I think the idea behind a prediction market is pretty interesting, especially from an economics dataset point-of-view. And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Oscars?"
But we're in an era of less and less responsible government oversight, so the whole thing naturally gets ruined if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals from participating in ugly, greedy ways.
Though I'm also likely to adopt the idea that the absenece of competent government is an effect, not a cause, of some societies having had to mortgage their souls.
Edit: I mean, yeah, if you're stuck being fixated on pessimism and greed, of course there's a lot of ways this can be exploited. I just think that in its more pure, good faith form, the idea of letting the market tell you odds of things happening is pretty fascinating. I'm sure there's a whole body of economics on this idea, that it might be a better predictor of events than other models. I had fun betting $5 here and there on video game announcements/awards. (though for me betting is a game, not a financial strategy)
Friend of a friend does announcing online.
Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours.
So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul.
Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say.
No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said.
That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially.
You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat.
It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades.
[0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
Never go to Nevada.
But you have to go to Nevada for that.
You don't have Nevada 24/7 in your pocket. Or you shouldn't.
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there.
I don't think so. At least you have a 50% chance of winning. Unlike say a lottery or a slot machine.
It's not the chance of winning that matters, it's the mean expected value.
If you have a 50% chance of losing $2 or gaining $1, you have a negative expected value and that's bad.
If you have a 10% chance of gaining 100$ and 90% chance of losing $1, that's an expected value of $9 and it's a great deal.
Yes that is bad, but it isn't as bad as the expected value of a Powerball lottery ticket.
I didn't say it isn't bad, just that it isn't the worst.
50% chance of winning, but there is a rake from the site.
How does someone break into that field. I have a buddy who used to announce pro sports ( he's sort of famous for it ) that wants this kind of work.
He just kinda hustled I think. I don't know him all that well. But from what I do know, he started announcing for his buddies who referred him to other people and so on. Eventually he had a website going and would schedule when he was available for announcing (dude has a family and day job so not all the time). Made a niche in online basketball games and was open to really anything.
If your buddy is somewhat famous, then get on the socials and network with the players in the files already, they all seem really open as it's still a big and unaddressed market. Payouts are gonna be small at first, think beer leagues and largeish friends groups. And from what I can tell the competition for big gigs is tougher as you go up in the field.
Honestly give it a try, seems like a great side hustle.
Edit: be a great idea for AI in the low end, but it's the human touch that really makes it. The guy I know is pretty funny and I assume his wisecracks help him
As mentioned in the other comment, scout out local events - bars that have trivia nights, bowling contests, etc. Find the ones where it's obvious the bartender is also the MC, and offer to do it for them for free/drinks/small fee.
Have business cards ready to go and have them laying out.
In my heart of hearts, all gambling is equally degenerate: from stock markets to assasination markets.
Economics sort of works ok when money transfers are used to mediate, y'know, the exchange of goods and services. Nearly everything else turns out to be a pretty obvious moral hazard.
Reminds me of the cheap bets casino from National Lampoons Vegas Vacation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byfewcZsug4
How is that different from roulette?
The regulation behind who can operate such establishments legally and who can participate, etc.?
Roulette uses a physical process and is not compromised.
I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
Yes if you hold a camera and capture the speed and position of the ball and wheel you can gain an edge, people have tried it. Good point.
It literally has to be compromised to work. If the roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start of the spin. It has to have irregularities and asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour – and those same irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!
But if that physical process were somehow complicated, why, you could break the bank at Monte Carlo!
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets.
At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).
Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
> Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
this isn't correct. slot machines are random. my first job out of school was, in part, making sure slot machines were random.
people think the machines are rigged because they don't understand the rules. the machines are fair, it's the pay tables that are rigged.
One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low. But look at it as paying for the experience of the possibility of a jackpot and realize when you buy one ticket or multiple so just buy one and it becomes a cheap thrill.
Well, you can win the big state lottery if you really khow what you're doing. But you might need to hide in a remote island if you win too much. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/how-to-win...
> if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and player.
$50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you’ve broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just feeds an addiction. But there’s no skill here; the odds of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player does.
I don’t play the lottery but I’ve never really understood the math against it. It’s a negative expected value, sure, but it also produces a (small) probability of a high return. The math against it seems to hinge on the idea that people should maximize the expected value of their wealth.
But, an alternative goal is to maximize your probability of qualitative changes up, and minimize the probability of qualitative changes down, for your living conditions. If somebody is in a situation where they can spend a qualitatively inconsequential amount of money on lotteries, then playing the lottery is a rational way of maximizing this metric, right?
Of course, it does add the hard-to-quantify risk that they’ll become addicted to gambling and start spending a qualitatively meaningful amount of money gambling!
OTOH if we as a society all started putting a small percentage of our wealth toward the lottery we’re essentially misallocating whatever that percentage was. So it produces a somehow less efficient economy I guess. So maybe there’s a social bias against it.
Two or more tickets in the same draw have a lower expected value. Yes it is a very small change to your payout while having an extra chance. In some way you're betting against your self with a second bet in the game relative to the jackpot .
I have one friend who likes to gamble. I've tried the old math argument with him and he dismisses it out-of-hand. He says that, yes, he knows it's a negative sum game but sometimes he wins and that makes it worth it. Then he says, "You spend money on a symphony or an art museum or an expensive restaurant, right? Those are guaranteed to leave you a little bit poorer at the end of the night. Same thing as gambling, but with a bigger guarantee."
And I didn't have a response.
Hear me out: Whenever people try the "math argument" on a gambler they are basically wrong and are misunderstanding how recreational gamblers actually think, which is not irrational (for the most part) or at least not irrational in the way people think on the surface.
Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will (on average) lose money.
Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely change the life of most people and therefore the marginal utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on the ticket.
It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling companies are arbitraging. And for people who become addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The companies are just exploiting people who have a disease and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
[1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
[2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by probability. This could be seen as how much of a difference the payoff would make to their life.
All people who go to casinos are not pathological gamblers.
They have some disposable income, and spend it at the casino for a bit of fun. Sometimes, they come out richer, and they are happy, sometimes, they lose, they come out a bit disappointed, but that's the cost of of entertainment.
Some fraction of people that start out that way end up addicted and spending way more money on gambling then they should.
Gambling can be entertainment, and as long as it's viewed as consumption it's fine IMO. I enjoy playing craps whenever I'm in a casino, and have great memories with friends playing the ups and downs of the table.
The response is probably that gambling is designed to be as addictive as possible, and while your friend might think they will not get addicted, is it really a good risk to take?
Unless you do insider trading, which can be pretty easy on prediction markets depending on your job...
How is this not degenerate?
You know you’re going to lose.
You know the money is wasted.
You do it anyway — and knowingly just pretend those first two facts aren’t true.
Then you lose your money. Which you knew was going to happen.
Go to a movie and you are going to be put the ticket prices, it’s a money losing proposition clearly there’s no reason to do so. Obviously, people place value on some experiences so any argument which fails to consider that is flawed.
If you happen to be at a casino, make exactly one bet in your lifetime and there’s a significant chance you’ll end up ahead. On average you’ll be out money but we don’t live out every possibility and average them. It’s just one event and you could easily end up ahead, it’s only as you repeat it with minimal gains and negative returns that things quickly become a near certainty.
With Powerball the odds are low but not astronomical that you buy 1 or 1000 tickets and end up ahead. It’s the most likely outcome by a massive margin but due to non jackpot prizes a long way from zero.
However again the odds of breakeven just reduce the cost of play they aren’t the only thing people get for their money.
How would you define degenerate?
If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.
> At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).
Only fair until the manufacturer of said lootboxes gets in on the action. This is why gambling is so highly regulated in all jurisdictions.
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
How is this any more degenerate than slot machines? At least it is truly random, rather than rigged.
slot machines are truly random. the rigging is in the pay table.
I don't see how this is more degenerate than betting on roulette at a casino. Prediction markets usually provide more efficient odds than casinos because the house profits from trading volume instead of from the spread, so it's essentially just a way to bet on a game of complete chance with a much better average-loss than you could get on games of pure chance in the past. If people want to bet on coinflips, it seems objectively better that they have access to a way to do that in a way where they only get fleeced for 1% of their bet rather than 5%+ of their bet.
For sporting events, for example, the alternative to prediction markets 5-10 years ago was to use a website where you bet against the house directly, and they'd usually take around a 15-20% spread, and they'd ban you and keep your account funds if they decided you're winning too much. Now you can bet on the same events on prediction market sites, with around a 1-5% spread, and the house doesn't care how much you win (so there's actually an argument that you're playing a game of skill, compared to the old format where you definitely weren't, since you'd be banned for being too skilled).
Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someone to collect on the obvious profit opportunity for an assassination.
The more anonymous the winner is relative to the action taken, the more that bad behavior is incentivized. Back when this was dreamed up, the idea was crypto. But now we have prediction markets that encourage insiders to bet. And an administration that chooses to not prosecute corruption: https://www.wsgr.com/print/v2/content/49042620/Executive-Ord...
The result is a market that incentivizes manipulating wars for private gambling profit. With no need for anonymity, because the investigators have been fired. :-(
Or bribery: "I didn't pay anybody to dismiss the case against me. I just innocently hedged my personal risks by betting I'd be convicted. Now, if that judge or clerk just happened to be betting I'd go free, so that my million dollars is coincidentally in their pockets... well, that's just how things work out sometimes in prediction markets."
The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the pardon for Changpeng Zhao (Binance CEO). Or the investigation into Justin Sun that got stopped.
See also the list of prominent people and companies that benefitted from executive action after investing in the Trump Presidential Library. You know like Amazon, Coinbase, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. One wonders what exactly Qatar has gotten for deciding that the library needs a jumbo jet.
As I said, when the investigators have been fired, this kind of stuff can just happen in the open...
(To be fair, this happens on both sides. Granted, Trump has moved the Overton Window on corruption. But there is no guarantee that his successor, even if a Democrat, will want to move it back.)
The insiders ruin a market like this. Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders.
And in the US prediction markets are regulated like commodities which have much more lax insider rules, because again, insider trading is the point.
> Prediction markets as a useful tool are predicated on insider information. The punters without edge are the bait incentivizing the insiders.
And like any other gambling (see 1919 Black Sox), they can also incentivize behavior for actors who can influence the outcome of what’s being gambled upon.
Personally, that’s a significant enough negative externality for me to not want to live in a society where “prediction markets” are popular.
Makes me wonder if there's a bet you can take on Polymarket that Polymarket will get shut down due to it negatively influencing behavior. The insider trading on that one should get interesting.
Will it pay out if it is shut down though?
1. I believe you can bet on this
2. If it’s only banned in the US, yes it pays out, you just need to get a VPN or go to another country.
Also even it’s banned everywhere, the markets are blockchain contracts so you should be able to access it without the website, which is just the frontend. (this is where my technical expertise breaks down, someone who knows blockchain is a better expert)
I personally think it’s ridiculous that we have allowed these prediction markets to subvert our sports betting laws. And meaningful corruption legislation should exist to prevent government and military personnel from profiting from them.
But if you are going to allow them at all, you want as much expertise as possible in them. Sharks eating minnows is what that looks like.
Why would we want insiders to profit on a public decision like war? If some general has money on Iran's leader being taken out by March 1, he might not be acting in the best interest of the country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwz8051y0lo
The idea is that prediction markets show the “odds” of an event occurring (that’s why it’s percentages after all).
So if a war with Iran is going to happen, and so a general bets that it will, the odds will jump and go very high.
Now at least theoretically, people in the Middle East can see the high odds, and travel elsewhere.
After seeing how many people got trapped in the UAE, I might check these prediction markets in the future for similar things.
It only work if you have a "good" passport and you can pack your income source and move it (i.e. easier for a web page designer than a goat farmer).
Sure, but some people would get out, right?
Surely you aren’t saying that because prediction markets can’t save every single life, that it’s somehow useless to save a few.
Another example, if odds jump on a missile strike on a particular city, you might have the chance to move out of the way.
For me that feels like the difference between insider trading and market manipulation.
How is it useful when what we are seeing is insiders place massive bets immediately before the event resolves. Does gaining this information a few hours early provide value to society that offsets the impact of normalizing gambling and attaching incentives to bad outcomes of war, politics, etc.
This notion that price discovery is only possible with insider trading is demonstrably false yet somehow surprisingly pervasive.
In the same way that the crypto hucksters were desperate to invent legitimate reasons for NFTs to have trillion-dollar valuations, pathetic gamblers are desperate to invent legitimate reasons for there to exist some non-gambling cover for the existence of predictions markets.
> insider trading is the point
Says who?
It's in the name: Prediction market. The point is to predict an outcome, insiders will naturally be better at that than non-insiders.
Though I think where things start to get a bit more insidious is when the "insiders" have access not merely to inside information, but the ability to change the outcome. That type of insider trading should be banned IMO because it works against the purpose of prediction markets as a tool. (Though the extent to which banning that is possible is debatable.)
That isn't very convincing, as the stock market itself is largely a prediction market. People buy stock to bet on future success, whether that manifest in the form of stock price increases, splits, and/or dividends. It's merely a much more narrowly-focused prediction market.
For that very reason, insider knowledge, and especially the ability to influence future outcomes, become the subject of heavy regulation. And, the lack of such regulation for congressional members is also why their net worth tends to skyrocket once entering office.
I'd argue that the "purpose" of the stock market is matching investors with companies that want liquidity. Allowing insider trading hurts the purpose by driving away non-insider trading participants, and it does not really help in any way.
With prediction markets, the "purpose" is information discovery, and "insider trading" actually helps (=> via information from insiders).
Disclaimer: I'm somewhat playing devils advocate here, I personally think that prediction markets are for now mostly an ineffective zero-sum game (and legalized gambling with all the drawbacks that brings).
> I'd argue that the "purpose" of the stock market is matching investors with companies that want liquidity.
But you don't usually buy the stocks from the company itself, do you? Unless there is some shenanigans with buyouts going on...
Companies can issue new shares to take advantage of positive public sentiment.
> Robin Hanson, the economist who’s commonly known as the godfather of modern prediction markets, thinks that using inside information to place bets like this is actually necessary for these markets to work—making “insider trading” a feature, not a bug.
> “The point of these markets is to get information, so the only reason you should ever be trading on them is if you think you have some information,” said Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University whose academic work inspired the founders of prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi. “People with more information should trade more and get more money because that's how they get paid for the information they contribute.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2026/01/09/why-predi...
Seems like you should read more about these markets.
Insiders bring information to a market. Intelligent analysis and prediction also does, but obviously insiders have special information they are incentivized to bring to the market. Most people placing these bets are simply gambling, insiders and analysts at least have rational reasons for placing bets and add information to the market.
> Insiders bring information to a market [...] special information they are incentivized to bring
Simultaneously: Insiders have power to coerce an outcome, the market creates a corrupt payoff for them to abuse that power.
If I use a drone to look over a fence to count the amount of inputs and outputs of a factory, and only I know this, it is perfectly legal for me to trade on it. Not insider trading! I'm just a really good information-finder and I'm morally just in how clever I am at finding an edge.
If I work at the company and count the inputs and outputs, and trade on it, I am a morally bankrupt scumbag and I have hurt society and all of the traders in the market.
Hmmmmmmm
If you work at the company you have almost certainly signed an agreement not to disclose such information; if you do so, you are violating the agreement. But that isn't insider trading.
If you hold a position of fiduciary responsibility within the company (or gain information from someone who does) that's a different matter. But the analogy there would be hacking into the company to read internal records, not just looking over a fence. in both cases, it's a crime.
This is a troll post, and I'll bite.
The reason insider trading is illegal is because it undermines confidence in the markets by establishing a pattern by which insiders with privileged, secret information leverage it to profit off people who cannot access this information.
It also incentivizes insiders to leverage their position within a company to manipulate the business in order to profit. This also undermines integrity of markets.
Your second example, setting aside all your troll bait inflammatory verbiage about moral bankruptcy, is an illustration of this risk. I don't care if it rises to the level of moral bankruptcy, it is harmful to a capitalist society in a serious way.
Your first example is a depiction of someone leveraging information that anyone can gather. It does not undermine the integrity of markets because it is just an investor acting on publicly-accessible information.
Yeah there are all those stupid things like "what color of Gatorade will they pour over players at the end of the game" that are ultimately about some arbitrary decision an individual or small group. Probably a whole sports game is fair to bet on because it involves so many sub-events but people gamble on things that make no sense to be gambling on.
If some specific prediction market can easily be manipulated by someone with insider knowledge, you better should not gamble in it.
> Unlike in sports/stocks there are no rules / punishment for insider trading.
Wouldn’t the good old-fashioned fraud laws present in basically every jurisdiction apply?
Even in stock trading you can get away with it for a long time. See Epstein.
The stock market and the sports market are also honeypots .
I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn if you believe that when you bet on the stock market or on the sports market for each and every particular bet involving millions of people the maximum profit is not reaped by a half a dozen of insiders who trade on inside informations and their only problem is not being too obvious about it.
Also even if they get caught the millions of people wagering are still getting fucked because there is not a redo or making people whole when the insider traders get caught (which is a tiny percentage of the time)
Yep, similar thing is happening with college sports.
You went from a situation where the intent was for coaches to develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.
And now it's leaving at the slightest difficulty, constant money dangling to encourage transfers because even if the guy doesn't play for you at least he's not playing for your opponent, followed by a million voices online just telling kids to follow the money. There's no telling how much gambling is playing a part.
It's taken one of the best institutions in our country for developing youth and corrupted it while people go out of their way to not report on the stories of people being hurt by the process.
Well, to be fair, in order to complain about no longer being able to "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.."
we would actually have had to have been delivering on the whole "..develop young men, teach them about hard work, overcoming obstacles, getting an education and become a part of an alumni base for the rest of your life.." story.
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of student athletes in money sports, we never really delivered on all of those promises in the past.
These younger generations (GenZ) of student athletes are just wayyy smarter than the older generations of student athletes. Consequently, we can't take advantage the way we did in the past. Even women's volleyball and basketball athletes are choosing to take their money up front, and then transfer because they're pretty sure they won't need the "value" of the "alumni base".
Yep, I realize that a lot of fans of different schools were jaded by the idea. It was happening at Clemson though. Dabo made that his #1 priority as a coach, constantly led the country in graduation rates alongside Stanford while competing at the highest level. They created a program called P.A.W. Journey to really take it to the next level too.
https://clemsontigers.com/pj-what-is-paw-journey
He's obviously not the only coach who wants to carry his program that way, just the most high profile to recently do it while competing at the highest level.
Another notable legend was John Wooden from UCLA who famously won 10 championships while teaching his players his Pyramid of Success that's been written about in books and even hung on Ted Lasso's office wall in the TV show.
We hear about the negative examples. What you're not hearing about as much today is the number of players entering the transfer portal seeking better deals who don't get one and end up as college dropouts. It's a huge percentage.
if there's no guardrails to prevent peoeple without souls or the accompanying morals
I am curious - how do you even begin to police such a thing like polymarket? Wouldn't it take enormous resources to do it? Is it even worth it at that scale? They let you bet on anything and everything, right?
I had fun betting $5 here and there
Maybe this is the solution - don't let people bet more than $5. That is small enough for everyone to have some fun and not worth it for insider trading, threatening journalists etc?
You mean, turn it into a fun minor hobby-time of sharing popular-opinions that are mostly weighted by how common they are, rather than dangling a huge perverse-incentive in front of an insider so that they reveal (or cause) a strong outcome through greed?
Actually, there's another perverse incentive operating on a higher level, when it comes for the people running things: "How is my prediction-market startup supposed to IPO for a bajillion dollars if we're not first-in-line for having sometimes-corrupt insider data? Nobody's going to pay me that much for a company that's just a spicier form of polling."
You'd have to define extravagant first. No highly-regulated bookmaker in the UK would take that bet as written.
It has nothing to do with oversight and everything to do with extralegal means of enforcing your win.
>And there's probably a lot of fun, harmless things to bet on. eg. "Will Conan lead an extravagent musical number at the Emmys?"
I cannot fathom what could be fun about that.
Fun to lose to insiders on the production team?
I don't know why you'd ever put money into something like that. Anyone working on the show will know the answer
Kinda legal insider trading, I guess.
I mean, what's fun about my specific example? Guaranteed money.
By that definition all terrible aspects of the concept are the same as the fun.
Conan hosted the Oscars.
Sure, it’s fun if the limits are at fun levels. Five dollar bet on who wins an Oscar? Whatever. But you could do that amongst your friends or in the office pool. Scaling gambling on real world events to VC level, or allowing people to bet self-ruining levels on anything online? Should be illegal and ought to be recognized as blatantly immoral. That it isn’t shows just how far the cultural rot has gotten.