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Comment by bagacrap | Hacker News Reader

Technically you can't bet on the demise of a person, at least in the US, as participants recently discovered when the previous supreme leader of Iran was killed and their "leadership change" bet did not pay out.

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This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..

Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though, arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).

[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.

Polymarket doesn't operate in the US.

https://docs.polymarket.com/api-reference/geoblock

Polymarket is headquartered in NYC; it's a US company; it has many US customers, and it knows that, even if it did a wink-wink dance "disallowing" that prior to 2024. Since then, it has explicitly expanded into the US market[1]. It is unambiguously subject to US regulations (if we had a regulator who chose to enforce those regulations).

[1]: "Following the end of the investigations, Polymarket announced the acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. The acquisition allowed Polymarket to legally operate within the United States under regulatory compliance. The company received an Amended Order of Designation from the CFTC in November 2025 and began actively expanding in the United States market."

https://www.axios.com/2025/07/21/prediction-market-polymarke...

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/polymarket-receives...

As I understand it they operate as two separate entities -- polymarket US and polymarket INTL.

Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are morally corrupt and we having given them too much space in our society already.

That particular part isn't lawyer bullshit. They're beta testing a completely separate system that runs under US regulations. It looks like it'll be legal in a non-bullshit way.

Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.

There are bets like "X out of function by april" which are functionally equivalent to betting on their demise.

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