Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?
I question your definitions. In what sense is it legally or morally useful to discriminate between lying with statistics and lying without them? It's an academically useful distinction, but why does it matter in practice? People are misled, the misleading is intentional, but if you hire a statistician to do it for you instead of an actor then you're A-Okay?
It's useful because honesty and dishonesty are strongly self-correlated. Someone who works hard to ensure their advertising is technically true will likely work hard towards technically satisfying other goals and rules we set for them; someone who's comfortable outright lying in their ads will likely also lie about other things.
In the US, the FTC is very clear that faking or purchasing testimonials is illegal. Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud. On the other hand, selecting and advertising specific real testimonials is fine. A customer described their actual experience that way, and presumably the consumers understand that advertisers will select especially positive individual testimonials for their advertisements. I can't believe I'm actually trying to explain this, but fake testimonials are illegal because the consumer has no way to know that they are made up. Real testimonials are not "lying with statistics", they're not statistics at all, and are legal because consumers can understand that it's not the median customer experience.
If picking real winners and real winnings to feature in the ad was just as good, they could do that. If not, then yes, it makes an impact on the world to mislead people with that marketing.
Somehow there's a difference between things that happened and didn't happen, and that's a good place to draw a line in the sand of what you're allowed to advertise and not.
Not GP, but here is how I know. Messi and Steve Carell did an ad for local chips brand, (market size < 10 million people). There is no way that brand could afford them. Searched online and found the same ad for Lay's. Turns out Pepsi owns a lot of local snack brands. They'll buy local brand and if it's popular they will keep the brand (instead of replacing it with global brand like Lay's). Ad is recorded for all brands at once, they just replace bag of Lay's with bag of whatever is the local chips they own.
Believe it or not, the laws don't say verbatim "Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising...". I can't really believe that this is a real question and that I'm trying to explain this, either. The actual laws are more specific, and combined with how the courts interpret them, cover a lot of different situations and try to do so in a reasonable way.
If you actually want to understand why "an actor pretending to enjoy drinking Coca Cola" is okay while other kinds of endorsements are not, in the US at least, you could start with the FTC "Truth in Advertising" website, and "Advertising Endorsements" specifically, or other resources on that page.
Yeah. It's so demoralizing, seeing all these people make fortunes while honest people scrape by. It feels like getting in on the grift is the only way to make it.
only lawyers care what the laws say. I care about what's right and good and leads to prosperity for people I care about (which is to a greater or lesser extent everyone)
It's the lawyers job to make the laws align with some version of the above, and many of them, like most other people with power in society, are doing a willfully terrible job of it
This is not correct. It's a politician's job to make them selfrich by any means necessary. It's a lawyer's job to make you pay for as many hours as possible.
correct - "a" lawyer. a single lawyer is but a cog in the machine. Lawyers as a whole, as an institution, however are at least ostensibly supposed to exist for some benefit to society. They, like other institutions, must act to prevent principal agent problems. And like other institutions, they are failing dramatically
It's the same for all the gambling platforms - they give creators and influencers privileged accounts that win more than they lose so when they stream it looks like they're not losing constantly.
Seems like a weird mistake to make. If they're going to bait new users, why not just use bets that did exist? Better yet, why not use users who did make a lot of money?
Seems to be a popular means for marketing gambling. There was a scandal of a bunch of twitch streamers doing the same thing for skin gambling websites.
A few years ago crypto gambling really took off. The big fish here is Stake. Back when Twitch still allowed slots, there was a flood of slots streamers. Ultimately this led to Twitch banning gambling. This was such an issue that Stake created their own live streaming platform (ie Kick). That should tell you how lucrative it was.
But what came out was that there was different contracts the streamers had. Some were paid a hefty fee and they got to keep any winnings. Why anyone would choose this is beyond me because over time your expected return is negative. The other option was that you could "gamble" with fake money. None of it was real. And none of it was disclosed.
I never understood why people would atch someone play slots all day but some people did. I think psychologically it's a bit like mukbang where people live vicariously through someone else's gluttony. With gambling, the psychological hook is so strong that it can be triggered by watching someone else gamble. But that's just a guess. Luckily, I've never been bitten by the gambling bug. It's one of the worst addictions.
I think fake gambling in particular should be illegal or, in the very least, disclosed publicly.
How is this not gambling? I mean, any mobster bookie could simply claim prediction market in this case, and simply take a cut. Where is the line drawn? On how much money the organizers give to the Trump family?
I made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/) They actually don’t decide on market outcomes, they outsource that to UMA which is as opaque as it can get.
Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.
this reminds me of the social media "turbolearn ai" slop. i feel like the vastness of this form of marketing is becoming the new ai slop on social media.
This is like a food commercial where someone shows an extreme reaction to food that isn't the product they're selling, or acting like they're eating something that isn't food at all. There are laws regarding food advertising that require it to present the real food (though the presentation of it is usually way better).
Creators are supposed to make it clear that it is add. Usually they add a #ad to their post. But many creators don't understand the rules and don't correctly mark their post as being sponsored.
I blanket consider any post by these "influencers" as paid for.
But my biggest fear is for my kids. I'm doing my best to teach them about the duplicity that exists in this world, and that's precisely why I'm against blanket social media bans for under-16s.
By the time kids turn 17, they've hit the rebel stage. And that's exactly when the freedom to access social media arrives. At that point, they won't listen to parents. They are going to get soo badly burnt.
This is why I advocate for controlled, early access to social media for children. As a parent, I can monitor what they follow and teach them to distinguish right from wrong.
But with these blanket bans, that's taken out of my hands entirely. They grow up sheltered in a picture-perfect world...and then, boom.
I have news for you. That burger is the McDonald's commercial? It's most likely made out of plastic. That happy lottery winner? Probably a stock photo from one of the major visuals providers. And I am ready to bet my bankers don't have this hollywood white teeth looking of banks commercials. Since when is advertising real?
“The truth is most of what you see in food photographs is real. FTC laws state that whatever you’re selling with a photo must be real in the image. To use a familiar example, if you’re selling corn flakes the flakes must be real. But then it gets interesting. You can use white glue instead of milk in your bowl of flakes because you’re not selling the milk, only the corn flakes.”
I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.
I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
This industry is wild.
Back in the good old days you needed a few more steps before you got into debt after gambling.
Back in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.
This was with their credit card. You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
I'm guessing that at some point, probably not very long from now, credit cards are going to cut down on this. They don't want to be held responsible for a bunch of debt from gamblers, when they've already paid the sites.
At some point, the fees won't be worth the combination of PR and actually losing money from bankruptcies / delinquencies.
Most of those gambling sites don't have merchant accounts and aren't able to accept credit card payments directly. Customers take out cash advances or buy cryptocurrency through various shady intermediaries, then transfer the assets.
> You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
If you do not have assets or high income, you can just ignore debt and it will drop off you credit report after 7 years. They can try to sue you (unlikely for <$5k debts) and then try to garnish wages (max 25% of aftertax income) but many states outright prohibit garnishment for consumer debts (like Texas) or limit it (like CA - just show that you have high living expenses to avoid garnishment).
Overall much better options that kneecaps.
Loan sharks that use threats still exist, non-bank personal lending funds use cold calling and connections with bankers and use non-staff third party callers to distance themselves from the consequences and reputation of threatening with violence.
So it's not like people need to go to shady lenders in the first place, they can be pipelined from normal credit card debt into less scrupulous debt collectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMntLU1bNE0
Does cold calling still works? I get so many spam calls that unknown numbers just go directly to voicemail that I check every other week or so. Pretty much everyone around me does the same. I do not remember when I got last legitimate call - it's all spam now.
The link you have is about business debt - that's likely much more collectable than CC debt.
The general rule is that if you see an attack/ad, it's because someone is falling for it.
Attacks have costs, no matter how marginal, and if someone is paying that, they are probably funding it with the victim payouts.
Very rarely will attacks be funded on hopes, and if that happens, it's not for long until they run out of funds and energy.
I read a book this year about sports gambling in the US [1], and it points out how nasty and predatory it is. I think "prediction markets" have even less regulation? I would talk to my sports fan buddies at work and they would say "oh, just how sportsbooks in Vegas operate already", but this is on-demand, in your face, constantly nudging you to bet with dark patterns and "comps". I used to want sports gambling legal in the US, but the way it has gone is incredibly disgusting and is starting to make watching sports almost annoying. The crawl on the bottom is no longer scores, but moneylines...
[1] "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling" (2026) by Danny Funt
Predictions markets are more regulated than sports betting, because the events being predicted are wider, so they will naturally touch on a whole lot more regulation.
For example, can someone place a bet on an event that X person will be shot? That question now touches on a whole range of laws regarding murder, life insurance, incitation to violence, free speech? That you just don't touch at all in sports betting.
So where are those regulations?
I'm not a lawyer, and I originally made a claim about sportsbetting covering a a subset of prediction markets, so just being covered for more laws that are not necessarily related to bets.
But I made some research, and here's the main body that specifically targets 'regulation' regulations for prediction markets https://www.cftc.gov/LawRegulation/index.htm
I can see the argument that they are piggybacking off a body of regulations that wasn't designed for this. I'm not an attorney, so I don't know if that holds, but even if it does, it's undeniable that there are enough parallels between commodity futures and prediction markets and that's why it's being used to regulate so far.
If you argue for more or more specific regulation, it's probably going to be a fork, not regulation from scratch.
And as mentioned in other comments, there's existing laws around the subject of bets themselves that mean that there already exist loads of regulations around these subjects, in the end they are just contracts, which is one of the main branches of law and has a huge body of law and jurisprudence, so either it's inaccurate to say they are unregulated, or it regulation means something much more specific that I'm unaware of.
I read your statement and my reaction is what you describe is less regulated than sports betting. For example, in sports betting there are laws by major leagues that players can not bet on games they are in. On prediction markets, if someone has insider knowledge, or can control whatever verification source is set for a bet, they can win (I believe there was an article posted earlier about some journalist reporting on a bomb that fell on an area and was pressured to change the wording to say it fell or was bombed). Additionally, as some of the prediction market wagers have weird grey areas, there are predictions that have additional sub text added after a market has been open/wages have been made which completely change the bet - that is just fast and loose and less regulation IMO
My main proposition was that prediction markets include sports betting as well as a bunch of other things, and they are therefore more regulated.
Did some research, and Kalshi (US based) is regulated by the CFTC, so they are already regulated by the same stuff that regulates securities, including price manipulation.
The subject of insider information is different because these are not public securities, there's no fiduciary responsibility. But it's not that there are no regulations, it's just that that specific regulation that we associate with the 2008 crisis just doesn't apply. But that doesn't mean there's no regulation, there's heaps, feel free to check out the CFTC website.
Lol. This is some quality sv psychosis content.
But ok, let’s follow your thought process. Couldn’t someone place a bet on a sporting event and then murder a key player? Wouldn’t all the same laws be triggered?
Laws against criminal activity aren’t regulations. Regulations are limitations and oversight requirements on business activities.
> Couldn’t someone place a bet on a sporting event and then murder a key player?
Probably not, no. I would be very surprised if the sports betting shops didn't have some sort of "force majeure" clauses.
That seems like a good safeguard.
I don’t see any force majeure clauses here https://polymarket.com/event/trump-out-as-president-before-2... but maybe they’re hidden in the fine print?
>" can someone place a bet on an event that X person will be shot? "
> Couldn’t someone place a bet on a sporting event and then murder a key player?
I don't follow, these are separate hypotheticals. For the record the answers would be:
1a) Can? Yes
1b) Legal? No, listing itself against public policy.
2a) Can? Yes
2b) Legal? No, murder is illegal
2c) Wager profits retained? No, slayer rule/No profit theory.
Re: 1b “public policy” is not law, so no it’s not “illegal” just against the betting site rules. Easily skirted by making the bet not directly about death, e.g. https://polymarket.com/event/trump-out-as-president-before-2...
Re: 2c also applies to scenario 1, if you get caught you can’t retain the money.
So, to your point about which is more regulated - there is no difference in the amount of regulation between the two scenarios.
>Re: 1b “public policy” is not law, so no it’s not “illegal” just against the betting site rules
Not a lawyer, but jurisprudence (case law) is law, especially in Common Law jurisdictions like the US it has even more weight than actually codified law (unlike for example napoleonic Civil Law like in Argentina or France).
"Restatement (Second) of Contracts" (1989), Chapter 8, has a pretty extensive list of restatement and examples of case law of contract nullity by being against public policy.
Additionally, it's even a more basic rule that contracts are void ab initio if they are about breaking a law, I can see how it might be argued that a contract about a murder is not about breaking the law, but it's debatable and probably fact dependent.
There's also probably statutes or UCC that explicitly state such rules, but that's secondary.
>Easily skirted by making the bet not directly about death, e.g. https://polymarket.com/event/trump-out-as-president-before-2...
Worth noting that polymarket is not in US Jurisdiction, so no, it's not regulated. Kalshi is in US jurisdiction and is regulated by US laws.
There was a case that reached some appeal court about election bet in Kalshi, and Kalshi won, you may agree or disagree, but it is under regulation.
>Re: 2c also applies to scenario 1, if you get caught you can’t retain the money.
Not necessarily, because both parties would be at fault in scenario 1. In scenario 2, the law would not declare the contract void, but award the payment to the non murdering party. In case 1 the whole contract is void, and the court will probably not get involved in any action whether forcing award of monies, nor forcing a party to return money, letting "the loss lies where it falls", in pari delicto.
>So, to your point about which is more regulated - there is no difference in the amount of regulation between the two scenarios.
It was a very basic mathematical claim, prediction markets include sports bets, so therefore they touch more regulations. The regulations the prediction markets touch is huge, as it can be about anything really, it must follow the regulations of almost every branch of contract law.
> In case 1 the whole contract is void, and the court will probably not get involved
So less regulation. Case 1 is the polymarket/kalshi case.
> It was a very basic mathematical claim, prediction markets include sports bets, so therefore they touch more regulations.
Uber is a taxi company and more. Uber is (or was) still less regulated than taxi industry.
You’re claiming it’s simple math, while grouping things that are categorically different into the same bucket.
If Poly and Kalshi were actually prediction markets, then betting on a person getting shot and then murdering them yourself would both be allowed (by corporation only) and even encouraged. Because this is exactly what a perfect prediction is - you predict and then that happens with 100% guarantee. You are the best predictor and win.
But if Poly and Kalshi are gambling joints, then of course fixing gambling bets is no no, and that is what actually happens. They ban wins of market predictors who actually correctly predicted something but did it by fixing the game. A market prediction service wouldn't care about that, but gambling joint would.
A bit of a tangent, but many like the moneylines isn't because of gambling but because it tells you who's the favorite/underdog and by what margin. It's like in the equivalent of a chess game of knowing the player's ratings, which itself can directly lead to a nominal moneyline, but in most sports there's no formal predictive rating system.
It’s the kind of thing that would suck all enjoyment out of watching sports for me personally. I may well be in a minority though, possibly an old person thing too
Fellow old here too. I enjoy it because there's a lot of sports I follow intermittently. For instance I enjoy watching UFC on occasion, but often find by the time I catch another fight I often have no clue who the guys in the main event are!
I think I enjoy the odds because it adds a sort of unspoken storyline to a fight, because those fighters themselves also know who's the underdog and it adds a bit of a psychological edge to the contest.
It's a lot like watching a chess game where the same stuff unfolds where you expect the favorite to push. Will the underdog look to survive, try to come and prove he's not to be taken lightly, and so on. Good times.
I feel the same way, the odds are part of the story. The UFC has removed them now, I guess as part of the Paramount deal. This actually makes the events less interesting.
By the way, the UFC chews through athletes so fast (part of their somewhat exploitative business model), it's no wonder it's hard to keep up with the latest names.
There could easily be. There's no reason you couldn't publish some Elo-like thing on teams or players, if that was your interest - you don't need gambling to get a good idea of who the favorite is. But the interest is in gambling, so most people inclined to publish such a thing probably bet themselves/sell it as a product to gamblers.
But this is where stuff like prediction markets shine. In chess, for instance, the prediction market odds are going to be way closer to the outcome than might be expected because of the players' ratings. This is because skilled bettors are capable of considering things like exact matchups, history, short-term performance/form, and many other factors that a static rating can't really account for.
Incidentally this is also what makes chess games relatively profitable. Moderate-info bettors will do things like flip on their chess engine, look at the eval, and then bet on that. But a computer might say a position is a dead-draw when a stronger player can tell you 'white has big practical winning chances'.
You can build a model accounting for all the things you like, you don't have to limit yourself to Elo (its main selling point is that it's easy enough that players can easily calculate how many rating points they stand to lose/gain) or Glicko (almost as easy).
Even in the most optimistic case, betting market accuracy will be limited by the commission (if you have a better estimate than the market, but not sufficiently better that you'll make money on it, you don't bet), and I think even a not-terribly-smart model can get you there for chess games. We don't need betting markets for the prediction's sake.
Polymarket not only doesn't charge a commission for market makers (the people who put out offers), but actually gives them a percent of all fees collected from market takers to help ensure and incentivize market liquidity. So if you could create a model that offered even slightly worse than market accuracy, you'd have an infinite money machine. It does not seem to exist.
And I think the reason for that is because a lot of these factors are unquantifiable, subjective, and non-fixed. For instance determining the winning chances for a human in a chess position is surprisingly complex. There's even a huge chunk of profit to be made for somebody that could create such a model outside of printing money in prediction markets - it'd be an invaluable tool for players to use during opening preparation since positions where winning chances don't correlate with computer eval are sort of the money-shot in human prep that's often motivated by a desire to avoid computer prep. And that factor is just 1 amongst many that can weigh in on an expert bettor's opinion.
It only really struck me in adulthood: the professional sports, particularly baseball and American football, are basically gambling delivery vehicles. They’re packed with nonstop betting opportunities for the duration of the events. Football games ceremonially start off with a coin toss, which is very much on the nose. The ‘fun game’ aspect of the sports are very difficult to find among all the bettable events.
This was my experience trying out "traditional betting" for the first time with Betfair last Worldcup, and some other platform I tried out before as well. Not sure what Kalshi/others are doing that is so different?
If you're going to gamble, it's probably for the best that your counterparty doesn't also control the platform. I'm not saying that justifies being able to gamble frictionlessly, but it is marginally less exploitative. Eg, back in the day bucket shops (which sold binary options, like prediction markets do) would increase the spread in proportion to their assessment of your skill such that you would lose even if you were more skilled. In a proper market the platform makes the same amount of money whoever wins.
So, not all that different, but marginally less exploitative. I've never looked at Polymarket but Kalshi and PredictIt slid steadily from things of at least plausible real economic value (a market where it was conceivable [if unlikely] someone would be hedging their insurance contract or something) into total nonsense with no non-gambling function like whether someone would tweet a certain word.
I think prediction markets could serve a similar to a futures markets and have a functional purpose in the economy. It could be useful to generate real time estimates of the probability of some events that no one can control and have real economic consequences, like a hurricane. But evidently that's not where the money is.
> it's probably for the best that your counterparty doesn't also control the platform
But doesn't Polymarket et al own their own platforms, just like Betfair owns their platform? There is no P2P going on, even if some markets seem to advertise themselves as such so again, seems like the same just minus gambling regulations?
As far as I know it is "P2P", a continuous double sided auction like any proper exchange. If there's something fishy going on with the order book I do not personally know about it. (I don't think there is but I'm also not going to stick my neck out for them.)
https://docs.polymarket.com/concepts/prices-orderbook
https://help.kalshi.com/en/articles/13823828-the-orderbook
Tl;Dr there's an order book with prices set by supply and demand. So you're at the whims of the market rather than the whims of someone who is your broker, exchange, clearinghouse, and taking the other side of your trade. I don't know much about Polymarket but iirc Kalshi is only your broker and exchange, so dealing with them is materially less risky in my mind.
> I think prediction markets could serve a similar to a futures markets and have a functional purpose in the economy. It could be useful to generate real time estimates of the probability of some events that no one can control and have real economic consequences, like a hurricane.
Even though nobody can control them, some people can predict them better than others. (Meteorologists with good models and supercomputers, etc.) In general it's impossible to prevent the appearance of insider trading in prediction markets, and it's also impossible -- unless you massively restrict what people can bet on -- to prevent people from doing things for bets to resolve in their favor, which turns those "markets" into "bounties." (The same guys who theorized prediction markets were the ones who theorized assassination markets.)
They're fundamentally broken and the fact that they're allowed is a sign and symptom of a dysfunctional society.
Insider trading by, say, having direct access to the particular wind vane that grounds the market and being able to manipulate it is a problem. Being better at trading because you have better models or better computers isn't per se a problem. Any more than it's a problem if someone is a better poker player.
In a broader context this may contribute to income inequality and regulatory capture, it can have negative externalities. But it isn't on it's face a problem. And the alleged positive externalities (realtime forecasts and a liquid market for hedging) are driven by such skilled traders.
Not all prediction markets are equally easy to manipulate. The bar was supposed to be (according to my hazy recollection) that a market had to be run in collaboration with an outside authority who, along with delivering a verdict that was already part of their normal duties, would help you exclude insiders from the market. That's a defensible position (not morally, tactically).
But "will so and so tweet about such and such" is a total joke. That's indefensible. That I do think that should never have been allowed or should be regulated as gambling. If there's no conceivable natural hedger, it isn't a real financial market and doesn't have a function (or the function is gambling, whichever).
Don't get me wrong, I think this turned into an end run around gambling regulations (that's certainly what happened with PredictIt), but I don't think that was always inevitable or will necessarily always be the case. That's a strong attractor for sure but it was pushed that way by the COVID era meme stock frenzy, the deregulation of online gambling, and ultimately competitive pressure from the sketchier markets. Once those forces were aligned it was inevitable, but it's possible that in 10 years there will have been a crackdown and tightening down of regulation and things will be very different. I'm not that optimistic, but it's a real possibility.
Coinbase CEO said all the words on Polymarket at end of Q3 earnings call: https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:2eb9f98ac094b...
> They're fundamentally broken and the fact that they're allowed is a sign and symptom of a dysfunctional society.
There are two ways to view a market (prediction or stock): as socially accepted gambling for posh elites (and now every wannabe rich), and as a prediction engine that refines people's opinions, beliefs and information into a most accurate estimate possible.
If you take the first view, insider trading is dysfunctional and unfair. If you take the second view, insider trading is the entire point, it's how you get strong signal into the system.
Prediction markets were conceptualized by people taking the second view.
You won't incorporate information from outsiders if they think they're going to get ripped off by insiders.
That's system working as intended. If there exist insiders with valuable information, engaging outsiders will just add noise to the signal.
(It's why I wrote about two perspectives - preferring outsiders to insiders only makes sense if the goal is to create a gambling venue.)
And who will they be trading with?
Other insiders and people who think they know better?
For large/complex enough bets, you won't have a single group of people who know how things truly are - you'll have multiple groups of people who each have (or believe they have) a critical piece of the puzzle, possibly by proxy, that makes them think they have a crucial perspective - and those points of view will conflict, giving each such participant a reason to bet. Taken in aggregate, you get a system that pulls in all those perspectives and distills a single signal out of them.
I don't think we have the same understanding of "insider". There are dozens to several hundred insiders at any one time. There aren't enough for them to reliably trade against ones another. To day nothing of how this system would fail when a company decided to raise capital. Like, is the CTO going to trade with the CEO because they have different views on the company? When they need to raise capital, are they going to get it from an accountant at E&Y who's auditing their books?
Why would prediction markets do a better job of predicting hurricanes than, say, meteorologists, weather stations, and satellite information?
All evidence I’ve seen shows mainstream prediction markets devolve quickly into gambling and related corruption while predicting nothing other than conventional wisdom. especially about real-time facts. The prediction markets on the NBA Finals game four this year were completely useless.
"Better" depends on the application but more precisely it would be "real time" and may include things that are measured but rarely if ever published. A prediction market doing poorly might be a negative result, "this is a martingale and our ability to forecast is limited." That would be my suspicion for a sports event but it could also mean that the participants are gamblers and so not making useful predictions, entirely possible.
The other value proposition would be that you could hedge your risk against all sorts of things that would otherwise be very difficult, like someone who sells funnel cakes hedging the risk of poor at the state fair due to rain. I think that's potentially interesting but was always far fetched and is definitely not as common as gambling.
Futures role is not "generate real time estimates of the probability" and never was. They have two roles: actual contracts to deliver later at set price and high risk trading (yes, some peoples use of it is gambling). Futures markets at do in fact have the actual market component. Prediction markets don't.
If you want meteorological prediction, you are way better off buying meteorological prediction from a company that sells meteorological predictions.
I said similar, not identical. The primary role of a futures market is for consumers and producers of commodities to hedge out their risk so that they don't go bankrupt if there's volatility in the market. Speculators (by which I do not mean gamblers) make money in futures markets by acting like insurance companies and absorbing that risk. Hedgers take "losing" trades that are equivalent to paying an insurance premium.
Prediction markets could be interesting to hedge a bunch of weird little things. Alas, not how things have gone so far really.
They pretend they are "market" and not gambling to avoid regulations.
It is not pretend, it is technically correct (the best kind of correct). Redefining what gambling is, is a different problem.
It's a market in the same way that poker and blackjack are "markets" on which cards are most likely to appear. You don't need to redefine what gambling is.
If it's a "market" then why do they enforce "fair bets" and disallow actually participating in a market to prevent influence on the totally-not-gambling-bets? If it's a market I can go play there and maybe even win it completely if I'm that good. So can I go to Poly, make a bet on a market state and then go change that market to satisfy my bet, aka "predict" it successfully? No? Why? Oh, because it's not actually predicting, it's gambling, and fixing gambles is a bad sport. Poly and Kalshi are biggest hypocrites ever.
It is not technically correct. It is just manipulative. It is gambling in its pure sense and meaning.
Markets sell actual products. These are gambling apps.
They pretend they are not a gambling operation to get around geographical and age restrictions limiting gambling.
The U.S. is quite far behind the rest of the world on sports betting, which means you don’t even need to imagine, we know from other countries that it doesn’t end well. The most worrying aspect is, the current U.S. government has no interest in the regulations that have helped minimise the problems in other countries.
The U.K’s highest earner for a few years running was the founder of a U.K. betting site, she had something like a 500 million salary and there is an entire town’s economy supported by her business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet365
I personally never met her but Bet365 is one of the most protected sites on the internet when it comes to antibot protections. When I started my company in 2025, I had two customers from UK, they were very much interested in odds for horse races from bet365, mostly realtime. Bet365 knew I was coming for them.
> Her salary of £421 million in 2020 was 50% higher than it was in 2019, and higher than all FTSE 100 Index CEOs combined.
Whilst it is technically a salary, since the business is wholly owned by her and her family it is effectively a dividend, so it isn't quite accurate to compare it to CEO's of non-wholly owned private or public companies. Other CEO's might have gotten paid more since they might own enough stocks in the company to receive dividends, or share awards etc...
That's a fair point, it would be more interesting to compare the salary to equivalent, family-owned private companies (although I'm sure most of them don't disclose that sort of thing).
It's really telling about the state of the UK economy that the highest earner's business doesn't make anything but literally drains money from the masses.
How were you able to use a credit card when it's not a payment they accept?
They call it 'onramping'. Moonpay is a big one, coinbase has one, onramper is another. Basically Applepay / credit card -> ETH or SOL or USDC, etc, then lose away!
I just checked my account.
They accept Visa, Mastercard and Discover via Apple Pay for a 2% deposit fee.
But I also see it says they don’t accept credit card in their help docs. I’m not sure what that’s about.
Instant deposit via credit card? Is that not considered a cash advance?
It is, and I know someone who found that out the hard way during the Super Bowl.
A cash advance is taking physical cash out with your credit card at an ATM or bank teller. Making an online purchase (which depositing money into your Kalshi account is) is therefore not a cash advance.
It’s a cash advance since you’re not purchasing goods or services with the card.
It’s really a cash advance whenever the issuing bank decides it is. There is no official definition.
Not necessarily, I mean if you buy a in-game item or currency that wouldn't be a cash advance so with this they could just say you bought $20 worth of credits and since you're buying credits that could be considered a good.
That would be purchasing a license (service).
Gambling is always classed as a cash advance. The gift cards trick has been tapped and closed, the credit companies figured it out decades ago.
What if the site allows you to purchase a digital asset such as a CS2 skin which you can then immediately sell back to them at the same price you to get credits in your account to gamble?
That's fraud.
I'm trying to understand which part exactly is fraud? If this site offered a legitimate marketplace for these items as well as gambling then in certain jurisdictions of course that could be illegal (due to the gambling aspect) but where does the fraud come in exactly?
The fraud is circumventing restrictions on purchasing gambling credits by ostensibly purchasing a CS2 skin at the time of the financial transaction.
Legal what-ifs have a much lower bar than a C++ if clause or the assembly conditional it compiles to.
How is it different than if I buy a TV and sell it on Ebay and use the funds to gamble?
Depending on circumstances, many activities under the same banner of analogy are actually fraud as well. I suggest talking to a lawyer before making any plans. Fraud is more about intent to circumvent, and chaining together individually-legal activities is the most common path to a fraud conviction.
If done at scale, you will get complaints/chargebacks that will trigger an audit followed by fines and/or account closure. Banks and underwriters have standard procedures in place to catch this.
> Gambling is always classed as a cash advance.
Many banks do, but there's no hard rule of the sort you're implying.
> The gift cards trick has been tapped and closed, the credit companies figured it out decades ago.
What do you mean? Buying gift cards using credit cards is absolutely possible.
There are many kinds of "cash advance". You can't buy lottery tickets on a credit card (or in jurisdictions where you can, it's a cash advance). Credit cards also treat things such as buying dollar coins online from the US Mint different from a normal transaction.
https://gosunward.org/articles/cash-advance-on-a-credit-card...
In Australia any sort of gambling payment on a credit card is treated as a cash advance. If you use PayPal on top of your credit card, the credit card company still manages to introspect it and apply a cash advance fee.
But these are "prediction markets", an entirely different thing that is definitely not gambling!
So they want you to believe, but I find I cannot take such claims seriously.
Wanna bet?
If I did, I'd be on one of the prediction markets.
I think the exclamation point at the end of GP's message is intended to indicate sarcasm - GP also doesn't take these claims seriously.
But if you somehow have a 100% correct prediction you are now "insider trading" and that is not allowed because all gambling.. ahem, all betting... hmm... All predicting much be "fair" and "random" and definitely not too good.
It's very simple. You can bet and lose as much as you like, but if you bet and win, you are clearly cheating somehow.
There is a whole lot of merchant categories that is treated like withdrawing money from an ATM. I believe the term is “quasicash”.
I saw this for the first time in NYC at a dispensary, i’ve never seen a payment terminal charge me $4.75 for an atm transaction fee but it was pretty smooth.
“Cash equivalents” is the term.
You think that's wild, look into prop firms some time
The on-ramp in crypto is incredibly well built out. But then, once you are in the fake money world, you will notice that the off-ramp doesn't exist.
I have taken money out of Polymarket and it is quick and easy.
The off-ramp of nearly all of my crypto endeavors has been very easy in my experience. Not always simple, because a lot of parts of moving money on various crypto chains is unintuitive and well in-need of improvement, but definitely easy once you know what to do.
The most annoying part, somewhat surprisingly, is always with regards to United States KYC restrictions. I've had a fair bit of annoyance trying to move crypto off of services that were once accessible to US customers and no longer are.
on-ramp and off-ramp were the problems of the past. Thanks to Trump, both worlds have merged together now.
Off-ramp does exist. Stop lying.
Until you’re flagged for some vague reason and support/fraud can’t help you.
I personally cant wait to start seeing sob stories of how people are having thier account permanently locked after making big wins. Thats what happens when you bgive money to unregulated casinos every tine and is the exact reason there are so many gambling laws and restrictions.
have you tried to turn crypto into cash money in a real bank account? have you tried to do it with large amounts? would you describe that process as easy?
It depends on what you mean by “large amounts,” but many “large amount” transactions trigger flags at the bank
yes. For crypto platforms specfically, those "large amounts" can be pathetically small. Ive had no end of trouble even with amounts as low as $50 getting my card blocked until I call the bank
Offramp exists it just depends how ugly it is by country. A friend of mine literally travels to another country to withdraw what he is paid in crypto.
Well try to make a withdrawal and see how convinient that might be. Internet casinos are usually easy to get money into but hard to get money out of.
It works just fine. It’s not a casino in the regular sense because you’re betting against other people, not the house.
In a casino you can bet against other people too. Nonetheless, the house always wins and takes its cut.
With gambling you should always play for entertainment. If you play to win you've already lost.
Making paper airplanes from dollar bills, and setting their backs on fire to give them jet engines, is likely cheaper and more entertaining, so if you're gambling anyway, you've already lost, period.
and perhaps somewhat safer
Cheaper, yes. More entertaining, not for a lot of people. Many play the same way you'd play a video game, with the actual stakes giving it a bigger rush. Enough that some become addicted.
If it weren't fun it wouldn't be nearly as big a problem.
But if you don't win, where's the fun in that? Do you consider other ways to part with your money also as entertainment? Is donating entertaining?
I'm not sure about Kalshi, however on most sports betting sites you actually are betting against the house. The betting sites all have in-house models (or piggyback off other sites) that are much better at predicting odds than the general public. If someone is making money then the sites just place limits on that account so they're not losing money.
It's not too complicated
The average player loses money. Hence the opposite side will make money
Exceptions are dealt accordingly
It comes down to some form of the old adage "the average person thinks they're smarter than the average person". They're not.
There's an old phrase that says something like "Look around the table, if you cant see the mark you're it." - if you think you are not betting against the house on a gambling site, you're VERY it.
If everything goes as planned, you won’t have to get anything out.
... anddddd its gone
I haven't used Kalshi, but I expected it's actually easy because it's technically a futures exchange, so it'll be regulated more like a stock brokerage than off-shore gambling.
There's a lot of proposed legislation trying to expand mobile gambling too:
https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news/114277/massachusetts-ig...
https://sportsbettingalliance.org/take-action/ohio_igaming/
https://sportsbettingalliance.org/take-action/texas/
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/h...
WHAT and I have to stress IN THE ACTUAL FUCK
You see sins. Politicians see sin taxes, political will to spin up regulatory beurocracies, etc, etc.
We used to debate things like the harms to society of gambling, now it’s a silent decree that it’s not only legal but the basis for our economy. The same group who used to preach family values turned out to be the biggest casino pimps and pornographers.
Meanwhile, small poker groups and gambling dens patronized by consenting adults routinely get busted.
"As they ought to, how dare they not give the system a cut"
-you know exactly the type I'm mocking
You know what earns a lot of money rather effortlessly? Harvesting organs. I mean its just a cash flow, anyway for sure from sinners. Look at Chinese, always ahead of the curve.
Bonus points for saving lives of some wealthy folks. Everybody (who matters) wins.
I have some other ideas, all one needs is to flush morals down the drain for good. Clearly some folks are there already, we need to quickly jump on that rat race or FOMO would catch up and thats a big NONO.
> According to Miller, who is no longer with KODA, TJ's declaring physician believed he showed too many signs of life _to continue with the surgery_, but KODA wanted to proceed anyway. https://www.kxlh.com/health/kentucky-man-wakes-during-organ-...
If gambling stops, the economy collapses.
Do you mean casinos and betting apps? The stock market? Something else?
all of it. We are by volume of growth a 'narrative' economy not a 'production economy' which for many years now is about gambling on future outcome over pay from realized production.
There are of course solid arguments for this, but the issue is the narrative part of the economy needs to be a mix with follow on production returns -- which... according to our current GDP growth mix is not. As most even realized production is backed by narrative bets.
Preachers are often hypocrites.
Politicians DGAF about sin taxes or creating bureaucracies that tbey have no control over.
But the lobbyist money, the campaign donations? Those are the drivers.
> You see sins.
I can't speak for mastermage, but I don't see sins.
I see addictions, and vultures preying on them and actively profiting from exploiting their self-destruction.
They actively encourage addicts to "self-exclude" themselves from winnings, meaning if they go to a casino and win, the casino will bar them from collecting those winnings.. but they don't appear to stop that same person from placing bets in the first place.
https://massgaming.com/about/voluntary-self-exclusion/
you can speak for me in this case because this is predatory as fuck. And instead of protecting the vulnerable they profiteer of of it.
Yeah, and also inevitable that a product designed to so efficiently separate people from their money would be overrun by grifters and scammers from the influencer/creator world.
What does make this instance perhaps a bit surprising is that it's Polymarket themselves who are paying those grifters.
They're an incredibly well known US based company targeting US based consumers in a way that is patently illegal. It seems almost unbelievably dumb that they would do this even by the often grotty standards of gambling companies.
They must have realised this would be found out and that, when it was, an investigation and enforcement action would follow? I guess maybe some of the creators will find themselves in hot water as well?
I really don't understand what the long term play is here, other than to be litigated out of business.
Let's compare and contrast this to how credit card companies treat sexual content vendors. Remember when a raft of games got delisted on Steam because of pressure from cc companies?
> They allow instant deposits with credit card
This is my biggest takeaway, and I really wonder what payment processor(s) they're using, because the chargeback and fraud rate in filling 'real money' into an online gambling account using visa or mastercard must be through the roof.
Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors (alluded to in popular fiction in Industry season 4 recently, for instance).
The back end of how they're able to get money "instantly" into peoples accounts must be fascinating, in a how the sausages are made kind of way.
> Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors
They're called high-risk payment processors and they usually handle all sorts of "legal but sketchy" sectors like porn, gambling, crypto, legalized drugs/vapes, MLMs, etc. It's not even some shadowy darknet industry, if you just search for "high risk payment processor" there is plenty of them which look very professional and even provide official Shopify integrations and stuff.
Interesting that if you go to one of their websites they also handle some pretty normal industries like "furniture" or "travel" just because of the high chargeback rate in them.
I wonder what the chargeback and fraud rate actually is in practice given they do ID verification. Pretty difficult to claim you didn't make the purchase depending on what they collect.
because no one's ever had their wallet/purse with their ID in it stolen?
What percent of ID verifications do you think are from stolen wallets / purses?
what percentage of fraud is fraud? I honestly don't know!
Once information stolen its easy to produce a digital fake ID with the info thats sold on the dark web and used everywhere. Private KYC collecting merchants rarely have the ability to authenticate the full gamet of valid types of government IDs.
Contrary to incredibly popular belief (at least in the US), asking for a photo of somebody's ID is actually not a sane way to do KYC. The point of an identity document is to check its security elements in person and compare the photo to the person standing in front of you. (Part of this can be replicated by doing a live video call, but that window is quickly closing due to deepfakes.)
Yet countless times in the past years, US and a few other companies have asked me to "identify myself" by sending them a scan of my goverment ID via chat/email/web form attachment, with absolutely no liveness check. This is just insane.
Having verified somebody's government ID doesn't actually factor into chargeback decisions and outcomes, not least because many forms of online KYC practiced today in the US are pretty laughable from a security point of view.
True, but for merchants that ship high fraud risk physical merchandise, it's becoming increasingly common to ask for a copy of a drivers license or other government issued photo ID (from a recognized US state or Canadian province, in the North American market) before a product gets shipped. I've seen this from a number of persons adjacent to a completely different forum who frequently buy things online like rifle scopes, spotting scopes, rangefinders, camera lenses, etc.
Getting a copy of the ID, only shipping to card billing address, using a signature on delivery required shipping option considerably cuts down on the number of fraudulent orders.
I'm assuming they pay high percentages to processors on deposits to cover the losses.
Then they recoup that (and more) in withdrawal fees
Plus a 2% fee charged on deposit.
Surely credit card has a terrible fee attached no? Just based on other services
> It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.
My worry is that social media surveillance could be combined with Polymarket to tailor bets to individuals.
This could be very subtle. You don't really need your punters to always be wrong either. Meaning that sometimes they'd win at the expense of other punters with the illusion they can make money.
You just need them to be wrong, say, 15% of the time and to keep coming back compulsively and consistently over time. The longer the better.
If you're ever around fruit/slot machines you'll notice that they do payout and when they do they make a lot of noise. That hides the fact they slowly cream off a percentage of the money that goes in. In the UK the legal limit is around 30%, keeping it low for new gamblers and ramping up when they're hooked.
With detailed information about punter's lives and no regulation you can weaponise that.
Future of AI Fintech
With "AWP" (Amusement with Prize, as opposed to SWP: Skill with Prize, i.e. quiz machines), they're often set to payout 80-85% of money taken in. (SWP's are usually around 30%).
And at that level they're still pocketing hundreds of pounds per week per machine.
The most lucrative ones I've seen (admittedly ~20 years ago now) were being emptied by the operator twice a week and taking out £600-800 every time, per machine, with 3-4 machines per location.
An eye opening industry - I'm sure there are businesses out there that pretend to be one thing (pub, club, etc), but their primary profit source is gambling.
> An eye opening industry - I'm sure there are businesses out there that pretend to be one thing (pub, club, etc), but their primary profit source is gambling.
Having worked in such a "business" - the problem is rents. When everyone else around you has a slot machine or two, landlords raise the rents (because they see what their neighbor landlord can get away with). And now, you as a legitimate pub owner have to choose, do you raise the beer prices yet again, or do you put up a slot machine yourself?
And sooner or later, depending on the greediness of the landlord, you have to choose between putting up a slot machine or closing down outright.
Gambling is an incredibly corrosive force. Not just to the gamblers themselves (wtf, I heard there are triple-zero roulette tables in Vegas these days?), but also to everyone and everything surrounding it.
I agree, some level of allowing gambling makes sense, gambling can even be observed in the animal kingdom, but it absolutely needs to be regulated.
>it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.
"Would you like to make decisions that are bad for you?" The future is indeed wild, and personal weakness is for sale. This isn't meant as an attack on you, but a lot of people will not be able to manage this sort of reduced friction. People with MBAs will call this "providing value."
> So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months
Are you sure those are the correct figures? That's a 4$ win in your favor if you don't use any of the deposited money and cash it back one year later.
Key point though is that Kalshi and similar prediction market betting apps are parimutuel, unlike traditional sportsbooks/Draftkings etc where punters bet against the house. This greatly changes (improves) the incentives for the house, e.g. they don't ban sharks and search only for dumb money punters, they try much less to prevent you from leaving with your winnings etc. The parimutuel house just takes a flat rake percentage off the top of the sum of all bids, so they just want to maximize the amount of money wagered overall instead of doing shady shenanigans.
I'm not a prediction market user/booster nor a sports gambler, but this is a key difference and a strict improvement from traditional sportsbook apps. If our society is going to have widespread legal gambling, we strongly want it to be parimutuel.
So too has nearly everyone else who is peddling someone's interests. Social media currently exists to bend you to someone else's will. This was always true in some sense: newspapers, television, radio, etc, but I'd point out a few things:
- This is precisely what made television such a bad experience. You could really feel the hand reaching through the screen to shake you. Demanding that you feel one way or another. Particularly with commercials, but of course with everything else as well.
- The mediums of television and radio were heavily gate-kept (even with the advent of cable) compared to the internet and social media. You didn't have the insanity of Twitter accounts from east Asia spamming BBC (not the news channel) propaganda, or Russia, Iran, and others attempting to inflame racial hatred, etc.
It's not a wholly brand new thing, but the reach, scale, and variety are so much greater that it might as well be brand new.
The WSJ ran an earlier article stating that unless you have access to a lot of data, computing power, and statisticians, you're going to lose on those bets.
It’s gambling, and the house always wins.
There is no house on polymarket, it's pvp.
Not true, polymarket and kalshi have a lot of system bets, basically bets where the other side is the market, and further they take a cut from the money gambled.
There are other things as well, like they control which side wins, so they can leverage trade or even swing trade internally with a few bot accounts, not saying that they do but I don't see a ToC that says they can't.
Polymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance.
They don't control which side wins (UMA voters do). You should read up about prediction markets and in general sport gambling. Sport gambling platforms with a "house" usually derive their odds from pvp markets. Polymarket is similar to a classic order book market.
1. Kalshi doesn't use UMA. 2. Yeah spend more money to get UMA votes to decide controversial decisions. That's how polymarket works.
I have a lot of experience with similar systems, that's what we call rigging the election.
Imagine a handful of anonymous UMA wallets dominate Polymarket’s contested resolutions, and reporters have linked some deciding wallets to positions in the very markets they judged.
:But you don't have to it happens way too often and there is no oversight against it: https://www.wsj.com/finance/polymarket-bet-disputes-fb1b8c6a https://www.barrons.com/articles/polymarket-prediction-marke...
I hope we can all agree to read this stuff.
> Polymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance.
That's like saying Elon can be a trillionaire, but so can you, I mean sure, anyone can, but how lucky do you think you have to be for your market to actually get any meaningful traction and for you to make any money. And even when you do, you are basically suggesting you should insider trade or rig bets to make money... I am certain that might be a flex for some but man I don't think that's the dunk you were looking for.
At the end the only folks making money are the markets, but who am I to stop the blind. Best of luck, hopefully you don't regret it. I only hope people don't get addicted or robbed by this stuff, rich people can have their own fun I don't really care.
Of course there is a house. You have a spread and probably a ton of other not so obvious fees. The house always wins by design, especially on polymarket.
No not really. Polymarket collects fees which are simple and deterministic. Bets on outcomes are tokens on the blockchain and can be "split" ($1 into YES/NO outcome tokens) and "redeemed" (YES & NO outcome tokens into $1). Placing a bet is simply a market order on a plain ol' central-limit orderbook for these tokens. The only house there is maybe the market makers, which isn't a house. If it were a type of "house", then NYSE/NASDAQ has a house too.
They take cuts.
This is not what a "house" is, such as the "house edge" you get in a lottery game.
In general, so is sports betting at a casino. It seems many people don’t understand this. You aren’t betting against the casino, you are betting against the other gamblers. The house “wins” because of the juice, eg. even odds past out -110. A smart book is going to try to keep the money balanced, but that’s not always the case in practice
You don't need Colossus-level compute or a genius-level IQ to evaluate the question "Will the steam machine cost more than $700 at release", or "Will 2026 be the hottest year on record".
Sure but that level of confidence is what would also eventually wipe you out because gamblers are not necessarily known for proper risk management. You could win 10 bets in a row but then it would only take one bet that you had 100% conviction on for you to lose and you get wiped out
I don't know much about gambling but is it not common to set for yourself max bets so your pool of cash doesn't deplete like you do when buying stocks or trading options so you can leverage up or down. I know it's a little different, but there is a similar principle.
Maybe only allow people to spend 1/5 their pool of cash per bet so it never reaches zero
You're sneaking in a prior assumption that people will act stupidly, and then make the argument "Well since they act stupidly they will have bad outcomes". That's like me claiming "Your startup is gonna fail, I can tell, because you'd need to be able to read and write to make it in business!"(sneaking in the prior assumption that the person in question is not in fact able to read or write)
Your strategic consideration is wise, though. 'Diversification' is one of the first things people will teach wrt investment literacy.
Well my assumption that gamblers will do something stupid is not that far flung.
And regarding your comment about investment literacy yes I agree with you but just to be clear we are discussing gambling and not investing.
>just to be clear we are discussing gambling and not investing
Where's the demarcation? The whole point of this sub-thread was "you absolutely can predict the outcome of some of these markets". If you do your due dilligence/leverage your domain knowledge to buy a thing you expect to pay dividends at a later date, how is that not investing? Are government bonds gambling in your thinking?
Your prior about people acting unwise is still sneaking in via the assertion that we are talking about gambling.
Are you seriously trying to make a comparison between government bonds and prediction markets? What is wrong with you?
What's wrong with me is I'm autistic enough to expect people to be able to follow arguments. I did not say "There are no differences between Government Bonds and Prediction Markets", what I said was "Let's find where the line between gambling and investing is, here's an example from which to pick apart the features that make gambling vs investing".
> I did not say "There are no differences between Government Bonds and Prediction Markets"
I never said that you said that, so now you are just arguing with a straw man that you just created, and your lack of ability to understand that is going to make a productive conversation impossible. Good luck with your gambling.
You haven't been putting in any good-faith effort into having a "productive conversation" for at least three of your responses, setting up "This is how things are" with no attempt to support this with any arguments, and have equally refused/dodged out of engaging with any of mine.
Your brain has just had your mental block up very obviously starting from your knee-jerk "what is wrong with you?" comment, isolating you from the scary prospect of being convinced by a consistent chain of logic, and now you're looking for a face-saving way of ejecting from the conversation.
You are not evaluating those questions, you are evaluating the probability of that two things happening, and you need to evaluate it better than the other people to win.
There are no easy questions, the difficulty is set by the skill/investment level of your competition.
I'm confused by how you're modeling these markets.
Let's say I am quite sure that the Steam Machine will cost more than $700 dollars, and I buy a 'yes' lot for 65 cents on the payed-out dollar, those are the odds at my buy-in time.
Where exactly now do the other participants' bets on the same market influence my chance to win/lose? How am I up against them and not the question "will my prediction come true"?
Sure, before my buy-in the odds, and thus the value fluctuate on account of the market movements, but once I'm in I'm in?
How exactly do you think the price is set at 65 cents, if not by the other market participants? When you win, who do you think is paying you out from the other side of the bet? When you lose, who do you think your money goes to?
Not only did you miss the point of the conversation entirely, you're attacking a point I explicitly addressed in my comment. I well understand how the system works, ggps comment had me confused about their perspective.
I didn’t miss the point at all. Once you’re in, unless you want to sell your stake, you’re in. But the entire point is that at the time of your bet, you’re taking a position that’s inherently disadvantaged. If there was any more EV to be gained, people with more money than you would have exhausted it. So without insider information, you’re flipping a coin but the house takes a cut.
>if there was any more EV to be gained, people with more money than you would have exhausted it
In a perfect market that everyone participates in and in which everyone has perfect information, but not down here in messy reality. Your logic would have you you seeing a dollar on the ground and without further investigation go "Oh that can't be real, if it were someone would have picked it up already!" Or refusing to play chess against anyone because Magnus Carlsen could beat you.
The stock market isn't perfect and not everyone participates in it, and the data is extraordinarily clear that essentially nobody is capable of extracting a durable edge. Of the people who do beat the market in a given year, those who beat the market the next year appear to follow the exact same distribution as the market as a whole.
Prediction markets are worse, both on the surface and by the actual statistics. The house takes an enormous cut, and then you have the issue of trading against insiders. Only an absolute rube would put money into a market rife with insiders, when they don't have comparable information. And the statistics bear this out. Something like 80% of all profits are captured by the top 1% of profitable users, which are only 30% of the total user base.
Anyone who thinks they will consistently make sound bets in these platforms without actually having private knowledge is a complete fool.
The betting topic is only a part of the equation. Should you bet $100 to win $5 on the Steamdeck price? Should you sell your bet before the Steamdeck even comes out?
But that's about juicing the maximum amount out of each bet, not about the matter of simply winning or losing(which was what I was originally responding to). If any situation one doesn't take for all its worth is a loss then I agree that it's damn near impossible to win, but this would be true everywhere.
I am intentionally flattening these trades to simple win/loss affairs(not just for the sake of this argument).
You're playing the game at a higher level and "complaining" at the increased complexity(I don't mean to say you are complaining, I just couldn't think of a better word). You're talkkng about the 80% that get you the last 20%, I'm talking about the 20% that get me the 80.
You cannot bet 50/50 on that question. Hence, you aren't actually asked to evaluate whether the answer to the questions you posted is 'yes' or 'no'. You are instead asked 'is the actual chance of it happening higher or lower than the current breakeven chance as posted on Kalshi / Polymarket'.
Can you help me better grasp this? My intuition is thus: Sure, if I'm going at it like a proper rationalist, I'd have to do things like calculate expected value or whatever(I fully admit my lack of foundational knowledge when it comes to statistics), but at the surface the questions I feel I'm being asked is: "Is this a winning ticket?" and then "How much would you pay for a ticket set to win $1?" The latter question being obviously meaningless except for the obvious: It does not matter in the slightest, as long as I don't pay 1$ or more.
So you could see how the face odds are irrelevant to me, only my internal yes/no intuition? Obviously this is not optimized, opportunity cost etc etc, but is there a big hole in my thinking you could point me in the direction of?
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-b...
Also, kids get scammed daily on YouTube on Pokemon card pulls with "loaded" packs and otherwise fake pulls for views.
The live scammers targeting kids are pretty vile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTPI57GLac
Seems like it's just a game of whack-a-mole, nothing is really being done to stop scammers from making new accounts and continuing their scams.
A lot of it is straight up sponsored by card makers too
Can you back this claim up? I don't think they need to do this. After all, WotC was doing pretty well way before these videos became widespread.
There are really only two businesses in the modern economy, fraud and gambling. Some are both.
Porn?
gambling (intermittent dopamine hit)
Don't forget addiction.
This is the other side of the coin when it comes to the push for ID verification.
Another way is to simply disallow certain ways to make money. It doesn't have to be complicated and it shouldn't be controversial.
The only defense is parenting. And no, I'm not one of those childless people who tells parents to parent better.
Its not the only defence, important and necessary, but also I think educating children about these risks in school is important (my kids' school does okay at this), and government regulation and criminalising such activity is useful too.
"Parenting" is a nebulous concept and at least to me, it also includes pushing for better laws for children. Nobody would think it's reasonable to allow stores to sell cigarettes to children and tell parents "if you don't like it, just don't let your kids smoke".
Nicotine is probably the worst example possible to argue that laws prevent children from using and becoming addicted to something.
There's also heroine and fentanyl, both are regulated by the law.
Heroin is illegal for people of all ages, and those laws don't work either.
Fair enough. Alcohol is regulated for children.
Laws don't have to be enforced perfectly to be effective in most cases.
Why is it the worst example? Sure, the laws don't 100% prevent children from smoking, but certainly they have an effect. I'm not using it as an example of a perfectly effective law, I'm using it to make the point that it wouldn't be reasonable to say "parenting is the only defense against smoking" and scrap the law.
It's a bad example because the last 5+ years in UK/US have seen an epidemic of child vaping and nicotine addiction when it was illegal for them to have it, while the Tobacco companies fight tooth and nail against regulation on fruity flavours and bright colours.
I don't want to scrap laws. In Britain we're 20 years ahead of the US on this (see Gambling Act 2005). Gambling laws are written by the gambling industry so no parent should think that the law will do anything to help their child.
So, in summary, the laws against nicotine are useless, which is why tobacco companies are fighting against introducing new laws?
And the UK is 20 years ahead of the US in regulation, by having introduced a law against gambling that's useless?
Okay...
It is disturbing what has happened to pokemon cards in recent years. I remember as a kid no one wanted those packs because it as basically acknowledged by everyone the shit odds of getting something cool like a charizard vs a bunch of stupid cards. If you wanted a charizard, you'd just go to a card show with a dealer who has dozens of charizards and pay them like $20. You would never pull countless packs in effort to get one, everyone thought that was extremely stupid.
the fact that apps like Polymarket seem to be legal is absolutely crazy to me.
I was baffled to see gambling completely take over advertising in CSGO years ago with no one batting an eye, Valve also had its share of responsibility with loot cases but they have such a great reputation it's difficult to call them out on that.
Since ublock stopped working on twitch, I've learned that all ads they show for me are localized gambling ads, and it's sickening.
Thank donald trump jr
The alternative would be to ask both sides of the bets to record a video, and tell them to only post winning bids, but to pay out to both sides. Is that really better? Classic tactic by the bet picking gambler gurus and is impossible to confirm.
I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.
There's no "both sides" of the bets in this case. All the bets researched by the WSJ were fake, none of those bets was ever placed.
Yes. That's not an argument against my point: they could achieve the same biased result using recordings of real bets. Be happy they (maybe) haven't yet, because that conartistry is much harder to show.
Don't trust anything anyone says about probabilities of real-world future events. We still can't even predict the weather a week in advance, despite huge computational resources being thrown at it.
I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.
Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?
edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?
Honestly, calling it "personal responsibility" when a powerful group is actively working to exploit that flaw seems a little weird. But even accepting that, we outlaw plenty of things because we think society isn't currently responsible enough to handle them.
Personal responsibility is an excuse for lazy regulation. These things are designed to be harmful, for the express purpose of squeezing money out of people, as efficiently as possible. We know that some people are psychologically and genetically more prone to addiction than others, and that people like that will be extremely likely to form addictions with gambling or drugs when we make those things easy to access.
What would you rather have? More regulated gambling and less addicts, or unregulated gambling and more addicts? Personally, I prefer the former.
You are promoting gambling to young people, easily manipulated.
That's why you see so many college boy on their marketing video.
It's completely fine when you're old enough to be responsible, and to know that gambling is a degenerate behavior that you can allow yourself sometimes to release the steam, but these companies don't make money from us.
They make money from the kids overspending because they are convinced they are going to get rich doing that. That's manipulation.
It would be like showing McDonald ads to starving African kids, of course they are going to make the wrong choice when offered food. They can't think rationally in that state.
Personal responsibility: a way to avoid talking about responsibility and behavior of large rich actors.
Yes online gambling and sports management actions are their personal responsibility. And we should blame them for harm they knowingly cause.
> He compared the videos to fast-food commercials, where food can appear more appealing than it does in real life.
> “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.
The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger
The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives. But with burgers most people blame the victims. In my opinion it's all the same. Gambling, junk food, drugs, guns... Lots of money to be made, lots of lives destroyed.
> The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives.
I think it will take quite a while to wipe out one's life savings eating burgers.
It is time to admit that the Chinese were right when they built their great firewall.
You either protect yourself from America or your civilization is lost to the void.
Online betting was huge in several other developed countries first. America got late to a trend. If anything, a Great Firewall in the USA would have protected it from the trend.
America banned international countries from winning the betting market to protect Vegas and casinos in general. Some sort of protectionism they said the war on Terror was the reason to ban it if I remember correctly(just after 9/11).
Does China have online gambling banned? I don't know
Yes all forms of gambling, except certain government sanctioned lotteries, are illegal and criminally prosecuted
Except in Macau, where casinos remain permitted. Chinese can also cross to Cambodia, where Chinese casino tourism is probably the bulk of the country’s economy.
Gambling is extremely popular in china despite the firewall and laws around it.
America was much better on betting a few years ago, it's been very recent.
I would have thought that trump giving so much to christians, he would be against betting but there are things that are beyond my understanding.
Trump is great at gettinf christians to completelt forget their moral stances
All businesses that make their fortunes from gambling must deceive to get people to participate. It's such a major red flag.
All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
We should just make gambling illegal online again, things were fine back when you couldn’t gamble online then, at least in the USA, the fucking supreme corpo guzzlers (formerly the Supreme Court) interpreted the laws according to their owners will and now we have gambling online.
Probation was a thing, too. How did that turn out?
You can’t download drugs and alcohol digitally.
Frankly, being able to buy drugs and alcohol online is probably a mistake, too.
> You can’t download drugs and alcohol digitally
It was almost certainly easier for most people to buy drugs than gamble illegally when both were illegal.
Most states had lotteries before this though. At least those brought in tax money and were designed to be relatively fair. Online gambling can shut down your account and refuse to pay if you get too big of a payout, and their money isn't going towards public schools.
There wasn't some mass movement of people doing online gambling that led to the dam bursting and it getting legalized, though. Courts just made a different decision and opened it up one day and as far as I know there wasn't even mass lobbying about it?
There was mass lobbying, specificially by the taxpayers of the state of New Jersey, via their elected representatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
Note that it was not a close decision:
> Opinion of the Court
>The Court announced a 7–2 judgment in favor of Murphy on May 14, 2018, reversing the Third Circuit.[25] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch and in part by Justice Stephen Breyer.[26][27][28] The majority opinion agreed that §§ 3701(1) of PASPA commandeered power from the states to regulate their own gambling industries and thus was unconstitutional. It followed New York v. United States and reversed the Third Circuit decision.
fanduel and draftkings poured massive amount of money into advertising, pumping their numbers to make it seem like gambling was too big to stop.
Prohibition was incredibly successful at reducing the amount of alcohol people drank
And increasing tunneling skills! And increasing car racing! (Though I still don't get oval racing.)
Prohibition had some unintended consequences.
You'll have to ask your probation officer.
Exactly. Gambling in the real world involved friction. That plus a certain social stigma if you gambled outside of “mainstream” casinos.
And this helped weed out all but the most addicted gamblers. Now there is no friction, the platforms are free to create dark patterns to encourage problem gambling, and the vice has zero social cost.
The dark patterns aren't just in online gambling. Nowdays, a lot of brick-and-mortar casinos encourage, or even require, clients to create an account (often framed as a "members club" or "rewards card"), which is used to track the client's activity at the casino and target them with promotions tailored to their behavior. These can be used in some really troubling ways, e.g. by identifying clients who may have a gambling problem and targeting them with promotions to come back to the casino more often, to stay longer, and/or to start placing larger bets.
The worst dark pattern I saw for gambling was in Lithuania: in supermarkets, they sell scratch cards right next to the credit card terminal. If you are a recovering addict, you just can't avoid the trigger, at the worst moment.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(p.s. Just to pre-empt the usual: no, this is not a defense of Big Gambling, just an attempted defense of HN thread quality.)
This comment was unnecessary and very distracting from a far more interesting discussion in the replies to the commenter you are attempting to condescend.
There is no censorship happening here - the comment remains visible, he simply asked them to refrain from the inflammatory language.
> There is no censorship happening here
Wait until your account is shadow banned and you post in the void for weeks/months before noticing
dang is the moderator
I'm aware and was expressing my disappointment in that kind of flaming comment coming from someone who's supposed to be the adult in the room.
Usually I agree with your calls on things being unsubstantive, but this one kinda seems fine? I don't think it's flame bait, just emotive language? And the substantive point being made is that online gambling should be illegal.
(apologies if arguing about mod decisions is frowned upon, I didn't see anything in the rules about it)
If it were just the one comment I wouldn't have said anything; the issue is the pattern (note the word "repeatedly").
Fair, the comment history does paint a different picture.
You haven’t said anything, or at least I haven’t seen it. There’s no inbox here and I don’t always read old comments. If you have pointed it out before I don’t care, I haven’t seen it. If you want to point something out, then maybe email me about it the just time you see it, otherwise I’m not trolling through my old threads that often so you’ll have to accept that this is the first I’ve seen you ask.
I’m respect your wishes but you can’t say you have told me anything if I didn’t see it here, sorry Dan but that’s only fair since there’s no way for me to see your message unless I randomly go back.
If you want to ensure people see these messages, then that’s a feature you’ll need to add. I’m fine with you using the email on my account for this purpose, too, but I’m not fine with getting a single message from you here and you expecting me to have seen anything else you’ve said in the past. As far as I’m concerned this is the first I’ve seen you ask me about this.
This is an unusually long way of saying “sorry, I haven’t seen your messages before – will be more careful but could you please email me next time?”
This seems like an unusually good time to mention https://hnrss.org I’ve been quite happy getting replies to my HN comments as an rss feed!
No affiliation, just a happy user. Also not trying to say you must use sth like that or anything, just a piece of software I’ve enjoyed. :-)
These are the previous moderation replies, and you certainly saw some of them, since you responded. Interestingly, sometimes your responses were positive and sometimes rather hostile (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877994). But we're not asking you anything different than we ask of others here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875947 (May 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265350 (June 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36062502 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449790 (April 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190475 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32146436 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29857469 (Jan 2022)
The other point about supreme court is also factually correct.
There’s no flame bait here just some swearing and rough language. I’ll cut back because you asked (once, I’ve not seen your responses other than this one), but I don’t think I’m out of line.
Also if people were downvoting my comments it’d be different but it’s just you for a frw recent ones down modding then, because before you get here they were up or even. Moderators should focus on those truly displaying bad behavior, I’m just swearing and saying relevant things.
I have a very long history of good comments here, arguing otherwise seems suspect, honestly.
I’ll back off like you say but I don’t agree at all. I’ve read the guidelines and tend to follow them.
Edit: I see like 3-4 questionable comments from me, two of who’ve are barely questionable. I get what you’re saying about the language but it’s really amazing you’ve targeted me here today, this us such low hanging fruit here, don’t you have better things to deal with? I’ll write better comments but I’m just really annoyed at your characterization of my behavior, it is very unfair in my eyes. I’ve done very good comments for ages and emotional language like this is rare for me. I expect better from mods here.
I appreciate the expression of feeling here! I know it sucks to get upbraided by moderators (and we don't enjoy it either). But it's definitely not personal. The moderation response would have been the same regardless of user, since we're not focused on usernames to begin with.
What attracts our attention are, in this order: (1) a post that breaks the site guidelines; (2) the other comments by that account; (3) whether we've posted moderation replies to that account before. It's true that that the username is what links (1), (2), and (3), but what we're paying attention to is mostly the content.
I think one factor here may be the tendency, which we all have, to underestimate the provocation in your own statements and overestimate it in others [1]. Those two distortions compound into quite a skew [2], and makes it easy to feel like one is being singled out or treated unfairly [3].
Beyond that, when you run across other posts breaking the site guidelines and going unmoderated, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the moderators are biased or secretly agreeing with those other posts. But this is a mistake. Overwhelmingly the reason for this is simply that we didn't see those other posts. We can't moderate what we don't see, and we don't come close to seeing everything on HN (or even 10% of it) - there is way too much. [4]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Was the commenter wrong?
The court ruling was a good one, and anticipated. The federal government can either allow all gambling, or ban it all. They can’t pick and choose states where it may be allowed.
Before online gambling went wild in the US, most brick and mortal gambling was one of three sources: (1) Nevada (Las Vegas, etc.), (2) Atlantic City, New Jersey, (3) Native American tribes. There were also some other odd locations, like river boat gambling on the Mississippi River or "cardrooms" in California. As a result, most Americans did not live close to a casino. Now, you can do it from your smartphone.
And federal law said states other than Nevada and New Jersey had to ban gambling. The court said they can’t do that. They could ban gambling nationwide in federal law.
Exactly. The corruption and rot is beyond the pale.
Just another hearty dividend thanks to corporate personhood and Citizen's United. Rarely has a single decision so thoroughly broken our system, but the regulatory capture is plain to see these days.
Citizens United gets a lot of flak, and it wasn't good, but it's far from the only factor here. We can at least go back to Buckley v. Valeo which gave us the idea that "money is speech". Corporations are a problem, but money is a bigger problem.
Most of their practice are illegal already. The problem is lack of enforcement.
We are not suing polymarket. We are not suing the marketing company. And we don't want online censorship.
IMO, the marketing company / media company should be sued. -- They are (relatively) easier target to sue. Many are US based and not going anywhere. With enough luck, this might give us a better internet with less SEO bullshit.
The regulation has gone the opposite direction, recently.
It was regulated.
This would just push everyone to unlicensed casinos/bookmakers . Means no tax revenue + even worse player protection.
make this severely illegal with minimum two decades behind bars and what how they disappear… this is a very solvable problem which no one wants to solve
Good luck with cross-border enforcement.
Also the operator is completely legal/compliant with it's jurisdictions laws as they allow us players (many now blacklist the us, but some not )
So they won't accept any foreign judgement . That's why most countries rather target their infrastructure (psps/banking etc ..)
Even Eu countries had/have severe problems with Malta (due e.g Article 56A of the malta gaming act, which shields the operator from foreign judgements)
Make the websites unconnectable from the US. Make domestic ISPs not route the traffic to the site else jail time for the executives. Make VPNs not route traffic to the site else jail time for the executives and being null routed by domestic ISPs.
If you really want to crack down on it, then it could be done.
In the ancient days of 2011, this was done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
Because they know it will not work.
People have spend decades in prison for selling weed. Now it's legalized in more and more countries. Making things people like illegal rarely works, and it's far from a "solvable problem". Don't get me wrong, gambling is very bad, but if we were to analyze it statistically I think alcohol is way worse for society at large. And we all know how making alcohol illegal went.
Legal weed has been a disaster in the US, 20 million addicted (almost daily use/daily use) versus a few million before it was banned.
Note that I'm not in favor of either weed or alcohol being as readily accessible as they are now, but there are a few things making that claim a bit dubious. The first is that obviously people are less reluctant to self-report using weed if it's legal. Secondly, the causation could be reversed, i.e. there are other factors in society contributing to both higher usage and larger general support for legalization.
In any case, my point was that simply making something illegal with the threat of "decades in prison" isn't a very good solution. Gambling, drugs, social media, etc. are all "big business", there's money to be made because there's a demand for it. How to solve that I don't know, but just prohibiting it doesn't seem like a good fix.
You made that claim up. There was a study of Some 22 million people around the world being dependent on marijuana. You are severely overestimating US addicted people.
What about this: that policy was huge success, because unlike gambling, weed is fairly harmless.
https://apnews.com/article/marijuana-cannabis-alcohol-use-di...
Close to 18 million in 2022, not exactly 20 million.
And the disaster part is where exactly? Their or their close ones lives being negatively impacted are where exactly? The original claim was "addicted" and "disaster".
The world has 22 million of people who are addicted and their lives are negatively impacted. The logical implication here is that these people are not negatively impacted.
These comparisons misunderstand, or perhaps underestimate, how markets work.
Demand for cannabis and alcohol is ubiquitous, strong.
Demand for each individual betting market, diminishingly rare.
Good luck finding the bookie at work or in your college class taking $10k in action on whether the Shah of Iran is still the Shah next week…
Banning the clearnet-based convenience, scale and breadth of market participants these services offer would immediately put a huge dent in most markets - non-sport especially.
Whether the black market and cryptocurrency-based sites outside of the clearnet would start to fill in, remains to be seen.
There has never been anything near the scale of Poly or Kalshi on “darkweb”.
Seems very disproportional. Reminds me of that TNG episode where the penalty for every offense, no matter how minor, is the death penalty.
>gambling sites
I think I’d probably go farther. Next time you’re in a corner store or gas station, pay attention to who is wasting their money on scratchers or other lotto tickets.
You shouldn’t be allowed to gamble unless you can prove it’s disposable income.
we prevent people from gambling on early stage startups and risky investments by limiting investment to "accredited investors". same thing should apply to gambling.
I believe some countries/casinos in Southeast Asia have policies that you either have to show a foreign passport, or put a deposit of $500-1000 down to enter the casino, that you get back when you leave, with the theory (easily exploitable, I'm sure) being that you can't leave the casino penniless.
for a while i was using the sports gambling apps to make lots of little bets.
it was fun to put $0.50 on a game I normally wouldn't watch and tune in with a real rooting interest. i never bet more that $1 on a game because I knew that I would really dislike losing 'real money'.
the fact was that the stakes were completely irrelevant to me. the value came from definitively and publicly taking a side. if you're the fan of a team, you do this in every game. but with these little bets it's a way to sign-on for a little slice of being a fan in every game.
and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform. people love chasing worthless internet points (reddit upvotes, HN karma, etc), so why not build a platform that gives you points for betting?
you could let a chunk of the population scratch the itch they get to gamble without creating financial risk. they can still brag about their wins.
I'd do something fairly similarly, but in a sort of emotional hedge. If in a fight I was really rooting for one guy, I'd put a relatively small amount of money on the other. Ok 'my guy' lost, but hey - dinner's free tonight! It's also quite remarkable how often arbitrage opportunities come up where you can put bets on both sides with a guaranteed win. You'd think they'd all get eaten up by bots, but that's not at all the case.
Those are the dark patterns.
Give a player that is hesitant a good opportunity to place a pretty much guaranteed winning bet and try to get them to cross their threshold. Once crossed, it’s much harder not to cross it again for most people.
> and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform
We have that in the Netherlands and we do it massively for every World Cup and Euro. The app my friend groups are on, Scorito, has 1.5 million competitors for the current WC, in the country of 18 million, and that's not the only app.
Normally a group would make a small buy in, like €5, where the winner takes all, but this year the legal department at work forbade that, se that sort of gambling Is actual illegal.
That will make things worse unless you reign in crypto. If you regulate Kalshi, people will use the unregulated polymarket which is already illegal in the united states.
sports gambling has been going for several years in UK and several other countries. i dont remember anyone getting murdered over a lost bet.
It's been going for centuries in the UK. There have been murders:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/father-jailed-fo...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/gambler-murdered-woman...
It's a bit hard to find good stats, but it's at least 1 or 2 a year, it could be more like 10 - plenty of domestic violence is caused by money problems, and those problems can often be gambling related.
There's a lot of suicides - between 250 and 650 people each year according to gamblingwithlives.org https://www.gamblingwithlives.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01...
Have to remember that regulated gambling also has lobbyist so unless regulated gambling is invested in these apps they are likely trying to get them banned or also regulated
I'd say this goes for more than gambling. Since digitalization, we've removed a lot of friction from depraved behavior, and regulation hasn't caught up to it yet.
Is this fraud?
Yes, it is 100% a misrepresentation of reality to fool the general public into joining a platform that condones deceptive user acquisition strategies.
I was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad.
There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging."
Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA.
So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.
I don't see an end to any of it when the Grifter-in-chief is in office.
[flagged]
I mean maybe Trump also caused it but there's no way he's just an innocent bystander here.
Yes I already said that he’s bad, don’t roast me, I’m trying to use nuance here like we’re supposed to.
I agree with your point in general, but doesn't that disclaimer apply to any kind of supplement? As far as I know that sort of thing has been allowed for quite some time. For whatever reason the FDA allows for an almost completely unregulated vitamin/supplement industry.
They used to be vague and not make specific claims because that wasn't allowed. They'd say "Vitamin K helps promote healthy eyes." They can't say "our chewable will cure your glaucoma. (claimhasnotbeenreviewedbytheFDA)"
But apparently they can do that now, or at least they are doing it.
It's not up to the FDA, their hands are tied thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah on behalf of the supplement lobby.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/31/6738513...
Would it matter if the bets were real and they picked the 0.00001% big winners to feature in the ad? Would that be less fraudulent in any meaningful sense, would it have a different impact on the world?
Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?
> Would that be less fraudulent…
Is this even a question? Yes, it would be less fraudulent.
I question your definitions. In what sense is it legally or morally useful to discriminate between lying with statistics and lying without them? It's an academically useful distinction, but why does it matter in practice? People are misled, the misleading is intentional, but if you hire a statistician to do it for you instead of an actor then you're A-Okay?
"Someone won" is truthful.
"Celebrity X won" was not.
I am not a fan of gambling, nor gambling advertisements, but this was outright fraud, and a violation of FTC rules (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...) on disclosure.
It's useful because honesty and dishonesty are strongly self-correlated. Someone who works hard to ensure their advertising is technically true will likely work hard towards technically satisfying other goals and rules we set for them; someone who's comfortable outright lying in their ads will likely also lie about other things.
In the US, the FTC is very clear that faking or purchasing testimonials is illegal. Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud. On the other hand, selecting and advertising specific real testimonials is fine. A customer described their actual experience that way, and presumably the consumers understand that advertisers will select especially positive individual testimonials for their advertisements. I can't believe I'm actually trying to explain this, but fake testimonials are illegal because the consumer has no way to know that they are made up. Real testimonials are not "lying with statistics", they're not statistics at all, and are legal because consumers can understand that it's not the median customer experience.
If picking real winners and real winnings to feature in the ad was just as good, they could do that. If not, then yes, it makes an impact on the world to mislead people with that marketing.
Somehow there's a difference between things that happened and didn't happen, and that's a good place to draw a line in the sand of what you're allowed to advertise and not.
> Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud.
Doesn’t this make every ad fraud? It’s an actor pretending to enjoy drinking Coca Cola, every ad is the same.
How do you know the actor is merely pretending ? Maybe they actually it?
Not GP, but here is how I know. Messi and Steve Carell did an ad for local chips brand, (market size < 10 million people). There is no way that brand could afford them. Searched online and found the same ad for Lay's. Turns out Pepsi owns a lot of local snack brands. They'll buy local brand and if it's popular they will keep the brand (instead of replacing it with global brand like Lay's). Ad is recorded for all brands at once, they just replace bag of Lay's with bag of whatever is the local chips they own.
The actual verbiage is narrower.
First result with a summary of 16 CFR Part 465: Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials: https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/09/...
Believe it or not, the laws don't say verbatim "Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising...". I can't really believe that this is a real question and that I'm trying to explain this, either. The actual laws are more specific, and combined with how the courts interpret them, cover a lot of different situations and try to do so in a reasonable way.
If you actually want to understand why "an actor pretending to enjoy drinking Coca Cola" is okay while other kinds of endorsements are not, in the US at least, you could start with the FTC "Truth in Advertising" website, and "Advertising Endorsements" specifically, or other resources on that page.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising/adv...
Laws are for poor people.
Is fraud "more fraudulent" than non-fraud? Yes. Wtf man?
Would a prosecution have high chance of succeeding?
Isn't everything these days? It's all gotten so gross.
Yeah. It's so demoralizing, seeing all these people make fortunes while honest people scrape by. It feels like getting in on the grift is the only way to make it.
you may be confusing it with deregulation.
only lawyers care what the laws say. I care about what's right and good and leads to prosperity for people I care about (which is to a greater or lesser extent everyone)
It's the lawyers job to make the laws align with some version of the above, and many of them, like most other people with power in society, are doing a willfully terrible job of it
This is not correct. It's a politician's job to make them selfrich by any means necessary. It's a lawyer's job to make you pay for as many hours as possible.
correct - "a" lawyer. a single lawyer is but a cog in the machine. Lawyers as a whole, as an institution, however are at least ostensibly supposed to exist for some benefit to society. They, like other institutions, must act to prevent principal agent problems. And like other institutions, they are failing dramatically
No. There are still people and companies being proud of their work and not doing it only for the money side. I know, shocking..
I might age myself out here, but, does anyone take influencers at face value, for anything at all, but especially for anything involving money?
Sadly, yes.
Prior art; “More Doctors Smoke Camels” - 1946
It's the same for all the gambling platforms - they give creators and influencers privileged accounts that win more than they lose so when they stream it looks like they're not losing constantly.
Isn’t that auditable by gambling regulators?
Is it illegal? What gambling regulators are working with polymarkets?
Bait from polymarket to get new users, They should get sued.
Seems like a weird mistake to make. If they're going to bait new users, why not just use bets that did exist? Better yet, why not use users who did make a lot of money?
Seems to be a popular means for marketing gambling. There was a scandal of a bunch of twitch streamers doing the same thing for skin gambling websites.
So Polymarket did marketing....what a shock.
This is a well-trodden path.
A few years ago crypto gambling really took off. The big fish here is Stake. Back when Twitch still allowed slots, there was a flood of slots streamers. Ultimately this led to Twitch banning gambling. This was such an issue that Stake created their own live streaming platform (ie Kick). That should tell you how lucrative it was.
But what came out was that there was different contracts the streamers had. Some were paid a hefty fee and they got to keep any winnings. Why anyone would choose this is beyond me because over time your expected return is negative. The other option was that you could "gamble" with fake money. None of it was real. And none of it was disclosed.
I never understood why people would atch someone play slots all day but some people did. I think psychologically it's a bit like mukbang where people live vicariously through someone else's gluttony. With gambling, the psychological hook is so strong that it can be triggered by watching someone else gamble. But that's just a guess. Luckily, I've never been bitten by the gambling bug. It's one of the worst addictions.
I think fake gambling in particular should be illegal or, in the very least, disclosed publicly.
Good luck - polymarket sponsored trumps White House UFC Extravaganza
God I cant believe I wrote that
People in the white house are using polymarket to front run whitehouse actions. Someone made bank over maduros capture.
If you go to polymarket, Iran related bets have a specific subpage on their website no different than the sports subpage.
Unregulated gambling website is fraudulent? Jesus Christ, how did that happen? I'm baffled, completely shocked!
How is this not gambling? I mean, any mobster bookie could simply claim prediction market in this case, and simply take a cut. Where is the line drawn? On how much money the organizers give to the Trump family?
Facebook and Google really have a lot to answer for. Where's the regulation that's been increasingly needed for the last decade?
Its called DMA and DSA. Much hated by many American HNlers here.
Digital Markets Act and Digital Devices Act in the EU
They are transparently marketing using outrage and bullshit. Pretty good tactic for the market.
Alternative link without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/they-looked-like-t...
a complete surprise to nobody
I made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/) They actually don’t decide on market outcomes, they outsource that to UMA which is as opaque as it can get.
Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.
Also UMA holders who get to judge do participate in markets.
Not a stretch to call that a conflict of interests.
Wow, this is so much worse than i thought.
Yes, an recent example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Polymarket/comments/1ubxixr/am_i_in...
this reminds me of the social media "turbolearn ai" slop. i feel like the vastness of this form of marketing is becoming the new ai slop on social media.
I think when you voluntarily view ads, than you have to accept being lied to.
We're living in the golden age of the grifter
Every ad is staged like this. The whole point is to make as good of an ad for the product as possible.
Do you think in a food commercial the people eating the product are showing their genuine emotion? It's all acting.
This is like a food commercial where someone shows an extreme reaction to food that isn't the product they're selling, or acting like they're eating something that isn't food at all. There are laws regarding food advertising that require it to present the real food (though the presentation of it is usually way better).
OK but you know that you're seeing an ad. These are ads that are pretending to be users just posting their experiences.
Creators are supposed to make it clear that it is add. Usually they add a #ad to their post. But many creators don't understand the rules and don't correctly mark their post as being sponsored.
It is reasonable to be mad at polymarket if there is a pattern of their content creators failing to disclose ads.
McDonalds should show people who choked on a Big Mac in their ads /s
I think ads for addictive things like gambling, alcohol, tobacco need to be held to a very high standard, if allowed at all.
I blanket consider any post by these "influencers" as paid for.
But my biggest fear is for my kids. I'm doing my best to teach them about the duplicity that exists in this world, and that's precisely why I'm against blanket social media bans for under-16s.
By the time kids turn 17, they've hit the rebel stage. And that's exactly when the freedom to access social media arrives. At that point, they won't listen to parents. They are going to get soo badly burnt.
This is why I advocate for controlled, early access to social media for children. As a parent, I can monitor what they follow and teach them to distinguish right from wrong.
But with these blanket bans, that's taken out of my hands entirely. They grow up sheltered in a picture-perfect world...and then, boom.
Is this paid for by Meta or something?
Yeah, if I don't make my six-year-old drink with me every once in a while, he's never gonn learn to hold his liquour!
I have news for you. That burger is the McDonald's commercial? It's most likely made out of plastic. That happy lottery winner? Probably a stock photo from one of the major visuals providers. And I am ready to bet my bankers don't have this hollywood white teeth looking of banks commercials. Since when is advertising real?
“The truth is most of what you see in food photographs is real. FTC laws state that whatever you’re selling with a photo must be real in the image. To use a familiar example, if you’re selling corn flakes the flakes must be real. But then it gets interesting. You can use white glue instead of milk in your bowl of flakes because you’re not selling the milk, only the corn flakes.”
Yeah, but you know those are ads.
While the dressed burgers aren’t exactly edible, they are a far cry from being plastic.
McDonald’s Canada famously gave a candid behind the scenes of dressing a burger:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh1UAWLOgU&ra=m