alt Hacker NewsHow is it even remotely as destructive as casinos, where the odds are always against you? From a probability perspective Polymarket is much more fair, as you actually have positive expected value if you have an information advantage.
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I know a fair number of people who go to a casino, spend a pre determined amount of money and as such, have fun.
Also, in roulette there's nowhere to put your money on whether a countries leader will be dead by the end of the month
I will make this argument in favor of casinos, which is that at least we have coevolved with them. They've been around for centuries. We collectively recognize the dangers. We are not collectively blindsided by them.
Individually, yeah, by all means they can prey on people. But they're on the list of things that have been preying on people for centuries, like alcohol, and all kinds of other things. Ring-fencing casinos has a track record of some success at containing them.
I mean, sure, I'd love to wake up tomorrow and for all of the human race to have advanced to the point that to every last individual we are no longer gambling and that industry vanishes in a puff of smoke. I am as far into the belief that they are immoral as it is practically possible to be. But they are at least a known and knowable risk.
These prediction markets are blindsiding us. We could put up with them for another few decades until we coevolve further with them, or we could just, you know, not. Just end them now. Plus, prediction markets have a certain meta-ness to them that casinos largely lack that will keep them fresh and coevolving their own new ways to predate on us. Casinos have basically reached their final form, prediction markets could take yet more decades to get there and it's possible there isn't a stable endgame with them. Or, again, we could just end them here and now.
The ingredient you are missing is fraud
I don't understand this logic. If people with information advantage get to cheat and win, then everyone without that advantage gets screwed. I struggle to see how this is even remotely "fair". It's like playing poker, but some players get to see what everyone's cards are.
Even humoring your logic begs the question: Why is monetizing an "information advantage" valuable to society?
Casinos are regulated and have to be much more transparent. In Europe and Australia slot machines are required to have appx min RTP (return-to-player) of 95%. With sportsbetting, bookmakers cannot just make up results. It's a dirty business preying on weak, but it's not hiding that.
Polymarket prediction results can be swayed by whales and differ from reality. Example: they ruled Tesla unsupervised full selfdriving a real usable feature in ~Feb 2026. It still doesn't exist and won't. This decision is far from being the only such one.
Because Polymarket creates an incentive to change the real-world result.
If you create a bet on {person} getting assassinated by {date}, you greatly increase the chances of somebody on the "Yes" side thumbing the scales.