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.)
I have no horse in this race, that's sort of exactly my point - they haven't mysteriously 'gotten away with' it like done something illegal and nobody noticed; there have been cases, there will be more, it's so far been allowed. I don't call that 'getting away with' is all.
I hate the stigma and laws against gambling. They don’t stop gambling, they create a higher barrier of entry leading to monopoly, and gamblers are paying more because lack of competition
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.
> People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar.
Sure but I can't help but wonder if many of them have money riding on the games which makes their anger much more understandable. Perhaps those you grew up around were also having a bit of a flutter.
Oh, for sure, I don't doubt that at all! My only point is causality. I do not agree that it's betting companies fault (whether they are on-chain or not). If there weren't ways to bet, these people would invent them.
Agreed. I just personally think advertising gambling should be illegal. Obviously there's so much vested money that its hard to shift given that it props up a lot of sports revenue today. However we learned the horrors of tobacco advertising and I can't see why we shouldn't learn the same lessons about gambling. It can never be illegal because the black market would be worse, but we shouldn't encourage it.
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.
Maybe there should be a maximum betting limit the same way there should be an election contribution limit — let's say something like 10x the federal minimum wage or whatever so if you are betting under USD 75.5, it is A ok but once you cross this number, we require public disclosures, no hiding behind LLC, natural persons only, KYC, the whole shebang.
Actually, now that I think about it, let's get rid of the minimum, there should be no minimum, all bets even five cents must be fully disclosed and attributed to natural persons, no hiding behind "corporations are people, my friend" nonsense.
Artificially influencing a stock's price is illegal by itself, and there's probably about a half dozen other charges that could be tacked in this scheme, possibly including extremely serious ones like wire fraud which gets tacked on pretty much every crime involving digital tech.
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
EDIT: Oh, I initially thought that you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations but not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. Which is not what I said, I only said (implied) that it's not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. I made no representation regarding whether I think it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations.
However, what I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more, because... if ordinary people could trade in assassination markets then they would choose to assassinate the government's assassins, and then the government would not react or respond in any way, so then the government would no longer be able to coordinate assassinations, and the general public would stop using the assassination market, and then the problem is solved. Is that right?
> you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations
Oh no, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying you think this is acceptable. I'm saying the elites are ALREADY doing it. And you're expressing your extreme disapproval not of the phenomenon itself, but of the hypothetical situation in which not only the elites but also ordinary people would gain access to such tools (which, of course, would also be very illegal and unacceptable. Well, until these terms still exist).
> I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more
I think we are rather talking about an increase in the number of assassinations to a level that literally threatens the destruction of human civilization in its modern form. Purely because of the irreversible nature of this tool acquisition by society. It's just that at one point in time, society doesn't yet have access to it, and at another, it has, and now it's everywhere, for everyone, and there's no turning back. The entire planet is living in a new socio-political-economic reality.
But this does not in any way contradict the radical democratization of society.
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.
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
Gamblers do care about losing their shirt. Appified gambling is just remarkably effective at getting humans to keep playing. It'd be one thing if we didn't hook up all of the dopamine feedback loops that we've developed over the past decade to a gambling machine but that's not the world we live in.
Insider trading by politicians means even more incentives for greedy people to pursue politics.
The system is already very much like that, we should try to go in the other direction, not make it even more attractive for corrupt individuals.
When someone in charge only cares about personal profit, it is only them that will benefit (and a couple of megacorps), to the detriment of millions, and humanity itself (look no further than the current events).
I always found interesting that you can bet on Polymarket whether Jesus Christ will come back before 2027 or not.
At the moment, you can bet $96.20 to win $100 that he won't.
Who decides what a "win" is in these cases? I get everything apart from that part. Because I would take that bet, but I'm worried what the definition of "Jesus christ" is.
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.
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
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?
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 get away with it by having on the payroll the son of the president of the most powerful (and dangerous) country in the world
And one of the most corrupt presidents, I might add. He has increased his wealth by at least $3 BILLION during this last term.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/preside...
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.)
They've had people in their corner who've overturned state law. There are federal lawsuits in progress.
I have no horse in this race, that's sort of exactly my point - they haven't mysteriously 'gotten away with' it like done something illegal and nobody noticed; there have been cases, there will be more, it's so far been allowed. I don't call that 'getting away with' is all.
I hate the stigma and laws against gambling. They don’t stop gambling, they create a higher barrier of entry leading to monopoly, and gamblers are paying more because lack of competition
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.
Death threats are so common online that the selective reporting of them is weaponisation.
That's a fundamental problem with prediction markets, not the insider aspect of it.
> truth will start to be defined by money
I'm a firm believer in 'there's nothing new under the sun'.
> There's already been tales of journalists being harassed to change stories in order for over-leveraged betters to win polymarket bets.
So the only thing that has changed is who is doing the harassing.
> I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar. I grew up around them, this does not surprise me at all.
> People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar.
Sure but I can't help but wonder if many of them have money riding on the games which makes their anger much more understandable. Perhaps those you grew up around were also having a bit of a flutter.
Oh, for sure, I don't doubt that at all! My only point is causality. I do not agree that it's betting companies fault (whether they are on-chain or not). If there weren't ways to bet, these people would invent them.
Agreed. I just personally think advertising gambling should be illegal. Obviously there's so much vested money that its hard to shift given that it props up a lot of sports revenue today. However we learned the horrors of tobacco advertising and I can't see why we shouldn't learn the same lessons about gambling. It can never be illegal because the black market would be worse, but we shouldn't encourage it.
Yes, I agree. I think the advertising ban should be more general - anything that is known to be addictive should not be advertised.
Journalists are most likely to profit from this too
If there is enough money on the table, gambles can influence real world events.
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.
A lot of trials aren’t fair anyway, they are just influenced in a different way that is not accessible if you are not rich and powerful
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.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
Luigi, let’s-a go!!!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TvWbOKJvZmk
How is it different than shorting or buying put options and then damaging the company? The tools are already there.
Yes, that's why insider trading is illegal.
The difference is one is illegal, the other one is not.
Maybe there should be a maximum betting limit the same way there should be an election contribution limit — let's say something like 10x the federal minimum wage or whatever so if you are betting under USD 75.5, it is A ok but once you cross this number, we require public disclosures, no hiding behind LLC, natural persons only, KYC, the whole shebang.
Actually, now that I think about it, let's get rid of the minimum, there should be no minimum, all bets even five cents must be fully disclosed and attributed to natural persons, no hiding behind "corporations are people, my friend" nonsense.
I was responding to this argument:
>>the real danger of insider trading are company insiders being incentivised to damage the company to make a quick buck.
Damaging the company is illegal as well. Making things illegal doesn't magically stop people from doing what they have incentives to do.
Artificially influencing a stock's price is illegal by itself, and there's probably about a half dozen other charges that could be tacked in this scheme, possibly including extremely serious ones like wire fraud which gets tacked on pretty much every crime involving digital tech.
What other GTA missions and Mossad operations should we democratize with a small personal computerized device?
https://youtu.be/RmUQptXfiWs?t=485
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
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.
Or even worse what happens when people start gambling that someone won’t die today? It opens the door to crowdsourced hits with plausible deniability.
You missed out the reason that it's horrid, which is that it is a plausibly-deniable way to crowdfund assassinations.
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
I don't know how you got that from what I said.
EDIT: Oh, I initially thought that you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations but not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. Which is not what I said, I only said (implied) that it's not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. I made no representation regarding whether I think it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations.
However, what I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more, because... if ordinary people could trade in assassination markets then they would choose to assassinate the government's assassins, and then the government would not react or respond in any way, so then the government would no longer be able to coordinate assassinations, and the general public would stop using the assassination market, and then the problem is solved. Is that right?
> you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations
Oh no, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying you think this is acceptable. I'm saying the elites are ALREADY doing it. And you're expressing your extreme disapproval not of the phenomenon itself, but of the hypothetical situation in which not only the elites but also ordinary people would gain access to such tools (which, of course, would also be very illegal and unacceptable. Well, until these terms still exist).
> I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more
I think we are rather talking about an increase in the number of assassinations to a level that literally threatens the destruction of human civilization in its modern form. Purely because of the irreversible nature of this tool acquisition by society. It's just that at one point in time, society doesn't yet have access to it, and at another, it has, and now it's everywhere, for everyone, and there's no turning back. The entire planet is living in a new socio-political-economic reality.
But this does not in any way contradict the radical democratization of society.
> so then the government
Will there be a government?
> The gamblers don't seem to care.
Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
The obvious counter example is lotteries. People just like to gamble.
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.
Well, you can also use normal lotteries for money laundering: https://www.ftm.eu/articles/reynders-charged-in-money-launde...
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.
How would money laundering work with a prediction market?
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
Gamblers do care about losing their shirt. Appified gambling is just remarkably effective at getting humans to keep playing. It'd be one thing if we didn't hook up all of the dopamine feedback loops that we've developed over the past decade to a gambling machine but that's not the world we live in.
There's a difference between insider trading and gambling no?
What's so fundamentally wrong with selling crack to addicts?
Insider trading by politicians means even more incentives for greedy people to pursue politics.
The system is already very much like that, we should try to go in the other direction, not make it even more attractive for corrupt individuals.
When someone in charge only cares about personal profit, it is only them that will benefit (and a couple of megacorps), to the detriment of millions, and humanity itself (look no further than the current events).
Just Goodhart's law to massive scale, the most predictable thing ever. Please go back to crypto and destroy this abhorrent 'industry'
I always found interesting that you can bet on Polymarket whether Jesus Christ will come back before 2027 or not. At the moment, you can bet $96.20 to win $100 that he won't.
Who decides what a "win" is in these cases? I get everything apart from that part. Because I would take that bet, but I'm worried what the definition of "Jesus christ" is.
and that is not much higher than the yield on a B grade corporate credit
I dunno, I feel it's just democratizing insider trading. And as everyone knows, if it has "democratizing" in it, that means it's automatically good.
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.
> democratizing insider trading
Those are contradictory words
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
"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.
Buying future becomes even easier: just poor money into a bet and eveyone will discuss it as it's real people's expectations....
I recommend watching the latest Last Week Tonight about prediction markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4
> it blows my mind that we haven’t seen anyone arrested for insider trading yet,
Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos
Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and an investor in one of them (forgot which one).
I didn't bet on the beat this broke on.
https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815
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?