Not just America, everything is.
With stock market, at least we can somehow stop the bad actors, insider traders, corporate manipulation, pumps and dumps - with prediction markets, there is no way.
With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track, jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between bureaucracy. And proving something becomes moreso a question of free will - if I decided to do X and then someone bets millon dollars on me doing X when odds are low, how do you prove I haven't decided to do X before? Will you prevent me from exercising my free will because of suspect insider trading? What if I am a president/senator?
Years ago, I was a kid who discovered online betting - often it was the only time I could place bets on MMA events, especially because it wasn't as popular as it is now. Even then, the gambling sites had "Other" options where you could bet on presidents, popes, landing on mars etc. The new markets aren't that much different, but are just using a nicer way to talk about it.
It isn't gambling, it's prediction.
You aren't a gambler, you're a "hyperinformed high iq individual predicting the geopolitical moves". Just like crypto gave people the identity crutch of a "tech investor", this gives them the identity crutch of a "geopolitical strategist".
But in the end, it is still just gambling - wrapped in a nice ego stroking suit, but gambling none the less.
There are some distinctions between gambling and prediction markets. For example, in prediction markets, some forms of insider trading are considered somewhat desirable - essentially, it monetizes insiders leaking inside information.
Other forms of insider trading can be problematic: What if someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not doing X, in the hopes of you taking the opposite bet and doing X?
The most extreme that I've seen presented so far are markets where people can predict the death date of a person. On the surface, that just seems like a morbid bet. Once you consider the above form of insider trading, you realize that this can act as a reward for someone who can accurately predict the death date of said person, for example because they're making the counter-trade from a phone next to a high-powered rifle on the rooftop across the street - and like in the bribe example above, the people on the "losing" side of the bet might not mind too much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
I've never quite understood what's supposed to be so mind-blowing about the assassination market concept. I think the concept is supposed to be that assigning legal responsibility for such a killing would be difficult, since no one is literally paying an assassin.
But surely the answer is just that governments can and should ban prediction markets that are deemed to directly incentivize a crime. Where exactly to draw the line is challenging, sure, but no more challenging than all the other stuff that legal systems have to deal with. After all, pretty much any existing market (like stock markets) could be influenced by murdering certain people.
You may say "oh, but assassination markets are unique in that they're hard to ban those markets because they use cryptocurrencies and other decentralized/anonymous/censorship-resistant communication technologies." Well, okay, but if those technologies are so effective than people can already just run normal murder-for-pay markets.
> What if someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not doing X, in the hopes of you taking the opposite bet and doing X?
From their POV, that's the purest form of voting with money. If you do X, they're presumably happy with the outcome they just paid for; if you do the opposite of X, they at least have their payouts as consolation prize.
>What if someone (could be an individual or even an uncoordinated group) bets millions of dollars on you not doing X, in the hopes of you taking the opposite bet and doing X?
If the market is efficient and aware of the bribery effect, others will bet that you will do X up to the point where the indirect bribe is equal to the cost of you doing X. If you have private knowledge that a bribe would be taken, you probably have the access to do it far cheaper off market (and you can still use crypto).
As a matter of adopting sensible definitions, I think you need to draw the line somewhere between what is gambling and what is not.
If the risk taken can, in principle, be shifted in your favour (i.e. to produce positive expectation) through application of skill, then it isn't gambling. For example, in my mind, betting on whether you will win a game of chess is not gambling. On the other hand, if you cannot influence the outcome in your favour through skill, then it is gambling. Roulette is generally a good example of this (with the caveat that in some very specific circumstances it's possible to beat with skill).
If we're limiting the definition to merely risk-taking (you might win or you might lose) without factoring in skill, then virtually everything in life becomes gambling. For example, you gamble when you deposit money in the bank because it might go bust.
There's also the legal definition, in which case it's just a matter of checking whether the jurisdiction you are in considers the activity to be gambling or not.
I would say that gambling with skill component is still gambling. For example, in blackjack you can limit your losses by following a basic strategy, which is a 2x2 matrix with rows containing the value of your hand and columns containing the open dealer card.
If you can obtain an edge through a skill component (card counting in blackjack), some people wouldn't call this gambling anymore, but I would still call it gambling myself. Someone doing this for a living is a professional gambler.
What for me would be a sensible definition is that a bet/gamble has no other goals. Putting money in the bank/investing in a stock reallocates capital, which can be invested by someone. The fact that it is a risk-taking endeavor is merely a side effect. I would say the same goes for selling/buying insurance for your car.
So for me, the difference between betting and putting money in the bank/investing is that the primary goal is something different than the risk-taking activity.
Does this not boil down to the distinction being one's intent? I play poker occasionally, for example, and my primary goal is to win money not to take risk. Does that make it meet your definition of investing rather than gambling?
Well you're not committing the money to purchase an asset that will generate returns, so no, it's not "investing".
It would be more accurate to say you're working, really: spending time and effort to earn money. Though the "work" here, assuming you're a skilled poker player sitting with lesser-skilled marks, is similar to a crypto bro performing a rug pull. You're enabling other participants to gamble in the hope of an uncertain win, while they actually are pretty much guaranteed to lose in a zero-sum game where the house will always earn its keep.
One could say that if everybody else at the table is gambling and you're working, it's still gambling. Lunch is lunch, whether you're the customer, the chef, or the lamb.
In poker the asset I invest in is just very short term - a single hand. I put money in when I expect the asset of that hand to pay off, risking the money a bit like an even shorter term day trade.
I don't think this thread is the best place for the everlasting debate on whether day trading is "investing", but for the purposes of my definition above, day trading, like other kinds of trading like buying commodities for resale, or having a booth at the flea market, would fit my definition of "work" (you purchased something that you expect to generate profit from by putting in your time and effort) rather than investment, since the poker hand is not doing anything by itself to generate value/money/returns for you.
Many sports gamblers (horse racing, etc.) will say it’s about skill. They believe they shift the risk in their favor because they have the data and because they bet strategically so as to win over long term. (They can spend a while detailing it for you if you are willing to listen.)
Prediction markets in general can make anyone feel like it’s about data and skills. If they lose, then they didn’t have the good enough information, so clearly they should improve their skill, right?
From my understanding, purely natural events aside, the probability of you betting against the “house” will always approach 1. If the platform is centralised, they have a strong incentive to influence the stakes, or (this has been documented) straight up limit your ability to bet if you are winning “too much”—enough to cost them real money. If the platform is open and decentralised, “house” is another player with much more capital and personal influence in the matter than you (for example, some president can bet that he would invade a country—and then invade it; some footballer can bet that he wouldn’t score N times—then score N-1 and fake an injury at the most favourable time; of course, they would use intermediaries, and only the careless ones will get burnt).
The “skill” line is what gamblers tell themselves to justify it. A much more useful demarcation is “does this game have any positive impact on the world” (entertainment value of the gambling itself doesn’t count). For example, insurance is not gambling even though it is itself a zero sum game, it enables societally beneficial risk taking. Options trading on real assets like stock aid in price discovery. Memecoins, sports betting, your local poker game and the way prediction markets actually function in practice are all gambling.
That’s what they say, but that’s not how they actually operate. There’s not nearly the liquidity there (and probably can’t ever be) to actually protect against downside risks. This niche is already better served by boutique insurance.
Talking about "traditional" sports gambling rather than prediction markets: how do we account for the heavy restrictions they place on "sharps" (consistent winners)? If a game can be won through application of skill, but winning through application of skill causes you to be effectively banned, then the game cannot be won through application of skill.
They don't mind a few with skill so long as those people don't win too often and they brag about their winnings to others who then think they have skill.
of course if you had the skill to win big why would you not make that your job thus making too much.
There is an entire category of casino games where the house is a player. These are called house-banked games and they include most of what you imagine when you think of a casino floor: blackjack, roulette, craps, slots, etc.
But even in player-banked games like poker, the house is an agent participating in the game through the dealer. They can still exercise their right to free association and not play with you.
A corrected analogy would be Nintendo banning you from Mario Kart Online for suspected cheating. Yes, Nintendo isn't playing, but they still have that authority as the facilitator.
I thought the commonly-held definition of gambling is: "it's gambling if it introduces risk."
e.g. a transaction to buy paper towels is not introducing risk, since I pay an amount and get something.
If I have a chance of not receiving those paper towels if I put money in, then it's considered gambling because the inherent activity introduces risk. It's the same reason the lootboxes were considered gambling at first, and the same reason I classify betting on a chess game as gambling. You're player may potentially not win.
>For example, in my mind, betting on whether you will win a game of chess is not gambling
As a general rule it is considered gambling not if skill is involved, but if there is any uncertainty involved.
And because there is not such thing as a perfect application of skill, all applications of skill have a degree of uncertainty to them. And you don't necessarily know how much your skill and luck will be in effect in the game.
In the context of Chess. Do you get to choose who you play against or is there a random draw? How close is the other player to you in skill? If you are both alike in skill then the skill application will be less important to the outcome.
I once lost a game at a tournament that had the rule that usage of en passant required saying en passant before doing it, so I was playing this guy whose skill was abysmal, we walked into a scenario where the very next move he did was going to allow me to do en passant, he had to take that move, or do something else that would lead to me taking his queen in the next move, and then folding up pretty all of his pieces and coming out two queens ahead. If he did the en passant move his position was worse, it was checkmate in like 10 moves.
If he had seen it and had any politeness and grace he would have just resigned. I mean it was extremely painful to have gotten into this position because it could be seen 20 moves before we were going to end up here and yet, he laboriously walked in to it, he could have gotten out before, by sacrificing a horse, and then a bit later he could have gotten out by sacrificing a horse and a knight, and then a horse and a knight and a castle, etc. etc. But nope, he just made move by stupid move into this position.
So then he made the move that I should make en passant with and ... I forgot the term "en passant" I couldn't remember the term to use, my brain froze, I probably let the clock run for ten minutes trying to remember the word, it's also not like I didn't know the move and the phrase, I had known it that 20 moves ago when I was thinking I do A, he do B I do C... and then en passant. But I couldn't remember.
Now if I had been not such a stickler for rules I might just have done it anyway hoping for him to accept and not require me to say it, but I didn't. So he won. Later my friend played him and he said "You lost to that guy?!" and I said "fuck I froze up and forgot the word to en passant, I had him setup to take all his stuff but because I forgot the word he had me. Damn it"
Despite differences of skill other factors can prevent the skill from being deployed to its greatest effect. If someone knew Bryan is skillful, but he does have a habit of choking up or sometimes losing focus in longer games, whereas that guy there sucks so the odds are 4 to 1 in Bryan's favor (which I was very much more skillful than this guy, so embarrassing), but that guy is skillful enough to drag it out a bit, and he will never give in, therefore it might make sense for me to bet a small amount in this case to leverage the uncertainty.
Because of course that kind of gambling is itself a form of skill.
If you only consider gambling on things that do not have any skill component, you then essentially say that gambling does not take any skill, which then leaves you with a large sphere of skilled activity, that many people have taken part in for many years of human society and that has traditionally been known as gambling, which now does not have a name to identify it.
What should this field of activity that you have rendered nameless by your fiat be called then?
That is one of the takes I've ever read. There is a reason gambling is so tightly regulated worldwide, and it's certainly not because governments hate easy vice tax revenue. Gambling debt destroys family units, increases poverty rates (most notably for the children of gambling addicts -- the consequences are not localised only to the person making the bad decisions), and increases violent crime rates. Gambling is massively detrimental to society. There can be arguments in allowing people to do things that are detrimental to society in the name of freedom, but it's not a great thing to pretend those detriments don't exist at all.
Do you know of any studies that can accurately show the correlation between gambling and societal costs? On the surface the link makes sense to me and seems like it should be right, though I'm not sure how we could have tested it in a controlled way to really know the link exists.
There are a bunch of studies out there [0][1] (two I found immediately) showing the risks around problem gambling, but like with most vices people who’ve already picked the pro side tend to react in the same predictable ways (myself included):
1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the methodology like “N=200? That’s meaningless.”
2) Apathy: “So what if some people get addicted? We can’t babysit everyone.”
3) Rationalization: “Yeah but it helps Native American reservations, so...”
4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how prevalent is problem gambling really?"
There's also a version of rationalization where people project arguments from the war on drugs to illegal gambling, as though the enforcement of illegal gambling was somehow had costs greater than just letting anyone bet any amount of money from their phones.
That's anecdotal, I was curious if there were (well designed) studies that showed likely correlation between the two.
I have had family members addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and friends that have been addicted to gambling at various times. I've seen similar reactions anecdotally, but that isn't societal or scientific.
One study showed a significant increase in domestic violence after gamblers lost sports bets (based on the team for a specific city losing or winning and then comparing DV rates to cities before and after legal online sports betting).
In my country, lot of institutions running out-of-home-campaigns against gambling-addiction etc.; so yes, if public institutions are doing this then there is some evidence there
I don't doubt that the programs are helpful, but how does that equate to evidence?
Creating a campaign doesn't prove in anyway the specific problems caused by gambling, especially at the societal level. It only shows that there is a group willing to fund programs against gambling addictions.
In no way am I questioning the intent or value of such programs, I hope it doesn't read that way. It just isn't necessarily relevant with regards to evidence.
You would like a study proving a negative? Good luck.
My point absolutely wasn't that gambling has no known negative side effects. I was asking out of curiosity if there were studies someone could link to that actually tried to test it in a controlled way.
> Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.
This isn't true.
each 10 per cent increase in gambling expenditure in NSW results in more than
4,500 additional assaults
2,800 additional home break-ins
1,300 additional break and enter (non-dwelling) offences
1,400 additional motor vehicle thefts
2,300 additional stealing from motor vehicle thefts
3,800 additional fraud offences each year
> Stock market integrity is important because of their function in the economy
Some might argue that people - including gambling addicts, and those impacted by their addiction - might possibly be more important than one of many possible financial mechanisms for free enterprise.
Is that NSW = New South Wales? I'm asking because Wikipedia lists New South Wales as a population of only 8.5 million, and those crime numbers are insanely huge relative to that.
The part the article OP linked to would be based off the line:
To put these percentage changes in terms of interest to policy makers, a 10% decrease in gambling expenditure in NSW would result in 4579 fewer ASS offences; 2867 fewer BESD offences; 1380 fewer BESND offences; 1398 fewer MVT offences; 2361 fewer SFMV offences; and 3793 fewer FRD offences 2 each year
Right, it's almost like necessity and desperation cause people to do desperate things. If I take your money and give you no resource in return, that's a degeneration.
You are ignoring the point of TFA. Kalshi & Polymarkets provide a marketplace to monetise political decision-making, a.k.a corruption. This is definitely detrimental to society.
First of all, anyone getting scammed is detrimental to society because society is made out of people and those are people getting scammed. Gambling addicts are not less important than wealthy people.
Second, these markets are generating new gambling addicts, which is wildly and provably detrimental to society.
Just so we're clear on the standards of solidarity here, someone murdering your entire family would be tragic but not detrimental to society. How much should society do to prevent that from happening?
> Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.
I used to believe that. With the legalization of all the sports betting and how fast it can drain a gambler which can then affect the gambler's family, I'm now pretty much on the other side of the fence.
Just like we banned public smoking because of the effects of secondhand smoke, I'm pretty convinced that the secondary effects of gambling means it needs to go back to being banned. I don't see an obvious way to legislate gambling to prevent the auxiliary victims. It doesn't help that getting maximum profit as a bookie means being part of a group of the scummiest people on the planet who will stoop to anything to drain people of their money as fast as possible.
The sports betting sites even have account managers who are tasked with keeping people on the sites even after the user has decided to quit. It’s so lucrative they can afford to pay people to sit and text gambling addicts.
This is common practice in gambling and now games, too: Zynga has 'VIP' teams for high-spending free to play game customers, they would talk on the phone at length, get to know them, fly them to Vegas for jaunts, etc.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales...
> "We've done so much experimenting at Zynga with VIP. We know what's the frequency of contact. We know what call types work. We know what times to call. We know exactly who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call."
Sports betting is particularly galling because the actual prediction is so unimportant. The only real reason to care whether Jontay Porter is credited with three or fewer rebounds in a basketball game is to win a bet about it.
You're encouraging people to waste their money just so that you can use the Wisdom of Crowds to predict something completely worthless.
Depends on how many of those gambling addicts there are.
If a huge enough portion of the population try to solve the statue quo of their economic problems by betting all on red, that's not gonna be great for society, including those who don't gamble.
Same as beer or any other drug - just a way to have some fun and not destructive provided you can control yourself.
Though, the one time I opened a CSGO gun case and felt the dopamine rush, it was way stronger than any drug I've done. Not that I'm a "highly-experienced individual", but alcohol, weed or adderall don't come close to a CSGO case. Gambling feels much riskier.
I can't think of any addiction worse than gambling. It can ruin the life of a family quickly whereas all other addictions are in general only self destructive.
Regulation and education are where the sane middle ground is. You don't outright ban the stuff (which is expensive and doesn't work anyway) but you keep the worst of the harms it causes from getting too out of control. Sadly, gambling is under-regulated and we'll probably all be suffering for a while as a result before regulations are tightened back up.
I agree that sane regulation is the most likely successful approach in the world we currently live in. A large cultural shift would be required for total prohibition to be successful.
Alcohol is the only painkiller which can be infinitely self-administered. There's value in that. It's quite ancient, been proven to work, which is why it's probably stuck around so long.
What are you talking about? Fatal alcohol poisoning hits long before infinite self-administration. And there actually are many other far safer painkillers than alcohol.
Gambling can absolutely destroy lives. I've seen it in my own family. Its highly addictive nature combined with an easy way to lose everything you own is incredibly dangerous.
I've personally witnessed domestic violence from a gambler taking heavy losses as they realize they're about to be in a really bad place financially. I've never seen someone get violent over messing up a few rows of knitting.
So your beef is with domestic violence, not with gambling.
In a counterfactual where someone was doing some gambling and not doing some domestic violence, would you be still upset about the gambling in and of itself? Who does it harm?
Its not just domestic violence (though the rates of DV are usually higher with gamblers than the general population...huh I wonder why), but also just completely messing up a family's finances. This can really destroy families and relationships.
And sure, the same could be done with lots of things. But gambling is incredibly addictive.
I've watched family members gamble themselves into homelessness before. Isn't this a harm as well? Aren't the kids harmed when they lose their home and have no college savings despite the household having a net value of several million dollars a few years before?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% against all forms of gambling. I gamble from time to time myself. What I'm against is this current wave of constant, relentless push of gambling into damn near everything, all the time. Back when gambling meant you'd have to go to the riverboat or fly halfway across the country or you're only dealing with small stakes poker between friends, its radically different to apps on our phones pushing notifications all the time, every sports game spending a significant amount of screen real estate to showing betting odds, news outlets talking about polymarkets all the time.
Could one have still been a problem gambler back before smartphone betting? Sure, one of those family examples I know about related to flying out to Vegas a few times a long time ago. But the rates of that happening were far lower before.
Maybe I enjoy having an arsenal of late-model machine guns, doing research on rare nuclear isotopes, brewing cholera in my septic tank, tending a Japanese knotwood garden, raising lantern flies, and breeding new strains of cold viruses.
Perhaps society should continue to restrain such hobbies.
If a lot of people have that as their hobby, and some are careless or malicious, people will be harmed. Now suppose that it's not simple to stop the offenders directly. Instead, restricting the sale of nuclear isotopes or cholera samples would probably be highly effective.
What is the point of being this obtuse? Is there a rhetorical benefit to pretending that gambling is not a vice? That it is just a "hobby"? Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?
>How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?
Gambling? Is people questioning gambling a new thing? Seems like the opposite is the case. Again, this is where being purposefuly obtuse gets us.
> Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?
Yes, of course.
Selling drugs is also a private transaction between two people that does no harm to anyone else.
If the people buying or selling drugs are harmful to others in the rest of their life, that's on them. It shouldn't be used as a fig leaf to negatively impact people who can buy and sell drugs responsibly.
Have you watched sports recently? Gambling has always had a negative effect on the perceived fairness but once that effect becomes a core part of the way the sport is monetized it gets even worse for everyone involved. Watching playoff games last weekend either Draft Kings or Fan Duel showed an ad where a single person in a crowded bar is cheering wildly by themselves while looking at their parlay bet or whatever on their phone - this isolation of the communal experience alone is a definitely a negative effect but I could go on...
Gambling is frying the brains of a disturbing proportion of genZ and millennial men. It's destroying sports and infecting politics. It's quite detrimental to society.
Until people are making money and affecting the world. Let's say that you're someone close to Trump and you have betted a very large sum that Trump should take a certain action. Are you going to try to make him take that action even if at that point it turns out to be the worst decision for the country and the world?
To be fair, if you were aware enough to separate the characteristics of wealth and intelligence, you've probably seen the investing world as a casino with ego-stroking suits long before this. The difference between the cigarette-burning retiree surrendering their OASDI check at a casino in Kansas City and Wall Street investors is a diploma from the "right" schools and in the ability to sway the odds in their favor; they both can - and will - destroy themselves or those around them to indulge in their habit.
Any sort of announced intention to "somehow stop the bad actors" became laughable after 2008-2009. We had bankers and financiers kick the monetary legs out from under an entire generation and unless they did something blatantly illegal (read: were Bernie Madoff) none of them faced a consequence.
That's why you have the current situation in the US where scammers can take advantage of distrust in any and all of society's institutions, up to and including the federal government.
If only there was some sort of way to see if a given market participant's behavior was best explained as a "high iq individual predicting geopolitical moves" vs. "just gambling".
With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track, jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between bureaucracy. And proving something becomes moreso a question of free will - if I decided to do X and then someone bets millon dollars on me doing X when odds are low, how do you prove I haven't decided to do X before? Will you prevent me from exercising my free will because of suspect insider trading? What if I am a president/senator?
Years ago, I was a kid who discovered online betting - often it was the only time I could place bets on MMA events, especially because it wasn't as popular as it is now. Even then, the gambling sites had "Other" options where you could bet on presidents, popes, landing on mars etc. The new markets aren't that much different, but are just using a nicer way to talk about it.
It isn't gambling, it's prediction.
You aren't a gambler, you're a "hyperinformed high iq individual predicting the geopolitical moves". Just like crypto gave people the identity crutch of a "tech investor", this gives them the identity crutch of a "geopolitical strategist".
But in the end, it is still just gambling - wrapped in a nice ego stroking suit, but gambling none the less.