Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
reuters.com
reuters.com
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
https://russpain.com/en/news-3/authorities-consider-legalizi...
>Rarely exceed 25 euros.
Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
A bet is a bet, whether it's against the house or other people it's a bet.
> You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home
This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.
I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
Evil, but most everything in real estate is evil.
With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing. Polymarket doesn't care.
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
You can get insurance without the above provisions, but it will cost a lot more. Once in a while someone manages to collect on a claim for loss of their expensive cigars after they smoke them - but this is rare and usually not worth the cost.
This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.
if there is evidence that someone took out the policy with the intention of creating a claim then the insurer may treat it as fraud and decline it.
> This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen
But buying the insurance cancels exactly that. Insurance fraud is a thing.
For example, I have a decently-sized life-insurance policy. If buying insurance "exactly covered that", I would be indifferent to whether I lived or died. But I'm not. And I can't think of a policy-size that would make me so. Money is an imperfect substitute.
Less dramatically, I have really good auto coverage. The car itself is nothing special, and the coverage I have would make me whole (minus a very small deductible) But I am very much not indifferent to replacing the car with money, and it would take way more than the deductible to change my mind on that.
The hassle-value alone would go way over. And hassle-value is usually not insurable.
Insurance fraud is absolutely a thing--but the insurance company still wants you to prefer that the event doesn't happen. That it doesn't work perfectly doesn't really invalidate the point.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
you dont take out cover on your business partner, the company itself does
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
If you wanted to correct a misconception, you should provide a better, more complete understanding, not just express frustration about a misconception that doesn't even exist outside of an uncharitable reading.
In this case, that means refining the point to the more accurate model, that you need an insurable interest -- i.e. reason you don't want the event to happen, even knowing you'd get a payout[1]. Your counterexamples only work as such because that exists![2] If you want to fix all the people who don't have your superior understanding, that would have been a great way to help them out.
>I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It exists because it's approximately true: you can't get insurance on 99.99999% of buildings in the world because you have no insurable interest in them. And any time someone could correct that false premise, they probably just complain rather than providing the complete understanding -- exactly the choice you just made here.
[1] IMO, this is the natural dividing line between gambling and insurance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13916088
[2] Edit: And in your building collateral example, the policy would prevent you from double dipping -- getting both the building and the full payout.
You can sell your life insurance policy to somebody else. It's a way of getting money to sick people to use while thy are still alive.
To be clear they had explicitly written in the contract from the start that death didn't count. And they paid out the full amount - just not to the same betters they would have if he had left office alive.
Any bum defending these contracts is to me either a shill or way too dumb to understand the concept of incentives.
Oh and there was an Israeli journalist that got life threats because he reported that an Iranian missile struck some place in Israel, and apparently there was a huge bet on it on polymarket.
Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.
Is there something specific you're getting at?
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
I feel like this might be a net negative from the pure speed and access in which you can lose money online vs real life, but idk.
I've played a couple of times solo and in group but never sticked to me.
No related to the point, but what it did stick to me for one season was La Liga Fantástica from Marca ( a fantasy league on paper) when I was a child, because it had the data component, you had a budget to pick players etc, This was before we had internet broadly, if I remember correctly the paper would publish huge lists with the teams ranking or the players stats. But what I do remember was some of my best players like Zalazar :D
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years.
It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.
Usually though people's pay/power directly correlates with how badly they can screw the company if they go (legally) rogue.
But anyone can get a job at XYZ, buy puts, and go and set the factory on fire the next day. Betting markets don't change the fact that you'll be arrested, except that you'll be arrested for a few thousand dollars rather than whatever you can squeeze out of options.
Anyone who can figure out "how to have an accident" can do it. A fire at an aluminum plant last year tanked Ford stock 6%. For a relatively boring stock like Ford, the right options would have moved 1000%+.
They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
Nobody's making millions betting on things like the weather.
So what's the point of polymarket, then? If at best we get "negligible" "insiderism", how is it that we are supposed to be benefitting from this as a society the way OP and others insist that revealing insider preferences "would"
An example would be the latest presidential election, where professional pollsters at them at almost 50/50, but the prediction markets had trump by a landslide. He went on to win even the popular vote.
The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
Trump didn't win by a landslide and he barely won the popular vote...
>The benefit comes to people who don't even participate, and just take notes.
Praying someone has an example besides the election, to which it seems to have made absolutely no difference at all
Then there is also the fact that the power of the people determining the outcome is inversely proportional to their care about betting markets.
Put this together and you get "The larger the size of the market, the less the people who can single handily swing it care about doing so".
If you are someone who can command hundreds of thousands of people to bet millions for or against you, you almost certainly lose more than you would gain by gaming it.
Mind you the market also naturally prices in this risk of the one person going rogue and taking them winnings for themselves. You will never find a market for "WarmWash will post nothing for 3 days straight on HN" because no one will take the other side of it.
I have a bot betting on a handful of what I consider (so far) markets that are impossible to cheat (bar UMA shenanigans): nobody has any control over the outcomes, previous knowledge is very limited. It makes some money, but looking at the depth, the volume, and my metrics, even being the fastest 100% of the time without worrying about bankroll, one of them would gimme roughly $1-2k a week.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
If I find out my friends placed bets on whether I'll say X tomorrow, I'm not obligated to act as if I didn't know.
This isn't share price manipulation.
I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
So we're in agreement that if he is not profiting from saying it, then it's OK, correct?
> I'm pretty sure this is the same as match or race fixing to get the payout from bets made.
If my friends make a bet that I will/won't do something, and I choose to make one side win, that is not match fixing. I'm sure match fixing only applies to regulated games. If people want to make bets on unregulated games, and lose their shirt, they have only themselves to blame.
Here's a paper on match fixing:
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/llr/vol56/iss4/9/
For something to be match fixing, the government has to recognize the activity as a sport, and most state laws require the person to benefit from the fixing, which the CEO here is not and/or they require "rule tampering" - there was no rule broken here.
There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
T hen again crypto isn't known for its bastion of legality and morality, therefore I would assume there are some deals going on in the background which are probably illegal, and if not that then unethical - not that they would care about that.
There needs to be evidence of such a thing, no?
> There has to be some motivation for people to do such random things, and even if not directly illegal, they do smell rather fishy and unethical.
I have motivation. If people are placing stupid bets on me, I sure as heck want them to suffer for it.
I'm sure some people view a CEO doing this as unethical, but I fully support it. Whoever lost money on that bet had it coming.
Of course, my preference is both sides losing money, but we can't have everything.
Speaking of ethics: There is a reason why betting and gambling are categorized under "vices". If you make any bet on things out of your control, the questionable ethics begins with you. Don't put it on a third party who was not involved in crafting the bet.
I believe in some jurisdictions, private bets are not legally enforceable (i.e. if I make a bet with you and lose, it is my legal right to refuse to pay). There's a good reason for that!
you might need to take your imagination and critical thinking out for a spin if you can't see where this leads.
There's plenty of people able to influence events to whom these barely liquid bets can still amount to huge pay offs.
That includes many CEOs whose compensation is tied to stock performance.
Single moms historically don't have tons of extra money, and Trump was ostensibly a billionaire.
Thanks, stranger!
How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
Sadly, from my point of view, you're right that right now going after the on/off crypto ramps would be enough to dissuade most people from using crypto gambling sites. I hope for a more educated populace that can bypass these laws and engage in whatever consensual activities they want to, as long as they're not directly harming anyone.
In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
What you describe (profiting from creating havoc by some "short" bet) is indeed problematic and is regulated.
This is also one more reason why trading should not be unconditionally anonymous. Another reason: proper trading venues have rules against "squeezing", namely that no entity may hold more than some threshold ratio of the open interest. That's obviously impossible to enforce with anonymous markets.
[1] Tradings allows individuals to time-shift consumption, it funds productive enterprises, it incentivises convergence of market price with fundamental value, which in turn is what enables efficient investment allocation, and it allows the emergence of an economy-wide equilibrium of savings and investments. Note though that all of these functions might well be fulfilled by having, say, one minute of trading a day.
It also incentivizes leaks from insiders, sometimes endangering others. A soldier was charged for betting on a military operation. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
And of course throwing pro sports, but that's been happening for ages. Sports has always been crooked: eg the Eupolus Scandal from 388 BCE.
‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
"What do you mean, people used to just walk up to planes with their shoes on and a FULL 8-ounce water bottle in hand with barely any physical security?"
It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons, vs. trying to strengthen the commons against all possible adversarial behavior.
Have there been multiple separate incidents?
The other side of the coin is that hijackings used to be a frequent and regular occurrence. Now they're not anymore.
And my understanding is that the current theory for MH370 is that the pilot locked out the copilot and then depressurised the cabin.
There are non-fatal cases like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 where the copilot locked the captain out when we was in the restroom (though loss of life was still a possibility, one of the engines had flamed out and was on emergency fuel).
As with all incidents, there are many factors that lead to them, but in these cases the presence of locked and reinforced cockpit doors contributed to the incident (in malicious cases the fact the door was impenetrable was clearly part of the decision-making, and in accident cases it was obviously an impediment to any positive outcome once the incident occurred).
It's impossible. No matter how good of a job you do, there will _always_ be people out to watch it all burn.
I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.
Even foreign actors during war time wouldn’t go through the effort of messing with individual temperature sensors.
That would have been perfect.
Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?
"Prediction market" ads running constantly on both sports channels/websites like ESPN. Shortly followed by mainstream cable news like CNN featuring Polymarket stats as a routine part of their horserace polling coverage. Gambling is now an omnipresent temptation for anyone even casually interested in following sports/political news.
And now millions of young men who previously would have had to seek out niche illegal venues to gamble have several dozen different apps on their phone offering to light their disposable income on fire by clicking a couple buttons every paycheck.
Yup, totally nuanced comment coming from a completely sane person since "central planning regulatory hell" and "laissez faire economy without laws" are the two only options we have here, good job carrying the conversation forward with curious and interesting comments.
Sports betting places on the other hand have multiplied like fungi in the last two decades, unfortunately.
You're probably talking about the big Vegas style entire-hotel casino that aren't so popular in Europe anyway outside a niche crowd. The average lower class Spanish person frequents these "sports bars" heavily
Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.
These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
You can also follow people. Tax fraud is how a lot of criminals are caught - we don't know what you did but we can prove you didn't get the money legally and that is enough.
I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
> Play money means it's much easier for anyone anywhere in the world to get started and try out forecasting without any risk. It also means there's more freedom to create and bet on any type of question.
Their investors/lawyers probably did not want to back the risk using real currency adds.
Do you really think that there are no people, who have bet on the price of something in one direction or the other, who enact real world consequences on people or other entities in order to ensure their bet? This is par for the course.
How do I cause someone to die using Kalshi or Polymarket, specifically, also without being caught? Didn't they catch someone that had pre-knowledge of the Venezuela campaign?
(I'm not asking because I want to do this, I'm asking because it's not clear to me how this is realistically possible.) Also, given that you can't just create a market on either platform, it's not like I can just say "XXX has 3 months to live".
If a criminal wants to make money on crime, they have better ways to do it than put 10k of their own money to make 50k by killing someone.
I just don't get this whole argument. If you're a contract killer, why put yourself and the contractee up in the feds sights?
Assuming you get away with the murder, guessing that's not the part you're asking about, a concrete example: https://polymarket.com/event/next-french-presidential-electi..., bunch of people on that list, surely many of them are like the typical European politician, mostly without assassination protection most of the time. Place a "No" bet on one of them, then hire someone to assassinate, and Polymarket indirectly drove someone to murder another person, as they could profit from it.
As a contract killer, I don't think you'd put yourself or your client more up in the fed sights than without Polymarket, it'd just look like another bet.
This is the same reason it is generally illegal to make public statements lamenting that someone hasn't killed a person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
I don't know if a contract is a good way, but it gives some deniability.
- incentivize harmful acts - create manipulation risks - are "contrary to the public interest"
So, all these contracts on the topics of US attacks, sports, whether California will burn due to fires, openly violate it.
But CFTC's head has publicly stated that they won't act on them.
This happens on the stock market on a scale 100x larger than Polymarket.
c.f. manipulated earnings reports, taco trades, strait of hummus nonsense
Legislation by who is willing to "donate" the most; law of the jungle capitalism.
Polymarket is quite tame in comparison, in my opinion.
And don't forget about the kids and what possibly could happen maybe someday!
There are several things about the "these are good because people can hedge" argument which bother me and I struggle to disentangle them, but one facet is this: These betting-markets may be an inferior form of hedging, especially for non-trivial scenarios that are intended to evoke sympathy. (Civilizations have a lot of prior art in risk-management.)
For example, our statistical Iranian Dude may be much better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on useful imported durable goods that may become unavailable, ideally ones that would have resale value even if nothing bad happens.
The convenient online casino doesn't require any more than a vague sense of anxiety to bet, but that generality also limits how well you can use the money to protect yourself. If you're specifically worried about famine, better to arrange a future result of food, versus a payout of cash when nobody is selling food. If you're a factory that uses X as a manufacturing input and worried about a geopolitical blockade, you may be better off investing in alternate supplies or futures contracts for X.
There are the people from the kill command who bet on what they are ordered to do.
There could even be a bet by someone with direct influence on the government who convinces them to do it to make some money.
[1]https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/30/polymarket-s-mil...
It's not at all obvious that leaks of classified information are per se detrimental to _actual_ national security.
In other words the money spent on bets that involve killing directly foments more killing.
The language is usually "This market will resolve to “Yes” if <politician> ceases to be <Prime Minister/President/whatever>".
Or for another example: https://polymarket.com/event/will-neymar-play-in-the-2026-fi.... Will Neymar play in the world cup? Not if he's dead. Any kind of "will celebrity appear in X in the future" can be reduced to an assassination market.
https://xcancel.com/mansourtarek_/status/2029996077554815268
Not sure if Polymarket does the same. Also not sure if I really trust these people to be the arbiter of morality and adhere to their own rules when it doesn't benefit them.
> A registered entity shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any of the following:
> (1) An agreement, contract, transaction, or swap based upon an excluded commodity, as defined in Section 1a(19)(iv) of the Act, that *involves*, relates to, or references terrorism, *assassination*, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.
Polymarket doesn't seem to care too much.
Polymarket is now two separate entities. Last year they were banned from the US and stopped taking on new US customers and made their site withdrawal only for anyone based in the US. You could bypass it with a VPN, but they did enough to at least look like they were complying.
They've now created a separate company that I believe is called Polymarket US which has it's own version of the site/app which they are using to re-enter the US market. This switched from invite only beta to open sign ups a few months ago.
Polymarket US is mainly just sports betting with a small number of crypto, commodities, and political election based markets, although they have said they plan to expand their market options. Their US based site almost certainly doesn't violate those rules. The version that is used outside the US is the one that has markets that violate that, but since they're not in the US, there's not much that can be done.
Fortunately we have big beautiful crypto that separates us.
We experimented with extending this to non-esports topics during the election, which led to a bunch of Trump-based predicting. Then Jan 6 happen and the whole site went to hell. I pivoted the product because I just didn't want to deal with running a site like that.
Seeing what is happening with these sites makes me feel good about my choices. If I were in charge of a product that enabled this I wouldn't sleep at night.
Just naming things differently does not work in other countries.
If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Generally, I think the common-law notion of "consideration + chance + prize" augmented with the requirement of an "insurable interest" (in order to keep the insurance industry legal) discerns the truth well enough. Insisting that any "prize" not be monetary or monetarily-convertible keeps it from becoming a cyclical addiction, and evaluating infractions relative to volume keeps extremists from banning gumball machines and Kinder eggs.
Right, so because "judges have to follow the exact letter of the law" in the countries you have in mind, somehow my view is US-centric, although I'm from Sweden and I live in Spain, never visited US nor been in any US court ever? Both countries I'm familiar with, have purposive interpretation rules.
You can share that in other places it might be different, compared to how it works in the places I'm familiar with, without chucking insults around, especially insults you uninspiringly basically said in every recent comment of yours, at least make it unique.
To actually make this a somewhat interesting conversation instead of just pooping words, as I just tried that and didn't find it as fun as you did; what specific countries are you talking about, how does it work there, and how little corruption do those countries have compared to say Sweden?
Now they encourage users to bet as part of the commentary.
I see the percentage of advertising devoted to gambling to be a similar bellwether to the decline of my whole country. And it’s getting worse all the time. I can’t turn on the tv, look at billboards on the freeway, watch a sporting event, or even walk down a supermarket checkout without getting constantly reminded of how far we’ve fallen.
https://closingline.substack.com/p/the-takeaway-kalshi-non-s...
Kalshi and Polymarket require you to provide your SSN.
gambling happens, tax comes in, crime goes up, police get hired, politicians get the police vote
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
What is the defense in the US for example that these are not gambling, "bets are placed on uncertain outcomes", it's that close to, if not the definition of gambling ?
Right, because it's not gambling, there are different regulations around gambling. All they need to do it GET their gambling license and they can continue, but in this case they will need to follow those regulations. Such as (Italy in this case):
Offer self-exclusion tools for vulnerable players;
Implement identity and age verification procedures;
Comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and GDPR for data protection;
Pay online gaming taxes, which range between 20% and 25% of gross gaming revenue.
So where is the line drawn? In the US there has been a tremendous amount of money spent on lobbying to keep prediction markets on the not gambling side.
I'm sure you need a license to become an insurance broker, stock broker, commodoties broker.
Gambling license is all they need to get.
It doesn’t make sense that if I bet on the outcome of a football match then it’s gambling but if I bet on the outcome of the Ukraine war then it’s I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-gambling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell#%22Assassination_Poli...
Not really how it works in practice here, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours, everything mostly keeps working as it always is.
Spanish congress approved recently a way to stop such a thing.
It's like calling the casino a probability market.
(Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
I don't think you'll find a simple/useful answer by slicing the problem on that axis.
You don't get anything outside of winnings or losses from your bets on a "prediction market".
That’s what I mean: Many things can be used in very different ways. These incentives usually matter more than the underlying things in finance.
I think you might be mistaken about how Polymarket works. They are indeed only a platform operator; all trades are directly between participants.
For example, I had a lot of people ask me about the Hantavirus and if it was worth worrying about. I didn't have to do any research other than look at the various prediction markets and see them all at 5-10% to determine it was probably a nothingburger. Much quicker than having to parse a bunch of fearmongering news reports and such.
In this specific case it's clear that the market doesn't represent our collective knowledge about hantavirus at all. Twenty days ago the odds of a hantavirus pandemic being declared by the WHO were ~10% and now it's 5%. This is just a reflection of the news cycle, it would be nuts to say that this is a reliable estimate for the underlying scientific facts.
Is this a standard you hold to any other single signal? Name it. What signal (a) predicted <3% over a month ago and (b) you believed prior to be a reliable signal?
Why a ministry has the authority to do so? What I don't like about my country, and the whole UE, is the lack of democracy. And this is a good example.
A democracy needs to have real separations of powers. The legislative body creates a law, and the judiciary, based on that law, will decide on banning or not the online gambling site.
A ministry belongs to the executive branch of the Estate. It is not up to them to decide whether something is illegal or not.
The law was already there, a minister in Spain does not only propose or vote on laws, but has quite some executive influence. This has always been so and is nothing unusual.
You can't really operate this stuff in a vacuum, otherwise it would take years to take any actions against illegal gambling, way too late.
If a law is violated, then a judge, and not a ministry, should be the one to enforce it.
When an administrative body blocks access to a service without prior judicial oversight, it blurs the line between the executive and the judiciary. And since separation of powers is a key component of any democracy, this raises legitimate concerns about the quality of democratic checks and balances.
Just to be clear: I’m not arguing that unlicensed online gambling sites should remain accessible. The issue is how the restriction is carried out, and whether it respects democratic principles and institutional roles.
You may argue that blocking internet access should always go through judiciary, for some reason. But you can't claim that this was undemocratic, that's just spewing bullshit for the sake of it.
I could be pretty neutral on the market maker, really. The point of a prediction market is to put information to use.
There may be some line to be drawn on such markets, but that line really isn't drawn. There are just vague gestures that it is both gambling and not gambling due to insider information.
If you wanted to regulate it, legislate which markets can be made. Require notification that it is not gambling and is all about the trading of insider information and that gamblers have less than "fair" odds.
I can't make this argument work at all. Gambling with some cheating is still gambling.
I mean Spain blocked these markets for now, to investigate how to deal with them, I don't think it's for sure they'll be classified as gambling and allowed, might very well be outlawed. Probably parent got confused you said "The whole world will eventually do the same" (about blocking/banning) but then seemingly you thought these were "classified as gambling" already.
Complete shamelessness all around.
Betfair doesn't present itself as anything other than what it is: a gambling exchange where the punters make the book. In my 10+ years time of using it they despite some occasionally shoddily worded markets they have only properly screwed up a market twice (The Australian Open in 2022 when Djokovic was denied entry to Australia and Betfair basically forgot the winners market was cross matched when they went to remove him and the 2020 Presidential election where they suspended the market when Trump went to hospital with Covid despite the fact the market rules said that the market would still settle if any participant died and obviously most people had been taking into account that both candidates being mega ancient whilst a global pandemic was happening might be a factor). Betfair is boring, staid and reliable.
Compare that to Kalshi and Polymarket who do everything they can to pretend they are not gambling platforms. It's kind of gross.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
They've got a license to stream LaLiga on Movistar Plus so they're particularly interested in blocking piracy.
Imagine your neighbour the alcoholic gambling addict having to learn to use cryptocurrency and VPNs and then having to file taxes in case any substantial winnings (from illegal gambling)...
It's important to remember that ~80% of activity Polymarket and ~90% of Kalshi, by volume, are sports. These are effectively sports betting websites with prediction markets on the side.
If it was "that simple" everyone would be making money on the stock market, but its not.
If you regularly trade and constantly watch your stocks, then it's a casino.
If you buy some index funds and never look at them again until 10 years later, it's not a casino.
There's no clear delineation between an investment and a bet; it's a Venn diagram with a huge overlap. I don't think that means that there is any question about where on the Venn diagram sites like Kalshi and Polymarket belong.
If you somehow caused some exchange to consistently lose money, I'm sure they'd cut you off.
* What price will Bitcoin hit in May?
* SpaceX IPO closing market cap above ___ ?
* Highest temperature in Amsterdam on May 26?
* Presidential Election Winner 2028
Quick reminder that POTUS has power to strongly influence Bitcoin price [1]
> SpaceX IPO closing market cap above ___ ?
Quick reminder that SpaceX gets most of its money from the US government [2]
To say nothing of oil and other commodities affected by war [3]
In short, an insider is literally anyone who knows what the president is going to say tomorrow.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/20/five-times-presi...
[2] https://spacenews.com/spacex-wins-2-29-billion-space-force-c...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/betting-on-iran-war-insider-tra...
2) SpaceX employee or board member.
3) Anyone with a blow drier that knows which weather monitoring station is used.
4) Campaign insider that can sabotage their candidate's chances of winning.
But it has to be something, and cannot be "Don't do the blocks" obviously since it's already ruled it should be blocked, but since you've managed to come up with a block so it doesn't have to affect even those Cloudflare IPs, could you please share the method you've come up with?
> But it has to be something
I think you're falling for the politician's syllogism. Pressure to do "something" doesn't mean we should do anything, specially if this "something" has already proven worse than even doing nothing.
Because society at large has to be pragmatic, you and I aren't the only people living here, and generally we (Spaniards) all agree that laws are generally made to be followed, in most instances, hence if a judge/the courts order something, we generally feel like that should be followed. You don't like it? Fight it legally, like the system is setup to work.
> The blocks clearly aren't working, everyone I know who pirates matches tells me their sources have barely been affected, and others share the same here.
Based on anecdotes, which I too have plenty of it working/not working, or based on actual data? Not sure it is the most trustworthy data, I personally don't trust La Liga so much, but last they said was that it was reduced by 60%, and if the blocks weren't actually working, I think they'd say as much, as they'd want to find a "better" way to actually fight it. But unless you have some more trustworthy data to share, I think this is as close as we get to actual evidence and concrete proof: https://www.laliga.com/noticias/fastly-y-laliga-se-unen-para...
> Meanwhile I, that don't care about football but pay for my ISP, can't visit during matches most of the sites I regularly visit.
What exact websites and services can you not visit during the games? I'm with Vodafone, and nowadays during the games Docker Hub is the only service that isn't available, everything else seems to continue working as normal. A year ago the situation was very different.
Did you report the websites you rely on to be victims of the blocks via the forms that are available for precisely this? Seems to eventually unblock the sites you report, give that a try if you haven't already.
> I think you're falling for the politician's syllogism. Pressure to do "something" doesn't mean we should do anything, specially if this "something" has already proven worse than even doing nothing.
I'm not, me as a private individual, before even speaking with anyone, also think it's stupid that Cloudflare chose to do business in Spain yet aren't willing to follow the law.
The ones who feel like you are an acceptable casualty in these piracy wars is Cloudflare, everyone else is following the law, that's why you're not seeing Bunny CDN or Fastly being blocked in the same way as Cloudflare, as they actually respond to legal requests.
Tired of Cloudflare grouping in providing services to clearly illegal services with clearly legal services? Well, maybe ask them to consider following the laws in the countries they operate, or use the actual service meant for reporting "unintended casualties".
If the courts decided Cloudflare has to be banned, let it be banned. But so far they haven't had a trial, much less a sentence. We're just enabling a private company to interfere with the services of another, which represents a huge part of the internet even if we don't like it, simply because the former claims the trade-off is necessary and acceptable.
And since the only actual evidence I can access (weak as it is) points to these blocks barely working, I claim that this trade-off is not worth it and we're just inflicting pain on people not watching the matches for a very slim benefit to LaLiga. Bring Cloudflare to the courts if you must, but leave us alone until they figure it out.
Wrong, here's a sentence with reference to the original case.
https://www.iberley.es/jurisprudencia/sentencia-civil-juzgad...
I apologize if this sounds rude, but it just sounds like you aren't familiar with the case or the subject matter at all, please perform some research if you want to make claims about what ought to be.
Here's the list of companies that actually were sued here, to let them block:
> 1.Vodafone España, S.A.U. 2. Vodafone ONO, S.A.U. 3. MASORANGE Orange Espagne, S.A.U. 4. DIGI SPAIN TELECOM, S.L.U. 5. TELEFÓNICA ESPAÑA, S.A.U. 6. TELEFÓNICA MÓVILES ESPAÑA,S.A.U.
I apologize if this sounds rude, but it just sounds like you aren't familiar with the case or the subject matter at all, please perform some research if you want to make claims about what ought to be.
And now more seriously, I've got a right to think the court's decision is wrong even if it's legal, get over it.
I just feel my personal opinions on the subject matter almost zero, especially since I'm not involved in the dispute, nor a citizen of either country. If you are american you are somewhat compelled, but I think that jurisdictionally, they have sovereignity, which is much harder to deny. Like even if you think the case itself and the sentence are wrong, ok, I get it. But I think we should compartimentalize and respect the venue, I don't think even cloudflare is arguing against the venue, claiming somehow that the US courts are proper for the case. But I could be wrong.
> It does not claim that Cloudflare is breaking the law
Right, I read that there was no trial or sentence at all. The linked trial was not claimed against Cloudflare at all, but the sentence does compel CloudFlare and refers to other several summons for CloudFlare (I read somewhere that it totals more than 100).
Here's a recent story I found on the CEO being personally sued on criminal charges:
>https://www.advanced-television.com/2026/03/04/spain-court-s...
Can't speak a lot on this specific case, but I personally wouldn't want to step into a country that sues me criminally. This is somewhat permissible for CloudFlare since it is a security company, so it probably isn't the first time they have had such an issue. But still, this is definitely not nothing.
What seems correct is that Cloudflare itself has not yet been the defendant of a civil suit for damages yet. But to be fair, they went straight for criminal charges, which to my estimation is way more decisive (and appropriate).
EDIT: Cloudflare is a defendant along with the CEO. With some nuances on terminology due to the common/civil, but I believe defendant is an accurate translation of "investigado"
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.
Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.
When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.
A better example is wagers on things like when the Iran war will end. That's actually useful 'wisdom of the crowds', and any insider trading is already illegal. Maybe someday those markets would get big enough to allow companies to hedge risks. That's an actual useful application of PMs.
Google Trends seems to agree too: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=polymarket&date=today%20...
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.