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These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.

I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.

Very close already. Death threats went to this journalist; seems someone bet on missile hits. https://factkeepers.com/polymarket-gamblers-vow-to-kill-jour...

It also incentivizes leaks from insiders, sometimes endangering others. A soldier was charged for betting on a military operation. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...

And of course throwing pro sports, but that's been happening for ages. Sports has always been crooked: eg the Eupolus Scandal from 388 BCE.

Yeah. You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home. For obvious reasons. But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world

I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.

It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.

Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.

The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.

> I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.

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

I think they are illegal already in most places under the insurable interest doctrine.

Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.

Is there any difference in practice between placing a large bounty on some known person dying in the next week and just straight up ordering a hit on them for that amount?
Maybe we should ban the stock market too.

In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock.

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

Historically similar services have also been used to try to manipulate the real world by using bets for creating opinions. Like if you get to vote between candidate x and y and x leads by 75% to 25% on Polymarket maybe you don't vote for y even if the real numbers may be way closer.
> manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet

This happens on the stock market on a scale 100x larger than Polymarket.

c.f. manipulated earnings reports, taco trades, strait of hummus nonsense

When I see people making money on Iran attacks, and murder of heads of state - it shows clearly something is deeply wrong with Polymarket. Its a level worse than Vegas or Indian casinos. A literal ticket to hell. I'm all for banning these evil sites.
Good.

Just naming things differently does not work in other countries.

If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

I don't usually see advertisements, but I was in a position recently to see a real-life television stream, and I was quite surprised to see them run an advertisement for Kalshi. I was pretty surprised that something like this would be advertised to normal people. I'd half expect the next ad to be for a hitman, or for beating your wife, or something. Seems crazy that this is tolerated whatsoever.
Didn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...
I sincerely hope these abominations made to either enrich the corrupt/immoral or prey on the addicted are made illegal during my lifetime.
Interesting comments here. I'd rather have prediction markets than casinos or sports betting services, because in the latter, you're playing again the house which can and will ban you for winning too much, while prediction markets are simply market makers taking a fee.

Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.

The only societally rational thing to do. Cheers to Spain for being a global humanitarian leader on this and many other global issues! (I am worried though by the extreme-right forces trying to throw over the government though.)
> Spain - like other European jurisdictions - considers prediction markets a form of gambling when bets are placed on uncertain outcomes.

What is the defense in the US for example that these are not gambling, "bets are placed on uncertain outcomes", it's that close to, if not the definition of gambling ?

I’m surprised these haven’t already been banned tbh.

It doesn’t make sense that if I bet on the outcome of a football match then it’s gambling but if I bet on the outcome of the Ukraine war then it’s I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-gambling.

People wonder how bad prediction markets are going to get. I think it's going to get a lot worse. If left unchecked it'll en up like the 1997 paper "Assassination politics" describes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Poli...

Yet blocks the internet completely decimating all necessary services for a couple hours for La Liga futbol. Spain is a backwards country
please stop calling them prediction markets. It's not even accurate, you do not buy a prediciton
Kalshi, Polymarket and every other prediction market should have been drowned at birth by regulators. They offer zero positive utility to the world. I hope that we follow Spain's example here in Australia; we have a hard enough time with legal gambling as it is.
> Spain's Consumer Rights Ministry temporarily banned so-called prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi [..]

Why a ministry has the authority to do so? What I don't like about my country, and the whole UE, is the lack of democracy. And this is a good example.

A democracy needs to have real separations of powers. The legislative body creates a law, and the judiciary, based on that law, will decide on banning or not the online gambling site.

A ministry belongs to the executive branch of the Estate. It is not up to them to decide whether something is illegal or not.

I find it humorous that these are simultaneously attacked as being gambling and attacked because some people know more than others and are "betting" on a sure thing.
Well, that makes perfect sense. The whole world will eventually do the same. gambling with software is still gambling, just like accounting with software is still accounting.
I'm still astounded that Polymarket, as a feature, is embedded inside Substack. Not a third-party plugin but baked into the platform. YouTube is one thing. It's practically ubiquitous in terms of video sharing but Polymarket?
It has been crazy seeing the explosion of Polymarket and Kalshi in comparison to Betfair.

Betfair doesn't present itself as anything other than what it is: a gambling exchange where the punters make the book. In my 10+ years time of using it they despite some occasionally shoddily worded markets they have only properly screwed up a market twice (The Australian Open in 2022 when Djokovic was denied entry to Australia and Betfair basically forgot the winners market was cross matched when they went to remove him and the 2020 Presidential election where they suspended the market when Trump went to hospital with Covid despite the fact the market rules said that the market would still settle if any participant died and obviously most people had been taking into account that both candidates being mega ancient whilst a global pandemic was happening might be a factor). Betfair is boring, staid and reliable.

Compare that to Kalshi and Polymarket who do everything they can to pretend they are not gambling platforms. It's kind of gross.

It's lunacy that you can create a gambling website, name it a 'prediction market' and somehow that skirts the law. It's a gambling website for nerds and high-ups in the USG.
Oh so finally someone is calling a spade a spade.
The main way betting markets can increase accuracy is by making it profitable for insiders to leak secret information.
Are they still doing blocks so configuring either Google's DNS or Cloudflare DNS will still unblock the sites?
I can understand them wanting to ban Polymarket et al but it's hard to implement unless you ban all use of cryptocurrency. Once you've done the converting fiat currency to some sort of crypto, all the other transaction can happen anonymously offshore. I've mucked about on Polymarket a bit including betting on Kamala to win of all things.
I see a lot of comments like this is the blocking of prediction markets about politics, war, etc.

It's important to remember that ~80% of activity Polymarket and ~90% of Kalshi, by volume, are sports. These are effectively sports betting websites with prediction markets on the side.

Good
If anyone from Kalshi or Polymarket is reading this: your advertising is reprehensible. Dumb bros bragging about getting rich betting on the weather. Cringey get-rich-quick influencers. No one believes for a second your claims that prediction markets serve the public good. I’ve never wanted an industry to fail so badly.
Good. Now ban sports betting.
Greece does the same.
Interesting!
It ought to be illegal everywhere, the only reason it won't be in the US is the president is on the grift with his kids operating on the boards of them.
good
Good. Now take the next step and ban them outright.
well, it's gambling.