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> said the low of the day was 17

People are gambling on the "low of the day?"

Might as well make back alley chicken fighting legal.

I'm not going to lie, it started as a fun thing to do on a boring and cold Saturday night after a snow storm, I was looking at weather underground map of stations around central park praying it would drop a few degrees and I'd make 4:1 on my bet. I learned a lot about weather stations in the next few weeks and it was cool looking the historical data from the Central Park weather station (I think the longest running in the US) and see how it added features and new reporting values over its long 100+ year life. It was a fun winter side quest.

I don't think this needs regulated if the people involved are responsible and having fun. No chickens died for sure, which is probably why these articles focus on the more serious bets where people are dying (and not weather).

I sure enjoyed reading your account of the experience! Thank you!

> if the people involved are responsible and having fun.

I think "please gamble responsibly" has the same power as "please drink responsibly." Which is to say, we regulate the ever loving hell out of alcohol sales, and that's probably where gambling should be headed as well.

There's a classic type of British bar-bet that is based on basically anything somewhat random. Wodehouse had lots of examples of it - betting on what hat the next lady to walk in would be wearing, things like that.

The key was they were local and person to person in person - not online.

You and I sitting at the bar get into an argument/bet about what the low today will be, and the bartender bookies the bet before he checks what the low actually was - that makes a certain amount of sense.

Putting it online and making it accessible over TCP/IP opens it up to all sorts of scams and manipulation.

I'd be curious to know why you decided to bet on weather patterns in the first place. Seems like a very roundabout way to lose money.

Your question implies a sense of moral outrage about gambling so I don't if it was asked in good faith or not.

Kalshi was on my radar because of Tim Walz dropping out the Minnesota governor race and an article about who would replace him being wagered on prediction markets, coincidently this was during a boring part of January after a snow storm and so weather was on my mind.

You can wager on aggregate precipitation, high and low temp, etc. The price is a binary contract between two parties with the market taker paying a small percent fee, so the conclusion you make that it "seems like a roundabout way to lose money" was not the conclusion I drew then nor believe that conclusion to be true even now, being a market maker using a trivial model from one-day forecast data was break-even for me.

Absolutely every single thing you could ever bet on can be rigged.

The high speed traders win, and you're not part of the club.

it seems this could be solved by refusing last minute bets?

Data is released every minute, every five minutes, every hour, and then 6 hour high/low, and then mid-day preliminary reports, so there is no last-minute since any one of those reports could contain data (with various validation/rounding caveats) that could eliminate a market of temperatures, so there isn't really a last minute.

My conclusion was to focus on forecast and attempt to predict the temperature better than forecast vs. market implied probability rather than attempt to respond very quickly to published information. I learned (with my skills) the latter was a losing proposition, but the former isn't impossible (although also possibly beyond my skills it seems).

A lot of people assume insider trading in weather markets on data that's publicly available but they're unaware of.

It's also a massive whoosh that you only consider the insider trader aspect in choosing to play weather markets. No consideration of how you would get an edge in these markets against extremely powerful weather models used by meteorologists who understand the subject and how to apply the data. It seems much different than betting against political pundits.

It's also another whoosh not realizing that some of these stations are actually not that secure when you take a look at them in real life. Less insiders than betting on things that aren't tamper-resistant.

Also, a lot of people complain about insiders profiting from last minute data. One way to limit this would be requiring markets to close in advance of final data, but people love to gamble (read: bet without an edge) on things at the last minute across all prediction market subjects.