I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
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.
‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
> 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
This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.
I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
Evil, but most everything in real estate is evil.
With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing. Polymarket doesn't care.
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.
What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
https://russpain.com/en/news-3/authorities-consider-legalizi...
>Rarely exceed 25 euros.
Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
You can sell your life insurance policy to somebody else. It's a way of getting money to sick people to use while thy are still alive.
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.
No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
Is there something specific you're getting at?
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
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...
What you describe (profiting from creating havoc by some "short" bet) is indeed problematic and is regulated.
This is also one more reason why trading should not be unconditionally anonymous. Another reason: proper trading venues have rules against "squeezing", namely that no entity may hold more than some threshold ratio of the open interest. That's obviously impossible to enforce with anonymous markets.
[1] Tradings allows individuals to time-shift consumption, it funds productive enterprises, it incentivises convergence of market price with fundamental value, which in turn is what enables efficient investment allocation, and it allows the emergence of an economy-wide equilibrium of savings and investments. Note though that all of these functions might well be fulfilled by having, say, one minute of trading a day.
Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.
Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?
How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years.
It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.
[1]https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/30/polymarket-s-mil...
For example, average Iranian Dude might (statistically) be better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on durable goods that may become scarce and (ideally) would have resale value even if nothing goes wrong.
Did we really kill God to have some bloodsuckers in suits tell us what’s right and what’s wrong?
Aside from the government, who is it that you prefer to do judgment and enforcement?
And yes, you can construct an argument to ban polymarket that does not rely on morality too. But don’t try to sell it to me with a “we will ban it because it’s eeeeevil”.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it bad to deprive you of your possessions?
And given that the house always wins, is it not depriving the gamblers of their possessions?
I'd say, because we as a group decide they are "bad".
Not sure how you can remove moral judgments from any discussion of banning
Which are valid arguments in your opinion?
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.
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.
It's like calling the casino a probability market.
(Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
"Why, because it's bad?"
"No, because they they're not giving the right parties[1] a cut"
Never change government, never change.
[1] Based on my experience with casinos it's probably a bunch of make-work compliance industry and/or compulsory middle men who pretend to put a veneer of fairness on things
Other countries such as USA work in a similar manner. Work permits such as green card, to name an example.
The people who complain about regulations and law either don't understand why they exist or how they work, or they have an interest in the abolishment of it because they benefit from that.
Then you get that BS about how USA is better off than EU. Well, if you're healthy, educated, and employed, sure. Otherwise? You can just use your eyes. Go drive through a rich and poor neighborhood in both. The poverty in USA is horrendous, and the effects are shown. We got poverty too, but not as severe. No need to go to that area between West and East coast. You can experience this right near the Bay Area. San Jose is supposedly a mess. I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great).
Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not?
Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in?
The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.
I didn't expect you to agree either. I wanted to inform the reader and lurker, not convince you. Why you have to resort to 'you are exactly the kind of person' is beyond me.
Since you decided to edit your post, so have I:
Yes, a government can outsource/delegate such, if the quality is good, why not? For example, the audit has to be thorough and the outcome non-discriminatory.
As far as I am concerned it is a very sick platform because (well anything related to cryptocurrency is) some of the bets are about dark things, seemingly allowed. For example, imagine being able to bet when the next murder of the Zodiac is happening, and how it'd occur. Same with the missile example. Should we therefore ban or regulate it? I don't know what is wisdom. But I do know EU and Spain can decide on this for themselves. One thing of note: insider trading is illegal in EU, yet Trump's clan hobby (yes, in past presidency it occurred as well, but not as severe, nor as ridiculous).
Fry's closed in 2021.
The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.
Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma...
Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
That ^ is mostly true today.
If you have access to Polymarket or Kalshi, you have internet access. If you have internet access, you have access to more public knowledge than any previous generation.
Whether you use the internet to educate yourself or to gamble should be your choice. But starting today, it is no longer your choice in Spain.
That didn't happen. The internet didn't solve disability, it didn't solve education, it didn't solve misinformation, didn't stop scams. In fact, it has made some of these things worse.
Pretty shocking to see all the replies you got though. Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
Fire departments are good for the community at large as well so the fire at your house doesn't become the fire at my house.
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.
Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.
When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.