These apps claim to let you turn your knowledge into money. What this means is the insiders get to cash out and the desperate suckers provide the liquidity. I'm amazed they've all gotten away with this for so long.
They've 'gotten away with' it by for example winning cases deciding they offer commodities trading, not gambling. (You can disagree with it, it's in the open and explicit is my point.)
Just Goodhart's law to massive scale, the most predictable thing ever (there should be a bet for that). Please go back to crypto and destroy this abhorrent 'industry'
I don't understand, what's so fundamentally wrong with this form of insider trading? Is the accusation that it makes degenerate gambling unfair? Is it necessary for degenerate gambling to be fair? The gamblers don't seem to care.
because the long term outcome is that truth will start to be defined by money. There's already been tales of journalists being harassed to change stories in order for over-leveraged betters to win polymarket bets.
I HIGHLY recommend going onto a sports subreddit match thread during a match and seeing what people say, versus the post match thread, a few hours after the match. The difference in tone is striking. While some people are probably just passionate, I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
But this is not insider trading, beause the insider event IS affected by the behavior of the gamblers. Normally the insider event should be uncorrelated and unknown to the gamblers
Matt Levine pointed out in a past article that the real danger of insider trading are company insiders being incentivised to damage the company to make a quick buck.
> insiders being incentivised to damage the company
I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.
Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on unusual deaths or serious injuries of... prediction-market executives.
beyond the general idea that we shouldn't normalize gambling, betting on some real-life events is horrid. think about insider trading on a polymarket bet for someone's death.
So, the typical "It's only okay when the elites do it." Although, it's almost certain that such crowdfunding practices will lead to a radical democratization of society as a whole.
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
people like hope. In Dickens era the hope was that you'd discover you were a long lost bastard child of some wealthy aristocratic family. These days, its that you win the lottery.
We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
Because there's pre-existing demand for lottery tickets that provides some plausible deniability for the money-laundering use case. If prediction markets were primarily used to buy insurance against hard-to-avoid expensive events, that's what money launderers would trade in too, in order to blend in.
Instead, most volume is in sports bets. People just like to gamble.
I (my agents) have been playing with the kalshi and poly market APIsv and whatever your opinion on the markets themselves it does feel like there's a bunch of interesting things to do with such a firehose of realtime data.
I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
In a way, it's even worse. (Yes, I know the post is sardonic, I mean it's even worse than that.)
Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes.
Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.
It's funny, after posting the above message I started thinking what else can be made to sound "good" just by prepending it with "democratizing". Surprisingly it works really well.
There is a market to bet whether Bryan Johnson will have sex this month or not. I dunno, seems that would be easy to control if you are, I dunno, the living person involved?
I HIGHLY recommend going onto a sports subreddit match thread during a match and seeing what people say, versus the post match thread, a few hours after the match. The difference in tone is striking. While some people are probably just passionate, I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
Can you guarantee a fair trial when anyone can bet on the outcome, including the judge and the defense?
It has changed the outcome of some sports matches. It could change the outcome of far more important events.
I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.
Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on unusual deaths or serious injuries of... prediction-market executives.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TvWbOKJvZmk
https://youtu.be/RmUQptXfiWs?t=485
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
Instead, most volume is in sports bets. People just like to gamble.
I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
Make a prediction for it: When will Gamma/Data/CLOB require subscription: 2026, 2027, etc.
Those are contradictory words
Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes.
Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.
Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos
https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815