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Comment by superfrank | Hacker News Reader

First, over 90% of the wagers on Polymarket and Kalshi are already on sports (quoting John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on that one). Despite the headlines, Kalshi and Polymarket are mainly just sportsbooks.

Second, while yes, some of the markets available on prediction markets can push people to do awful things, there are plenty that are harmless. I'm cherry picking to make an extreme point, but I would so much rather have someone betting on what the temperature in Los Angeles is going to be tomorrow on Kalshi than betting on who will win the little league world series on DraftKings.

I support regulation saying certain things should not be allowed to be bet on, but allowing bets on morally questionable things isn't a quality unique to prediction markets.

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Technically they are betting exchanges. But they also probably have contracts with some of the big sportsbooks to provide liquidity too making them also kinda a sportsbook. I used to work at a betting exchange and we did have liquidity partners that made sure to increase the liquidity on our exchange.

>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.

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.

Whether the people betting on the sports are betting directly with each other or not is a very small difference.

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.

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