This seems like a great argument to just never use the under-regulated betting markets.
Unless you’re privy to some insider information you can make bets about. Then you absolutely should.
I don’t like gambling. I worry about regulation driving it underground, though. I’d rather just see winnings taxed heavily, immediately and without exception or deduction. Invest it in social safety nets and it’s effectively forcing the winners to share their loot with the most vulnerable of the people they’re victimizing.
That doesn’t really address people betting on horrible things and then making them happen.
Also “it will just go underground” is still kind of a win? The average person isn’t going to navigate sketchy underground arrangements, but they’ll find a slick website with good SEO.
won’t that still have the same effect of driving it underground though?
Yeah, to a certain extent. The nice things about taxes is that they can be dialed up and down for effect. Complete, tax-free deregulation would obviously be crazy. 100% tax would pretty much be a ban and drive it all underground. Somewhere between 0 and 100, there’s an equilibrium point. Also, conflict of interest should be regulated. I don’t need police betting on how many gunshot victims there will be today.
Polymarket needs some serious eradication.
Correct answer. It creates extremely perverse incentives in society to allow people to bet on large scale harm.
Wait… why the fuck is there a betting site where you can bet on wars starting. What in the immoral fuck is that even about?
The answer to all of your question is: The US.
Boiling frogs.
- Farmers want a way to sell their crops before harvest time to guarantee a certain price, so they’re protected by unpredictable swings in price. A market is set up for commodity futures, so a speculator can take that deal, and maybe make a lot of money if the price she sets with the farmer is well below the actual market value. This is seen as a good thing because the farmer gets to reduce their risk, while someone else gets the opportunity to make money by taking that risk on the farmer’s behalf.
- This system expands like a cancer, so professional investors are soon buying derivatives on all kinds of things. Sometimes this is arguably good for the world, but many times it’s just complex gambling, and it results in the housing-based financial collapse of 2007-08. Hedge funds and investment bankers manage to convince the regulators to let them keep the system as is, despite the crash.
- Wall street pushes to allow random people with no financial power, no training, no knowledge to also be able to get involved with derivatives, because having idiots on the other side of their bets is great for their bottom lines. It’s much easier to make money from some random person using an app than it is to make money off another professional investor.
- Some clever person manages to reskin a gambling app as if it were an investment app, and allows people to “buy derivatives contracts” on just about anything. Nobody honestly believes that this is anything other than gambling. But, the regulators are all compromised and toothless, so now you can gamble on any of the 4 horsemen: war, famine, death or disease.
You can bet on anything, man. It’s like Money Plane but with words writing.
My innocent european ass has never heard of money plane or polymarket before.
It’s been a thing in UK for decades. Big with morons.
Creative interpretation of reality. Polymarket pretends it is not a betting platform, since betting on wars and similar shit is banned even in the US.
It’s about the USA in 2026? Been in jail or something?
I refuse to participate in Biff Tannen’s world! I know I’m likely to be the minority, but I’m a stubborn SOAB!
System of a Bitch
“Psycho groupie, cocaine crazy!”
Just ban it, gambling used to be illegal in a lot of places.
Please ban all online betting and only make it legal at places where you have to actually go there in person to do. Impulse gambling on smartphones and prediction markets are straight cancer to society.
Hear hear!
It used to be illegal to run away from your plantation, too.
No reason to outlaw this, why bother? People have always made wagers, and they enjoy it.
Always have been.
I have simply determined that I will have my pound of flesh before the end.
The purpose is to give incentive to knowledgeable parties to let us know up front. In a corrupt government status like the current one we should be happy that we can get few hours heads up before the bombs start falling.
They are not going to warn you for free…
There’s always someone on the other side of these bets. How is it that people keep betting on things like this when they know that insiders like this are the ones they’re sometimes betting against?
The point is this bullshit market can influence decisions, like whether to have a nuclear strike on Iran -you think a Trump family member would not try to cash in on that?
And kalshi and he’s starting his own.
Come on, why did you use an AI tool to make his nose look like this.
Damn the price of cocaine is about to skyrocket.
Ant sources on this? I already believe you, because it’s a trump, but I’d like to see the evidence so we have something more to slap into magat faces
So, monitor Polymarket for massive bets on things the US government could do, and copy those bets.
