It's not just a gambling addiction, but many people consider themselves smarter than the average person, and nature's way of punishing these people is creating things like stock markets and polymarkets.

It’s a gambling site. The motivation behind it is to make money through transaction fees. You can bet on sports games too.

There’s also a vague argument around hedging some actual risks that some market participants genuinely want to hedge… which depends a lot on the specific bet. Eg hedging exposure to specific political events, wars or even company announcements can be relevant and worth a premium for non-insiders. Where there’s a premium to be collected there are speculators to do so.

It is for people like me. I'm usually right about things before other people even know about them. Bought BTC in 2011, ETH in 2014 (funded the IPO), Tesla in 2013, Microsoft right when they replaced Ballmer (at $30 I think), Nvidia on the Covid crash day in 2020, learned Rust in 2017, took AI seriously two weeks after ChatGPT 3.5 launched. I never had any insider information. I typically have a good feeling for things.

Some people have better data, like insiders.

Some have better models that predict with higher accuracy, given the same data.

Because taking high variance slightly negative EV shots is not a terrible strategy when you have a long time horizon.