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Comment by declan_roberts | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate the election betting markets. They seem so un-American. It was only made legal in the USA last month, so all of the results so far have been foreign entities.

Hate it.

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FWIW, Polymarket is still technically not available from within the US, although since it’s crypto I imagine that’s not an insurmountable geoblock.

I've been using it from the UK where it's also technically not available and it's trivial to get around. You just have to turn on a vpn to click the bet button.

Polymarket was set up by Thiel to manipulate perception on election. Don't arbitrage it's overly high Trump prediction because he won't pay out for Kamala.

I do wonder what happens if they don't pay our. If it's not legal in the US, what's your recourse?

I believe it's all web3 smart contracts so they don't have the option to not pay out. They have an 'oracle' call the bets. Vitalik Buterin is an investor so I'm guessing the tech works.

You can actually get your money back at any point by selling in the market - I bailed on my Kamala bet when the results started coming in.

If you leave it to resolve it goes to the oracle which is a kind of voting mechanism https://docs.uma.xyz/protocol-overview/how-does-umas-oracle-...

Aside from gambling being iffy I'm quite impressed they've actually got the tech to work quite smoothly. There was talk of oracles and smart contracts for years and it never really worked much but this seems to be quite fast, cheap and secure.

Thats funny because I just saw an enormous video billboard ad for Polymarket in Philadelphia.

It's 100% American and has been a thing forever. It's also a free speech argument, I should be able to bet on outcomes of events. It was common all throughout US history

https://users.wfu.edu/strumpks/papers/Int_Election_Betting_F...

Fascinating, thanks for sharing! It should probably be highlighted tho that there were absolutely waves of relative interest (~1790-1840 and ~1890-1910, at least), and it was outlawed almost everywhere by the mid 1800s, which obviously means it primarily fell to the rich and well-connected. Ditto in Britain — they had bets, but;

  Bets about the outcome of events in war, over the death of political leaders, over court cases, or between voters over election results were illegal on these grounds. In the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the British government increasingly attempted to limit gambling, especially among the working classes.

So I’d argue it’s more like “a persistent scourge threatening democracy” than “a treasured ideal of free speech”. But I’m biased against all forms of gambling, so might have skimmed it unfairly. Worth a read, for sure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalshi is a nyc company i believe

Here's a very interesting interview with the Kalshi founder to get his takes on many things people are talking about. https://youtu.be/atGcvlEO4qU

Stuff they talk about include:

- 90% male bias on Kalshi.

- Polymarket is all crypto so that probably introduces bias.

- He says 60/40 is still a coin flip.

- Prediction markets are just another sentiment tracker, that the 60/40 is still a coin flip race.

> betting

> un-American

Sports gambling itself was illegal in most of America until the Supreme Court decided Murphy v. NCAA in 2018.

The entirety of the legalized sports betting industry has emerged from essentially nothing and embedded itself thoroughly in the national sports psyche in the span of six years.

Nearly 1200 comments last month:

Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41659458

I feel so bad for kids growing up watching sports now. The beer commercials were bad enough, now kids are going to grow up to be gambling addicts too.

"Video Games", I mean, digital slot machines with a game on the side was doing this just fine before sports gambling was legalized.

Hell, even Lego is in on the Gacha action! Gambling is too profitable an endeavor to allow in a market economy. It only serves to snuff out all the oxygen for less scummy business.

I don't think lowering the profit margins of gambling would make the issue much better given the problems are in the externalities and non-rational acting of the gambler.

Outside of perhaps very "technically correct" and restrictive, like literally restricting people to nickle bets per game, in which case time would probably be the bottleneck to financial ruination (leaving only time-consumption life ruination) and probably would drive gambling underground.

That's already true in Australia, sadly.

The mob infamously exploited this widespread American tradition of sports gambling. The law merely legalized, not made it more or less American.

Yeah I find it funny when people equate "legal" to "normal" or "acceptable". The prohibition is one such large example.

I actually think we should ban polling, too. Make the election about getting the message out and convincing people, not about a horse race between two numbers.

Could be a good idea, but I suspect asking people what they think about political candidates enjoys such core first amendment protection that banning it would require amending the Constitution. And practically, nobody in power will want to ban them because they're a tool for staying in power. Same reason that we'll probably always have a two party system.

In a one-turn voting system, polls are very useful as a kind of "turn zero". The important point is that one should always tell the poller who they actually want to vote for (a possible third candidate) so that if this candidate actually stands a chance it can be seen in the poll and be voted for. In the actual election, if you see your third candidate has no chance you can vote for someone that can actually win.

Changing the voting system seems much more important than trying to mess with the polls. However, regulating polls to enforce their trustworthiness is probably a good idea since they may have so much power.

In France the presidential election is two-turns and even then I think we need polls since there are so many candidates in the first turn diluting votes.

The US is really a two-turn voting system. The first turn is the primaries.

It's quite different from the French presidential election, but the first round is open to all candidates. A non-aligned candidate would have to formally join a party to run for the nomination, but that's a matter of paperwork, not ideology. If they win office, they owe the party no obligations at all.

The French system may well be preferable, but the American system really does have more opportunities for non-aligned candidates than people realize. They tend to dismiss the primaries as unimportant, but they really are a first round of voting -- that's why they're called "primary". Anybody who wants influence can start there, rather than jumping straight into the general election.

Why not ranked choice?

I would love to have ranked choices as a voting system in France. It tends to promote moderate candidates but because it would change the outcome of elections so significantly it's probably almost impossible to set up (all parties that would lose from it would go all-in in opposing such a change).

> Make the election about getting the message out and convincing people, not about a horse race between two numbers

Polling helps elites and voters alike allocate resources. Biden was replaced in part due to polls. Similarly, if a race in my state becomes unexpectedly competitive, I’ll at attention more than I would have absent that signal.

Is that a good thing? The more you complicate the election process, particularly the more meta-information you add - such as predictions, polls, early results - the more it drives people to play silly meta-games, trying to "vote strategically", instead of just expressing their preferences.

I feel this violates some fundamental assumptions about the democratic process - when most people play the metagame, the result is no longer expressing real, object-level preferences of the people. At the very least, it encourages "us vs. them" thinking instead of focusing on improving lives.

> more you complicate the election process, particularly the more meta-information you add - such as predictions, polls, early results - the more it drives people to play silly meta-games

Agree with the former. Not the latter. Our elections are complicated because the process is complicated. To the degree I most appreciate polling, it's around things like ballot measures.

> when most people play the metagame, the result is no longer expressing real, object-level preferences of the people

In a democracy, yes. (One of the many reasons pure democracies don't work.) In a republic, consensus forming is fine.

If we only get to pick one thing, I'd much rather see us harmonize voting times between states so we don't have the election results rolling in before some people have voted.

There’s evidence that they have done, and currently do, a better job predicting election outcomes than polling.

Are you sure you don’t like them just because they are currently predicting the person that you don’t like is going to win the US election?

https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/666656...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02613...

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