> 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?