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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

No, a stock is a share of ownership in a company.

Now yes, people bet on the derivative value of those ownership shares... but that also happens to basically every asset. If a stock is a prediction market, then so is corn, and gold, and your home.

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Yes, they are. Accurate prediction is rewarded in every market, for every asset or asset class. There are adjacent order benefits (I live in my home, I eat corn, I have a say in how a company is run) but these are never divorced from the impact of prediction and prediction in aggregate is just a crowdsourced leading indicator of value; oil spikes the moment a missile hits Iran not because the 2 are explicitly linked, but because the market has predicted the effect on the flow of that oil over some subsequent timeframe and priced itself accordingly

Yes, but all of these things have underlying assets that are not themselves predictions. You can buy and sell corn commodities, but at the end of the contract, actual corn is delivered. Predictions markets are different in that they betting on the prediction itself and have no associated asset.

That's my point. Where to draw the line and why?

Polymarket bad because it's accessible to everyone, futures trading on the CME good because it's only available to the rich?

Corn futures deliver real physical corn at the expiration date.

Polymarket is literally booking wagers that have no underlying financial assets of any sort anywhere and labeling them as “options”

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