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We've seen a couple other states that allow sports betting go after prediction markets. Personally, I feel that any state that allows sports betting is going to struggle to argue a case to ban prediction markets because you're essentially arguing over implementation details. Even arguments that certain prediction markets are ripe for insider trading or morally wrong fall a bit flat when you realize that traditional sportsbooks let you bet on things like college basketball player props and the little league world series.
I'm still not sure Minnesota will win their case, but it feels like that detail gives them a lot better chance of winning compared to many other states.
Why do states allow hunting some animals and not others? Why do states distinguish between different forms of income to tax? It's all implementation details.
It's like if someone killed my dog with 3d printed gun and so everyone started talking about banning or regulating 3d printers. It's like, yes, debating 3d printer regulation is probably a worthwhile debate to have, but regardless of where we end up on that it doesn't change the fact that that person killed my dog.
We should be having a debate as to whether there are certain things that are off limits to bet on, but regardless of where that debate goes, if a state has banned sports betting, it should be banned regardless of the platform.
Arguably bans on cellphone use while driving are a good example. It's not that it isn't bad, it's that distracted driving already carries a hefty fine without being specific as to the mode of distraction. So does causing an accident, which presumably is the harm we're actually trying to avoid.
I think their point was that your "going to struggle to argue a case" belief does not logically follow from a need to argue "over implementation details"
Separately, I believe over time that prediction markets will become the source of real world truth. Why? Because money is at stake and so validity and verification matter. It'll be interesting to see how, if this comes to fruition, how laws in states like Minnesota affect news reporting and journalism. It seems likely to me that at a certain point prediction markets will buy traditional media and news outlets to hire out the fact-finding and reporting teams to ensure ground truth, and of course to use journalism as the gateway to the market. So you read an article "China disappears random person" and then at the end you click a button and bet whether that person is alive or dead or whatever.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/polymarke...
Congratulations, you just created a murder market. Create “Is person X dead?”, and put a large limit order buying No. Anyone with means can capitalise on it by fulfilling the physical obligation of the market and buying up the limit order. Don’t create the murder market.
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It would be a stupid thing to do given the trail, bit it gives the person ordering it sort of plausible deniability.
That's kind of the point I was getting that. That's not really an argument about prediction markets, it's about what things should we be allowed to bet on.
I'm looking at FanDuel right now and I can bet on 1v1 eSports games of FIFA. The bets aren't even just who will win, but it's things like how many goals will a team score or who will score first. During the last Superbowl books were offering bets on things like what color tie the announcers would wear. I get that there's maybe a slight difference between that and betting on what words a sports announcer will say during the broadcast, but IMO, you're splitting hairs. They're both very easily to manipulate and very open to insider trading.
I think you probably agree with this, but IMO, there needs to be two separate conversations. One, are prediction markets sportsbooks by another name? Two, are there certain markets that we should not allow betting on?
Personally, I think the answer to both of those is yes, but I think if you smush them together into one conversation it makes things really messy.
The real question is what the purpose of prediction markets are. For sports, there isn't really much of a purpose to the markets except entertainment for the bettors, and harvesting cash for the bookies. There are also various advantage bettors (who may be involved in corruption or not), who attempt to harvest cash from some combination of the bookies and the bettors. Generally IMO these are bad due to simple human frailty though. We figured out a long time ago that for the most part, making gambling available to the general public was a net negative to society, because it mostly transfers money from addicts to big corporations, destroying lives.
For major world events, one purpose of prediction markets is just to generate a price. It's potentially useful for people to know that, in an adversarial market, what the aggregate probability of an event is. It can also be useful theoretically to hedge risks. Whether it's practical to do that depends on the depth of the market though, and with the current markets, it's not. Even more traditional "prediction" markets like commodity futures aren't deep enough to usefully hedge most risks. For example, you might think that major oil companies might hedge future pricing risks, e.g. they want to drill an oil field with a high production cost, but they're worried that the price might go down before they finish production on the wells. Generally though, the markets aren't deep enough for them to be able to do this, so they just won't drill fields that have a production cost more than roughly the lowest price in the past 20-30 years, depending on the age of the executives in charge of the decision.
There's this other purpose of prediction markets though, which is money/information laundering. People may have secret information where their employer has a strong interest in it remaining private, however the person with the information isn't that well compensated, so they monetize the information on prediction markets. On the darker side, you can have wildly illegal markets like "assassination futures" where people bet on when someone will die, and you can bet on a particular outcome, and then make it come true. There are lots of markets somewhere in the middle where someone can take an action in the context of them being a trusted agent of an organization, but instead of following their duty as an agent, they do what is profitable based on their bets in the prediction market.
Overall, IMO there are some good uses for prediction markets that allow people to hedge risk on both sides and enable useful economic activity, but most of the uses I've seen in practice are a net negative.
Those may have the added benefit of protecting you from price changes. If I need widgets and I'm worried a geopolitical event will disrupt supply, the money from a "won" bet might be minimal compared to the new costs as everyone raises the price of widgets.
So think really hard about what the problem with this whole concept might be...
Not just bars, but restaurants. Places you might take a date for nice Italian food have little corners with digital slots. Gas stations, Taco joints, sometimes an entire business in a strip mall dedicated to digital slots.
It's insane. The only place like it I'd seen prior to a some years back was Nevada. Businesses must be making crazy money off of them to be so prolific in putting them in, and that money comes from somewhere (i.e. not likely to be casual players).
I am still very, very anti prediction market, to be clear. But that is one reason why I would agree with a soft statement like "prediction markets are less harmful than sports betting" (in much the same way that a handgun is less harmful than a fully automatic rifle).
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.
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.
Or maybe I'm wrong, and "we don't want sports gambling" is different legally from "we want to be the regulator of gambling." But it seems like they're just variations of the same question, which is: do states have the power to regulate this?
This seems to be based on the false assumption that state legislation on distinct but related topics must generally be based on a coherent, consistent rationale. This is, very much, not the case under any law that binds US states, nor is it a rule that, despite not existing in binding law, is in practice imposed as a constraint on state governments by the actions of the voters.
(Conversely, even if such a rule was imposed, in law or otherwise, any state that has rules regulating the offering of insurance contracts, including who could buy insurance against what events—which, as it turns out, every state does—would have exactly the basis they need to apply the same kinds of rules to prediction markets.)
I think we can all see that betting on the Superbowl is the same thing as betting on the presidential election.
> "congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each state is free to act on its own."
(To be clear, it is still an nonsensical decision though. Congress does still have the power to regular gambling under the interstate commerce clause, just not outright ban it)
Canterbury Park would like a word…
My guess would be that either A) that's tribal land and there's an exemption for that in the current laws or B) they have a casino, but don't offer sports betting or C) they only allow sports betting on the property by either requiring all bets to be placed in person or the app they offer is for sportsbetting is geo-fenced to their property (which is how states like WA do it)
> This Minnesota law turns lawful operators and participants in prediction markets into felons overnight,” said CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig. “Minnesota farmers have relied on critical hedging products on weather and crop-related events for decades to mitigate their risks. Governor Walz chose to put special interests first and American farmers and innovators last.
Its an interesting angle; how do you draw the line between "a prediction market about what the temperature will be" and a futures contract that's used as a legitimate hedge? Minnesota's law is EXTREMELY broad in its definition: [2]
(e) "Prediction market" means a system that allows consumers to place a wager on the future outcome of a specified event that is not determined or affected by the performance of the parties to the contract, including but not limited to: (1) an athletic event or game of skill, or portions thereof or individual performance statistics therein; (2) any game played with cards, dice, equipment, or any mechanical or electronic device or machine; (3) war, state or national emergencies, natural or human-made disasters, mass shootings, acts of terrorism, or public health crises, or the ancillary effects thereof; (4) any event or events happening to a natural person or group of people;(5) a federal, state, or local election, or the actions or conduct of the federal, state, or local government and the government's agencies, employees, and officers; (6) legal actions, including but not limited to a civil or criminal suit, grand jury action, jury trial, settlement, plea, or conviction; (7) the death, assassination, or attempted killing of a person or group of persons, or mass casualty events; (8) short-term weather events or conditions; (9) events in popular culture, including but not limited to awards and the date a piece of entertainment will be released; and (10) whether a person will make a particular statement.
There's a bunch of exceptions that reference prior laws, which I haven't gone through, though they'd likely have to exempt, you know, Chase Bank, because if not that definition would clearly disallow Stocks.
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9233-26
[2] https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/SF/4760/versions/...
This has been banned for generations. It's called gambling. Of course, we all have to sit through another round of Silicon Valley pretending they've discovered some new exciting business model that's just vice.
Unlicensed gypsy cabs, SROs, shift work, patent medicines, narcotics dealing, customs fraud, and smuggling already had established market entrants I guess.
There's just too many wrong incentives at play.
Yikes. I am all for banning prediction markets but I feel like this is overreaching.
I don't know how they will enforce it but the fact that they want to control it is concerning.
Drinking and driving exists and is illegal, but going to the grocery store isn't. Should we do an all or nothing sort of ban, either allowing drunk driving or banning cars altogether? No one would do this - some uses are illegal, most aren't.
A law that allows legal uses of your car but disallows illegal activity isn't all that unheard of.
This is not a law to protect people, this is a law to protect entrenched special interests (Reservation and State-owned casinos).
While I am partial to the argument that the CFTC is actually taking away the states' 10th Amendment police power right, that is a somewhat tenuous case in comparison to the enumerated right of the federal government to provide sole jurisdiction to the executive branch to enforce a law (and not to mention a law that impacts interstate commerce).
I imagine Minnesota loses this case and what's far more likely is either a more liberal congress changes what is a future by law or a more liberal executive branch reduces the protections for Kalshi et al.
This is the authority on the CFTC's own website on prediction markets "For more information" section
https://www.cftc.gov/LearnandProtect/PredictionMarkets
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?hl=false&edition=prelim&...
And yes, both the Supremacy clause and the Interstate commerce clause neutralize any 10th amendment claim, unless the Federal government or any of its agencies was completely mum on the activity. But since the Federal government has exerted authority over that industry, via the interstate commerce clause, states can pound sand.
Congress lobs tangentially related delegation to existing agencies so you have to check how an authority is rationalized
It gets interesting
I could imagine that there's very little insight to be gained when some 23 year old has so little hope for his financial future that he's spending some of what he earned last night delivering food for uber eats on making a completely uninformed bet on a geopolitical situation involving a country he couldn't even find on a map just in case it pays out well enough that he can afford some of the needed medical care he's been putting off. That's the type of user I imagine most people participating in prediction markets are. It's telling that the vast majority of the people making bets lose their money. Are their predictions really valuable data?
Can you give an example of insights derived from prediction markets? Who benefited from the insights, and how did they act on the insights?
Genuine question as I haven’t used the site and everything I know about them are comments and some articles.
> EFFECTIVE DATE This section is effective August 1, 2026, and applies to crimes committed on or after that date.
Traditionally it has not been, but the current CFTC says that 'prediction bets on sports' ARE under their purview. This has not been fully challenged in court, though.
And by your argument poker or backgammon would not be gambling either.
This is Don Jr's consulting fee at work.
There's the same upside as pretty much all other forms of gambling. Plenty of people enjoy it and it can be used to generate tax revenue for the state.
Don't get me wrong, there's tons of harm that can come from it, but the arguments to allow them are essentially the same arguments for allowing sports betting.
Most major online sportsbooks have taken bets on the US presidential election for well over a decade. I can't imagine anyone really arguing that it's okay for DraftKings to offer that market, but not okay for Polymarket to offer it.
I put it somewhere else in this thread, but there are actually two different questions that need to be answered separately. Are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name and are there certain things that we should not allow people to gamble on.
The argument around prediction markets always seems to squish those two into one which I think does people who want regulation a disservice. I think to most people, the answer to first question (are prediction markets just sportsbooks by another name) is a pretty resounding yes. The second question has a lot more room for debate though. Even if people agree that there should be things we don't allow people to bet on, there's still plenty to argue over where we draw the line. The problem is that as long as we mush these two together, people will use the disagreement over the second question to prevent action from being taken on the first.
Yes, What MrBeast says on his next video is easy to fix, but so is something like betting on a D3 basketball player to have less than 10 points or some English 5th league soccer player to have a yellow card.
At the very least maybe it would make the advertising (tv, college campuses, etc) of prediction markets illegal in Minnesota?
That alone seems like a good thing.
The law[0] as written is a mess. You could in theory shut down the "legal" Minnesota state lottery that is otherwise carved out from the law by claiming they are providing data on outcomes via the internet if someone outside the state is betting on the outcome of the lottery in a prediction market.
[0]: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/2026/0/SF/4760/versions/... (search for "ARTICLE 8")
Predictions markets are just bets: one person wins, one loses.
Prediction markets—forums for gambling on the outcome of a platform-provided referee as to how a proposition about the future will be resolved—do not do that at all.
Now, the legal definition of commodities markets for regulatory purposes in some jurisdictions may be broad enough that prediction markets are legally a subtype of commodities market despite doing a very different thing than traditional commodities markets, but that’s an artifact of a legal definition being drawn in a very broad way at a time when it didn’t matter because nothing like prediction markets existed.
If you cross your eyes hard enough, you could claim that roulette gambling provides economic pressure to ensure that roulette wheels are balanced evenly. But when the roulette wheel is Vanah White’s dress color, what does that mean? Charitably, it’s a fun pass time. Through a dystopian lens, prediction markets pressure all public figures to play a kind of Keynsian Beauty Contest with their own behavior. Like social cooling for the celebrity/owning class.
Each market is a community with a financial incentive to think outside of the bubble.
They're just gambling. I'm not trying to argue for or against gambling here, but please stop trying to delude yourselves into thinking these gambling sites are anything other than gambling.
If harm to the consumer and societal burden are the downsides you're concerned about, you could justify banning smoking, alcohol, and junk food for the same reasons. We don't generally do that because we recognize that where there's demand there will be a market, whether it's legal or illegal. So you also need to weigh the potential harms of a black market against those of a legal and regulated market.
For some amount of people they use it recreationally to blow off some steam, but theres a segment of the population that ruins their lives on it.
In some sense it may be worse than opioids because a husband (its always the guy) can ruin their families finances in secret before the wife's credit card gets declines & she pulls on the threads to find six figures of hidden debt from it and realize they are about to lose their home.
In some ways, historically having gambling located in specific geographic areas that were not within most peoples daily travel routine ensured safer use.
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.
Polymarket bad because it's accessible to everyone, futures trading on the CME good because it's only available to the rich?
If the company goes to $0 then I own a portion of nothing, and so does everyone else who owns a share.
With prediction markets you don't own anything, and regardless of the outcome, someone can still win if they "bet right"
That said, futures and derivatives seem similar to prediction markets but I don't know enough about them to say more.
A closer stock analogy would be options.
I'm sorry, what the fuck?
> provid[ing] supportive services to a prediction market or consumer knowing that the services will be used to identify a consumer’s location, transfer money, or make or process payments for the purpose of allowing consumers to make wagers or to settle wagers made by consumers in violation of this section.
"knowing" is key here.
/s but not /s iykyk
Of course, we all have to sit through another round of Silicon Valley pretending they've discovered some new exciting business model that's just vice.
Unlicensed gypsy cabs, SROs, shift work, patent medicines, narcotics dealing, customs fraud, and smuggling already had established market entrants I guess.
If you work at one of these companies it's the same as working for a payday loan company. You are making blood money.
*It could be sponsored and thus either rigged or all of the money being used was provided by the company under the expectation that it would be paid back to them through losses.
Well, which is it? Was net neutrality a state or federal issue? The answer is it's, as always, a Schrodinger's STate's rights issue. That is, it's a "state's rights" issue when it suits them, a federal issue when it suits them and it's neither when it suits them. Lack of any kind of regulation is the goal. This isn't some libertarian pipe dream. It's just naked pro-company and pro-billionaire gutting of government to boost profits.
Fast forward to prediction markets. The CFTC regulates this (arguably). Another deregulation hack is in charge. And again, states like Minnesota who already ban sports betting are being sued. "State's rights" btw. We're seeing the exact same pattern.
This on the same day that the president who sued the IRS, which was defended by the president's DoJ and the recess appointee Attorney-General settled a $10 billion lawsuit right as a federal judge tosses it because the case lacked adversity [2].
Besides the J6 slush fund, part of this settlement is that the IRS is barred from ever investigating Trump, his family or the Trump Organization for tax fraud.
The level of corruption and kleptocracy here is beyond belief and what's really frightening is that a good 35-40% of the population not only don't care but actively support something they will never benefit from and there hasn't been (and won't be) any political price paid for any of it. The president's endorsement still carries weight and just today, we've had the most expensive Congressional primary in history (~$35 million) where Trump unseated a sitting Congressmen for daring to push for releasing the Epstein files.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-f...
[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/insight/trump-eyes-1-776b-irs...
[3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/19/...
They're not banning prediction markets from out-of-state, they're banning it entirely. A state cannot ban out-of-state alcohol, but it can ban alcohol outright if it wanted to.
Does anyone think that Minnesotans who are out of MN at the time of their bet will be allowed to bet? I don't think they'll be allowed, but they should be.
But that's highly contingent on that thing being something people are willing to violate the law over, and on the convenience of that thing not being significantly impacted by prohibition. Neither of which are true for prediction betting (it's almost identical to sports betting in that regard, imo.) The only reason these markets proliferate is precisely because they are legal.