We need at least one state to do this when large corporations violate privacy laws.
I have heard and seen: Bet's on the live & fate of a celebrity, person, company, country, weather etc.. It's getting absurdly criminal. You've seen the guy in France burning a weather-sensor, just so he wins a bet. The soldier's knowing their mission and "secretly" betting on the death of their enemies. This is getting beyond dark and unethical. It's maximally anti-social and destructive for humanity.
If Polymarket/Kalshi and co. continue roaming free, we'll eventually see parts of humanity circling a death spiral like ants do.
We're feeling the effects of broad-spectrum gambling addiction. It's hitting our kids. It's hitting our young men. It's hitting our elderly. Restrictions on social media, regulation around gambling and folks trying to drink less are all, it seems, part of a common theme.
Is there any evidence these markets actually provide useful predictions?
Kalshi had Abbot solidly in the lead (polls were closer to final accuracy) until the minute enough votes came in for news orgs' forecasting models to tip the race to Lean D, and then plummeted to 0%.
On balance it seems like they provide little to no uniquely valuable information for anything that matters.
https://kalshi.com/markets/govpartytx/texas-governor/govpart...
Note that for the Texas governor, Kalshi had Abbott at 60+% on election day and he lost by a _million_ votes.
There will always be cases where everyone is surprised. If you have a useful predictor that means it incrementally helps improve your expectation. It doesn't eliminate surprises.
There are plenty of legit critiques of the prediction power of these markets, but they typically don't involve pointing at single observations. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is prediction markets are highly accurate relative to other forecasting methods, but have also significant biases. Such as long-shot bias, etc.
But those biases are small enough that they are only resolvable by looking at lots of independent at-bats. Real-world consensus was not that Abbott would get smoked to that extent, and so of course that consensus was exactly reflected in prices. If you read a lot of pre-election commentary (I was reading primarily Democrats) you would realize that people knew something was going to happen, but they really had no idea about the extent.
Furthermore, we don't learn a lot (anything really) about efficiency by looking at a large number of events that are highly correlated. And of course the whole blue wave was correlated events, so yes you will find a lot of "bad" prices, in terms of raw numbers. But taken together they are really one observation.
See this huge study on political bias: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35846.pdf (Spoiler alert, if there is one it's incredibly small.)
We shouldn't be able to bet on bombings and wars, even without considering insider trading
I don't think it takes much boldness, so my condolences to anyone who needs to hem and haw over that decision.
It does raise the question, is waiting for the full picture when the full picture is ruining more lives for not much gain at all to anyone really a good idea?
As to your general point, I agree. We must be bold and say the right words online lest a stranger think we are terrible people because we choose our words to mean things instead of to signal our morality.
If you've somehow missed how these companies act then I'd say you're missing the table stakes to even discuss them: saying they're "everywhere" would not be an overstatement.
Also I don't get why you're clinging to morality as a loincloth: is there a logical reason to allow any of this? Even if you're a lover of all that is vice, we had gambling!
We don't need Kalshi to allow it: they represent a form of gambling that is less regulated, more susceptible to manipulation, more likely to cause unique adverse effects in the real world as people become incentivized manipulate arbitrary events it tracks.
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You're confusing amorality with objectivity. If you're our resident expert on what words mean, the broadly tolerated concept of moral objectivity shouldn't be foreign.
And it's less contentious to apply it when instead of saying "Gambling is bad", we're saying "Allowing a private company to turn any arbitrary event in the natural world into an always available, poorly regulated, aggressively advertised lottery tickets is bad".
Regardless of if one considers gambling moral, the latter is bad to most logical persons. Ironically the stubbornness with which you're ascribing personal morality to other people for saying that is by far the loudest attempt to signal personal morality in this comment section.
Obvious connotations aside, withholding judgment isn't a neutral or objective position when the harm is ongoing. It’s effectively arguing for the status quo.
EDIT: Looks like the 9th and 6th circuits have since agreed and rejected Kalshi and CFTC's argument.
Source?
I'm seeing "U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi in Arizona, a Trump appointee, denied Kalshi's request for a temporary block on Tuesday and ordered the company to demonstrate why the case should be in federal court given the new state charges" [1]. That's quashing a request for a preliminary injunction. Not throwing out the case.
Meanwhile, "federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts, respectively, issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports betting in their states, while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi. The Nevada lawsuit was remanded to state court."
[1] https://www.wlky.com/article/arizona-kalshi-criminal-charges...
It will go to SCOTUS due to the circuit court split.
I highly doubt it, they declined the case so the circuit split will live on for now and most likely be resolved by the legislature via one of the many bills making their way through congress. They could always take it up later but they're not so subtlety signaling that congress needs to make their intent clear on this one.
More likely a wasteful move. Federal preemption is well established.
This is a matter of whether the state laws violate the constitution.
> place restrictions on gamblers within their borders
This is a matter of if state laws have been preempted by federal laws.
Again these two things are not like each other.
I said 'commerce' not 'finance' because finance is just one of many, many things that is within the purview of federal law due the commerce clause.
Imagine there’s a law saying that regulating abortion is federal responsibility and the senate then uses this law as justification to ban demonstrations around abortion clinics. Would that mean that demonstrating next to an abortion clinic counts as abortion?
That's why subsequent courts walked it back. It was an obviously flawed ruling that produces preposterous results.
I mean, can the government prohibit dying (and throw your corpse in jail) because death means buying less food from others? Can the federal government throw you in jail for not having enough children because that reduces the amount spent on baby clothes?
[1] https://kalshi.com/markets/kxrt/rotten-tomatoes-scores/kxrt-...
Gambling has to do with putting money in a proposition, not with sports. "I bet you I can drink two points before you" is not a financial statement.
In reality, every thing we do in life is a gamble. Even investing in US Treasury Bonds. (And if you don't think so, look at the national debt again.)
I think gambling is defined by the players' behaviour more than the game's structure. There are professional poker players who I would argue do not gamble. They're playing risks as much as an insurance adjuster.
On the other hand, someone investing their life savings into McDonald's meals in an attempt to win a sweepstakes isn't buying burgers.
So the question really is, how many Kalshi and Polymarket users display signs of problem gambling? From what I'm seeing, it isn't negligible [1].
[1] https://newsroom.ucla.edu/in-the-news/la-therapists-are-seei...
2) The CME copper futures contract (/HG) is also physically settled.
/ES futures are used to hedge an SPX position or speculate on SPX. SPX options are also cash settled.
I’m not going to allow you to depose me, if you want to know more about futures contracts, CME and CBOE publish information on all of their futures contracts.
Then I won't ask you what the difference is between speculation and gambling. Instead I'll just declare myself the winner of this debate.
Prediction betting has an argument that truth discovery is economically valuable, but I don't buy it.
If prediction betting was banned, only two businesses would be affected, Kalshi and Polymarket. If futures markets were banned, many businesses would be massively affected, and almost every business would be indirectly affected.
The common language meaning of gambling is too broad and captures things that aren't legally regulated as gambling such as gambling (again common meaning of the word) with futures contracts. Sometimes gambling is dressed up a speculating, but one could argue that one can speculate as a participant in many card games since they allow room for analysis and aren't pure chance. This is what the legal dispute comes down too.
The other is the debate for the value of the truth discovery. Some folks buy it and others don't. SCOTUS will likely take the case to resolve the split between the circuits and we'll if the value of this even enters into the decision or it just comes down interpretation of the statutes.
Awfully rude.
>The common language meaning of gambling is too broad and captures things that aren't legally regulated as gambling such as gambling (again common meaning of the word) with futures contracts.
No it doesn't. No one argues that state gambling laws actually regulate the trade of securities, options, or anything actually covered by the CFTC, so this is a completely sham argument.
>The other is the debate for the value of the truth discovery. Some folks buy it and others don't. SCOTUS will likely take the case to resolve the split between the circuits and we'll if the value of this even enters into the decision or it just comes down interpretation of the statutes.
The value of truth discovery is completely irrelevant to these cases. Either congress intended to regulate sports gambling under the CFTC, or it didn't. The executive branch can't get around that.
This feels like a similar playbook to crypto. People make money through pump and dump schemes and/or luck/speculation. Then they justify their existence as some bastion of decentralized power/coordination.
I think a lot of folks here think I'm debating this because I support prediction markets, but I could have cared less which way SCOTUS comes down on this. Now I'm rooting for Kalshi when SCOTUS picks this up and not regretting the time I spent on this. I try to avoid commenting on anything political, but I had a moment of weakness while I was waiting for benchmarks to run. Thanks!
And this is what I've been trying to get at here... who can actually say with a straight face that congress intended to regulate sports gambling with the CFTC? It's a ridiculous proposition to which there are no actual facts that support it. Nothing in the congressional record, nothing in the statute. Just a broad reading of the language while keeping one's head in the sand.
The reference to bingo was something that New Jersey and the dissent brought up. Direct quote that covers both: 'Because Kalshi’s sports related event contracts are traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM and depend on event outcomes associated with economic consequences, they fit within the Act’s definition of “swaps” subject to the CFTC’s jurisdiction. See 7 U.S.C. §§ 2(a)(1)(A), 1a(47)(A)(ii).
New Jersey and the dissent “pile inference upon inference” and postulate that anything from bingo games to pingpong matches will fall under the CFTC’s jurisdiction.'
from: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ka...
That the holding opinion addresses, quoting the same exact section you did and then going on to say that "[i]n such far-fetched scenarios, Congress’s express delegation to the CTFC and the Securities and Exchange Commission to 'further define' swaps would prove useful." So yeah, that exact point stands.
>The 3rd circuit literally said they are '"swaps" subject to the CFTC's jusridiction' which is literally the opposite of what the 9th circuit said.
No, the 3rd circuit literally said that the CFTC designated Kalshi a DCM, so therefore it must be the case that its sports events contracts fall under DCM event contracts regulated by the CFTC. This is much more limited than my construction of the 9th circuit holding, which you insisted this is the opposite of it.It's literally not. The 9th Circuit's holding goes much further than to say they aren't a DCM. It says that a sports event can't be an event contract under the CFTC, so it does not even matter if it is a DCM or not.
You had me thinking you read the opinions when you came with the quotes, but it seems like at the same kind of superficial level the 3rd circuit is playing around at here. The 9th Circuit's holding is much broader and addresses the fact that the DCM designation is basically a sham, and clearly well beyond whatever congress could have intended with the statute.
And it's funny that you act informed about this but are playing ignorant the politics of the Trump admin's cronyism with Kalshi and its sudden and unprecedented designation of it as a DCM. Resting in the shallow depth of the 3rd circuit's opinion isn't a good place to be when you really think about what that court represents. And do you really think the supreme court is going to say that the executive branch can decide what congress intended by making designations like that? Fat chance. There's nothing in the congressional record that could ever indicate an intent to give the CFTC power to preempt state sports gambling laws on an individual corporate basis by special designation.
I feel like you're just interested in this for the culture war politics of it and take up the law as a barb. You're just being rude up and down this thread with your intuitive arguments which are really just legal non sequiturs but you don't get that because you don't do actual legal analysis (which is fine, I see all sorts of analyses on this site that I can't do, I just read in those circumstances).
Edit: 2nd circuit denied Kalshi's request for an injunction against NY's enforcement. So yeah... I think I'm within pretty good grounds to reasonably disagree with the 3rd circuit. You really just come off like a buffoon.
The event contract isn't tied to the delivery of a good or service.
In what? Source?
CFTC seems to be preëmpting state gambling laws under commodities regulation (specifically, as "excluded commodities"). That sounds, to me, like a major question. The sort Chevron deferred to regulators. The kind our current SCOTUS says should be decided by the Congress. To my knowledge, the Congress has said nothing about prediction markets. Which means it's in the domain of states.
Otherwise, fuck it, let's launch a prediction-market based national health insurance market. I'll sell you a contract that pays my medical bills if I have a health event.
Wall Street has been trying to argue this for ages [1]. To date, it hasn't worked.
[1] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/08/06/2...
So I wouldn’t be surprised under the right social and cultural conditions and the right people in power that it could become regarded as a protected liberty. It is rather frightening that this relativism – deprived of objective anchors and standards – doesn’t strike people as terrifying. Too many people take for granted the status quo they are accustomed to, or they are so fixated on satisfying some appetite du jour that they fail to grasp the waiting Dionysian fallout[0].
[0] https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/euripides-bacchae-sb/
My general position has been that the durability of the Bill of Rights is directly attributed to what you call "relativism". When the government finds the Bill of Rights to be unpleasant, they simply decide it never applied in the first place.
Congress didn't identify the markets it was regulating by common names or trade names. It doesn't matter if its generally called a prediction market, a commodities market, or a futures exchange. What matters is if it qualifies as a Designated Contract Market as per https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-I/part-38 so if you want to actually have knowledge of what Congress said on this topic your going to have read all of that.
There is already a split decision on this between the 3rd and 9th circuits so it seems likely SCOTUS is going to take this up. I expect they'll be the ones deciding if this in the domain of the states or not. If they don't pick it up then its going to vary by circuit, such that it will be in the domain of some states and not others.
DCMs are a creature of rule, not statute [1]. The statutes that animate it are the CFMA of 2000, Dodd-Frank "special rule" for event contracts and CEA § 5. The core question, whether the CFTC has the authority to regulate this kind of DCM, is still open.
> There is already a split decision on this between the 3rd and 9th circuits so it seems likely SCOTUS is going to take this up
Links to the split opinions?
[1] To be clear, DCMs are undefined in statute. DCMs are just referenced in other statute. Part 38 is an implementing regulation.
Seriously? That is easy to find, so I'm just going to skip past that to the petition to SCOTUS that references both: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/26/26-299/428759/2026...
If that's your only source, I'll rest my case–it make the argument cleanly.
Its seems like there is literally nothing you will accept to show that this isn't settled yet.
To the extent I’m challenging anything above, you’ll see it’s in rejecting anyone claiming this is obvious or settled.
Edit: 2nd circuit denied Kalshi's request for an injunction against NY's enforcement. So yeah... I think I'm within pretty good grounds to reasonably disagree with the 3rd circuit.
Predictions aren't swaps as defined by federal law. If they were, the term "swap" would be so broad that every transaction and exchange of value in the world would be within the CFTC's jurisdiction, excluding those the CEA gives to the SEC.
The only reason the prediction market hasn't already been shut down is because multiple members of the president's family are heavily invested in the industry.
I know several people that had their lives severely impacted by these things and they were all regular people.
Libertarians are like house cats. They’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
Now, I'm willing to accept that people will disagree about what deserves intervention and how much is acceptable. We can bicker about how much retail sports betting, guns, drugs, adult content, etc, etc, should be curtailed, that's fine.
But the hill I will die on is that people, such as yourself, who use a situations like this, where the overwhelming majority will probably want some amount of intervention as a soapbox to peddle intervention into people's private behavior for it's own sake like it's some sort of good default policy are evil at their very core and should be ridiculed, shunned and marginalized for the benefit of us all.
Same argument around banning hard drugs. They just make society worse. Obviously hard drugs are more clear cut and definitely worse for you, just saying, similar situation in principle.
jfc this is just terminal contrarianism. do we really need to debate whether it's harmful for extremely addictive drugs to be widely available? the Chinese literally fought wars over this
If we can create a situation where those people aren't breaking into cars, stripping the wire out of buildings, or dying in the street - that would be a net positive.
Prohibition has five decades of abject failure under its belt. Try something else.
I have given out a certain of points and bubbles in my life under harm reduction programs. These efforts (which I've worked at but not been central to) have had a measurable and positive impact on syphilis rates in rural Colorado among a number of other metrics.
While I think it's not great folks use, the worst parts of many of these things are created by states sanctioning things. People mess their lives up all kinds of ways and creating a black market pretty much just changes the incentive structures. It just makes it more likely folks will do fent because that's what they can find, but if they can't find that they'll drink hand sanitizer.
Unless you think that these folks should kill themselves off using tainted drugs (which was a policy pursued by the US government during alcohol prohibition), then legalization program makes some sense.
Introducing a government monopoly on things like heroin would have a lot of up-sides with the downsides largely being slightly skewed versions what we have right now.
I don't think that marketing heroin in social media apps the way gambling does is a sane idea, but I also don't think gambling apps should be allowed to market themselves.
Like a lot of things, I believe having a government undercut the market for things would have a positive impact, but depending on your view of the relationship between the DEA and the CIA you might think that is already happening but in the worst of all possible ways,
There's already causal inference evidence out there indicating that needle exchange programs reduce rates of HIV and other bloodborne infections, but increase the risk of fatal overdose. If simply making fresh needles more accessible increases overdose rates, I suspect legalizing heroin would have a much larger effect.
But I personally am not sure what the causal relationship between access "clean needles" and "fatally overdosing" is, though I would be interesting in hearing that account.
Straw man. Nobody is calling for banning gambling nationally.
For hard drugs, the expert consensus around harm reduction is supervised injection. Casinos are, in one sense, supervised injection for gambling. Kalshi, on the other hand, is the local dealer selling fentanyl to teens [1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/polymarke...
You think they were fucking gambling on their iPhones in 1890? They weren’t even doing that in 2012! Get real.
Because our regime is corrupt and bought [1]?
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/kalshi-re...
Or they could do the opposite, and just say that apps like this are gambling, which they are, and not a "futures market" that has any real value to society.
By this measure any regulation of a commons is authoritarian. Fortunately, societies with this attitude tend to bee-line their ways to ecological collapse.
"Hedging" is like insurance but the thing you're insuring against is another bet.
I support banning sports gambling/insurance/futures because it is a big onramp for foolish people to maneuver themselves into disastrous financial decisions.
Guess at which level insurance and gambling are regulated?
And then they rant about patents! Like it should be easy to come up with a pithy statement that is meant to delineate what should be protectable from what shouldn't for EVERYTHING that has yet to be invented! Like that's a trivial task!