>Kalshi and Polymarket are mainly just sportsbooks.
How? They sell contracts between two users. One side each. Completely different from a sportsbook where users are betting that the lines they set are not correct.
If they sell contracts on market prediction, then any person doing for example insider trading on corporations, fixing outcomes of sport events, directly paying out others to force event outcome, blackmailing people, or just directly adjusting some result like the CDG weather guy are completely in line with the platform rules and all that is perfectly legal. But since Poly and Kalshi themselves admit that those things are "unfair" and forbidden they have themselves removed their "just a contract" status and transitioned to a gambling status, where indeed fixing matches is bad.
90% of the betting volume on Kalshi is betting on sports. I know how prediction markets work and how they're different that traditional sportsbooks, but they ultimately allow customers to do the same things.
If you are saying Kalshi isn't a sportsbook because the house isn't on the other side of the bet, you might as well argue that DraftKings isn't a sportsbook because they don't actually track your wagers in a book.
Have you heard of Betfair? A UK company which has done "prediction markets" since 2000. In the Europe it is called a betting exchange and regulated like sports betting. And betting pools is another form of betting which is way older than that and there are no house in them either.
And by your argument poker or backgammon would not be gambling either.
And there is no house in pool betting, poker or backgammon either. We still count all of them including betting exchanges (what has now been rebranded as prediction markets) are still normally regulated as gambling.
I would even add that it fits into a more general trend where operations are done within SQL instead of in a script/program which would use SQL to load data. Examples of this are duckdb in general, and BigQuery with all its LLM or ML functions.
Based on just simple math there was basically no chance of turnout being over 2.5m and yet the market for multiple days had the higher buckets at exorbitant prices.
>Prediction Markets require insider trading to function.
And yet there are folks like me who have been on them for years before kalshi/polymarket making a very good side income from them without having insider knowledge.
Prediction markets as a whole are very very inefficient. That's not to say that insider trading doesn't exist but you can't claim that they require insider trading to function.
You're excluding the overwhelming majority of websites that were personal sites. Of those, the overwhelming majority are now gone. None ran with a goal of profit or even revenue. They cost so little that their owners were happy to keep them online at their own expense. But they were starved of attention by sites like Facebook and Instagram that used the open web only as one-way onramps to their walled gardens, so they languished and died. I contend, and you may disagree, that the information content of these small sites formed the backbone of the useful web at the time.
Sites that began with the question "how can we share what we know?" are what I call the open web. Sites that began with the question "how can we make money from* the web?" are what are killing it.
* I don't have a problem with sites that make money on the web. For all its problems, Amazon is a store that operates online. That's wonderful. But Facebook views the open web as a problem, locking a bunch of it behind uncrawlable access controls and pathologically self-serving algorithms. We used to share the public parts of our lives on our personal websites, usually for free as a part of the ISP subscription that we already paid for. Now all that happens on Facebook, and we've paid a multi-trillion-dollar tax for the privilege of doing what we used to do for free.
Alternatively, how would you suggest content that takes time and effort to make be funded?
I get that it's sad, but I'd gladly pay a monthly sub to use a not enshitified internet, rather than the cluster fuck of ads and data stealing that exists in the modern web. Spending time on the 90s and early 2000s internet and comparing it to this dumpster fire makes me so darn sad.
Were you paid to write this comment? If not, then your statement is either true (and therefore slop), or false (because what made the early web awesome was people like you putting their thoughts online... for free).
How? They sell contracts between two users. One side each. Completely different from a sportsbook where users are betting that the lines they set are not correct.
reply