kalshi and polymarket are quite obvious gambling sites. any pedantic arguments to the contrary are strictly financial chaff to enhance their operating margins until the regulations finally catch up.
they were never an innovating marketing play... it was the culmination of a gambling company committing to regulatory capture as evinced by Donald Trump Jr (totally not) sitting on BOTH BOARDS as a "paid strategic advisor" or whatever lie they want to spin.
There are ads on the DC Metro right now that advertise one of these as a source of truth for election polling. The poster says something like "98% accuracy" and in super fine print, specifies something like "within 2 hours of polls closing" and other normal fine print stuff.
To me it's absolutely crazy that the "gamble on anything" apps are being advertised as some kind of polling software. I've already seen at least one race called into question because the gamblers bet on the wrong pony.
They're pure corruption engines designed for insider betting. The top brass of these companies need to be made example of.
I've seen those and they are crazy! Many elections are decided by the primary anyway, and then of course exit polls are going to be basically accurate 2 hours before the election. It's not even that fine print, I think they may actually just be stupid.
this is an answerable question and these markets are generally well calibrated (including on election outcomes), they have a good brier score.
i would not premise an anti-prediction market argument on their accuracy being bad, you are building on shaky foundations. the better argument is the paternalist protecting stupid people from themselves imo.
The LDS church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), which is also based in Utah has provided explicit guidance against participation in Kalshi and Polymarket as gambling.
They absolutely have been the main force behind the timing of this push. It was the main topic of General Conference a few weeks ago and one of the most eyebrow-raising articulations of official church policy.
Given the way that the church has explicitly encouraged state legislators to shoot down recent laws it's not surprising to think they'd be pushing for this.
> Given the way that the church has explicitly encouraged state legislators to shoot down recent laws it's not surprising to think they'd be pushing for this.
And the way they've influenced voters in Idaho and Arizona recently.
I thought it worth posting the stance for those not willing to click
...
Gambling is motivated by a desire to get something for nothing. This desire is spiritually destructive. It leads participants away from the Savior’s teachings of love and service and toward the selfishness of the adversary. It undermines the virtues of work and thrift and the desire to give honest effort in all we do.
Those who participate in gambling soon discover the deception in the idea that they can give little or nothing and receive something of value in return. They find that they give up large amounts of money, their own honor, and the respect of family members and friends. Deceived and addicted, they often gamble with funds they should use for other purposes, such as meeting the basic needs of their families. Gamblers sometimes become so enslaved and so desperate to pay gambling debts that they turn to stealing, giving up their own good name.
I don’t see the clear difference between something like Kalshi and, say, Robinhood. I do see a clear difference between Kalshi and casinos or sports gambling sites like Fan Duel; in the latter, your counterparty is the institution itself. This creates a lot of perverse incentives on the part of sports gambling sites to maintain their edge, such as banning bettors that are too good at playing the odds. Kalshi, on the other hand, is never your counterparty in any transaction.
Now, Robinhood is a brokerage, regulated by FINRA, and has been fined for misbehavior in the past. So I am more than willing to believe that there is daylight here that I’m not seeing. But anything that lets you speculate attracts a certain clientele, and I think the most important distinction is whether or not the platform itself is an interested party.
Because you can easily collude and cheat at poker so it needs to be heavily regulated or outright illegal to prevent theft. You can't really cheat at prediction markets, unless you have insider information which they can litigate after the fact.
I agree that whether the house has a stake in the outcome is (probably, I haven’t read the statute) not relevant to the definition of what is and is not gambling under Utah state law. Online Poker is very obviously a game though in a way that Kalshi and online brokerages aren’t (even if they share game like elements, such as random rewards). Important to caveat that prediction markets do allow you to speculate on the outcomes of games occurring off the platform, and maybe that is the distinction here between Kalshi and Robinhood, but then is Kalshi still “obviously” a gambling site if they ban markets on sports outcomes but leave everything else?
It's really the worst of both combined. There is ample gambling like options and behavior on Kalshi
&&
policy makers, assistants, journalists, and the like are insider trading - and the president of the united states is intentionally market manipulating for profit
If Kalshi is not a gambling operation then it is an unregulated futures market, which is still illegal. There are perverse incentives in futures markets too, which is why they are regulated.
Also speculators serve an important purpose: hedging strategies require speculators on the other side. It is not just a "certain clientele," there are people who run profitable businesses on speculation (it amounts to collecting insurance premiums from people who want hedges).
A pyramid scheme uses new investor money to pay fake returns to those who have already invested.
A casino provides games to bet on where expected value for the player is negative. A sportsbook balances their book by modifying the odds to remain as neutral as possible and capture the spread (see ‘vig’).
Probably referring to online gambling specifically. And I would frame it as the folks who promote pyramid schemes are the same as those who promote online gambling.
Prediction markets' business model is taking transaction fees from contracts between independent counterparties. Kalshi won't go bankrupt no matter how much you make there (though 'people' collectively will make negative [fees + taxes]).
Personally I’m a fan of the non sports side of these apps, Polymarket in particular. They are putting a financial incentive behind accurately predicting the future, which makes these apps basically the most accurate predictor of the future. Available to anyone to view, for free.
It makes sense why they went towards sports gambling, because the market is so big.
> They are putting a financial incentive behind accurately predicting the future, which makes these apps basically the most accurate predictor of the future.
There is plenty of data that shows they actually don't work very well outside of surfacing insider knowledge (which the commercial prediction markets superficially pretend to be against).
For decidable events where you can't have full picture insider knowledge like elections, prediction markets are pretty awful at accurate predictions.
I think this is kind of a naive take. There's a reason why you can't take a license insurance policy out on a stranger. Being able to bet that there will be a wild fire or if a plane will be late creates terrible incentives. It's also a new way to do insider trading.
Most uncertain things that people need to hedge (currency, commodity prices) already had a hedge.
In practical terms can someone really give me an example of how they benefited from knowing the future (materially, not emotionally) from a prediction they got from Kalshi? I am honestly curious.
Most uncertain things that people need to hedge (currency, commodity prices) already had a hedge.
That's way too narrow of the categories. Here are some more cases, and you tell me where can I hedge it? And don't tell me the answer is "go to Goldman Sachs and they create any kind of derivatives to hedge for you", that only works if you are a huge enterprise. I'm talking about SME, or even one person company with $1-5M ARR.
(By the way, I do trade on Polymarket / Kalshi, had a job interview with Kalshi many years ago but did not take their offer since I disagreed a lot with their product design. So all of this is my own opinion).
1. Suppose I run an ice cream shop in midtown Manhattan, and my foot traffic depends on how good the weather is. If it's sunny and dry, I expect a lot of traffic, vice versa, if it's thunderstorm, hurricane or snow, I would run the day without any revenue (and a lot of ice cream waste). What is the way for me to hedge weather risk that could seriously affect my business?
2. Suppose I'm a restaurant owner in Koreatown in LA, and during World Cup I run a restaurant expecting a lot of Korean coming to my area (and my restaurant). So I would ramp up my business, hiring a lot of staffs, sourcing a lot of ingredients from the vendors. Then the biggest risk (and anticipation) is that Korea would be knocked out very early, which unfortunately that precisely happened. So the foot traffic evaporated, and with that the revenue. How could I hedge that risk?
3. Suppose I'm a distributor / reseller who needs to import goods and products from other countries and resells it back to US for profit. Barring the import / export regulations, the biggest risk is tariffs: the orange man can (and did) impose 50% tariffs from China, and all the sudden I face a severe supply-demand imbalance with a lot of contract cancellation and such. How can I hedge such tariff risk from the orange man? (Obviously, the alternative is that I wish we could have elected a more competent leader, but at least 75 million American disagreed with me).
> Most uncertain things that people need to hedge (currency, commodity prices) already had a hedge
What happens when the people with pitch forks come for your derivatives and call it gambling? They did during the 2008 financial crisis. It sounded pretty much exactly like your take here, one abstraction jump away.
Then after they've come for your derivatives, they come for your banks. Because what is a bank except skimming off the top of the company doing the real business?
Then they come for your company. Because what is a companies except skimming off the top of the workers doing the real business?
And then you're standing in that bread queue wondering how it happened, even if it was all 100% predictable.
Or they're creating a financial incentive for insider trading and manipulating certain events.
I mean look at all the oil market manipulation in the Iran war. The pattern was repeated so many times: short oil, announce a ceasefire deal with imminent on Sunday before the markets open, cash out on Monday, rinse and repeat.
The argument is that we get transparency on what's likely to happen. I don't think there's any evidence of this. I've seen any number of very poor predictions coming from Kalshi and Polymarket. I have also seen some clear manipulation.
> They are putting a financial incentive behind accurately predicting the future,
Unfortunately they also place a larger financial inventive on influencing the outcome of future events. Or incentivizing corruption within the inner circles of these events. Because the larger financial upside in these transactions is to bet against what the market thinks, and influence the outcome.
> They are putting a financial incentive behind accurately predicting the future, which makes these apps basically the most accurate predictor of the future.
This is so fallacious. Putting money behind something doesn't make a prediction of a non-knowable more accurate.
Tarot card readings by a psychic must be more accurate predictor than a tarot card reading by an amateur because professional tarot card readers have a financial incentive to be right, so people continue coming back to them for advice. Getting a tarot card reading therefore makes this basically most accurate predictor!!
The range of activities in which this effect can be harnessed for societal good is extremely narrow, but I think it's there.
I'd be in favor of a prediction market for which which asteroids are likely to collide with something, and when. Though we'll have to shut it down once it becomes feasible that somebody might go up and nudge one.
> They are putting a financial incentive behind accurately predicting the future, which makes these apps basically the most accurate predictor of the future. Available to anyone to view, for free.
Here, let me predict a future where someone will die. On the other side, let me pay for a hit on the same person. /s
^It's a bit extreme and exaggerated, but it's like that on purpose to make a point.
There’s a reason both Kalshi and Polymarket were quick to make political connections (aka pay bribes). They know what they are doing is illegal, and waiting for legislation like sports gambling apps did would take too long. So they bought get out of jail free cards instead.
In fact, open corruption is preferred because it creates a co-dependence to prop up the system. It puts you under then thumb of the administration because they can decide to enforce the law at any time.
It's shocking that 10 years in people are still falling for the "it can't be X, because X would be too obvious and stupid" trap when it comes to Trump-land.
These people are seasoned grifters. They don't look for one big winning ticket, but rather multiple streams. A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real money. For your rank-and-file workers that's serious.
as well as all the other points everyone else made, less conspicuous ways to profit may also have upper bounds, even if a prediction market has upper bounds two sources of profit will probably allow you to profit more than one.
it is true that a smart operator may like to profit only in the less conspicuous way, but what would cause you to think that applied to Trump and his family?
These venues do not have enough liquidity to attract Trump and his cronies. There might be people lower down the food chain who are taking advantage though.
Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor and investor to Kalshi and Polymarket. Why bother betting if they will just give you cash for having the right name.
Granted, the son whose wedding you skip has got to be lower down the food chain.
That does very little to diminish the incredibly suspicious nature of having the family members of a notoriously corrupt president on the board of a dubiously-legal-at-best company whose product is a platform for betting on major world events.
If I were Iran I would regularly put up 10 million or more on bets that the US wont attack Iran the next day and if somebody takes up the bet you know you are on.
This is a bad take. What they are doing is quite obviously legal right now. Federal law trumps state law and the feds have an opinion, despite being weird and controversial.
There are a number of ongoing legal battles about the federal laws but until they work their way through the courts, it's "legal". Also, it could all get resolved with a new presidential administration in two years. This is the correct solution.
We shouldn't cheer for personal prosecutions over definitionally legal activity. Nothing good will come of it. See also: Sending mifepristone across state lines, or traveling out of state for abortions.
Whether pre-emption applies in this case depends on whether the courts accept Kalshi/Polymarket's claim that they operate a futures trading platform, not a gambling platform. If and only if that claim is accepted is there a pre-emption argument, and only then would the opinion of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission be relevant.
And while that is winding through the legal system, courts have decided that Kalshi/Polymarket can continue to operate. That might change in the future, but it is the present reality.
As long as the business is legal to operate, there is no justification for criminally prosecuting the people engaged in that business.
"While gambling is legal under U.S. federal law, there are significant restrictions pertaining to interstate and online gambling, as each state is free to regulate or prohibit the practice within its borders."
If it were that simple then these markets would have been shut down already.
Matt Levine has gone into great detail about the legal chicanery that brought us here, but it summarizes as "it's not gambling, it's futures trading".
This seems like nonsense to you and me (and Matt Levine), but our opinions are irrelevant here. The courts' opinions are, and so far they've been coming down on the side of the prediction markets. Mostly.
So by definition - as weird as it is - it's legal. So far.
While I know of a few cases where federal law can force a state to have looser restrictions (for example, the second amendment), it's pretty uncommon. Usually if a state wants to ban something, it can ban it and federal law can't stop such a ban without a pretty strong constitutional justification.
> While I know of a few cases where federal law can force a state to have looser restrictions (for example, the second amendment)…
The Second Amendment isn't even really Federal law, nor is the rest of the Constitution. It's the supreme law that sits above Federal/state law and constrains what Federal/state laws can do.
(And the Tenth Amendment protects state laws significantly from Federal laws, where applicable.)
Isn't it way more complicated than that? A state can obviously make things illegal in that state that aren't illegal nationally, they do it all the time. There would have to be a positively conflicting law to be a debate. (like with drug laws) Normally going in the other direction. Pretty sure you'd need a constitutional amendment to bind a state from doing something. Like in the case of drugs where federal law is often more strict, there's a whole body of case law around that. They made a commerce clause argument, and there's a doctrine they can't force the states to act to enforce a federal law, but also the states can't countermand the federal law, there's a whole history of courts dealing with the interactions.
> there's a doctrine they can't force the states to act to enforce a federal law, but also the states can't countermand the federal law, there's a whole history of courts dealing with the interactions.
The Fugitive Slave Acts were two of these conflicts. The first one overruled any state that offered sanctuary while also making it a federal crime to assist runaways. The second one aggravated tensions between slave states and the rest of America. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, it was not legal for a suspected runaway slave to deny being the slave described in the paperwork. States were required to assist slave catchers. Also, suspected runaway slaves were not permitted any sort of trial. It legalized kidnapping any black person who vaguely fit the description on the paperwork.
Prior to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, some states regulated credit default swaps as insurance products while some state's statutes said that CDS were gambling (and outlawed it completely). The CFMA overruled the states that had outlawed CDS. This was one of the major causes of the 2007/2008 financial meltdown.
It's always plainly obvious what is illegal. Given the total lack of ambiguity, why do we even need all these courts and judges to decide stuff? After all, we're all intimately familiar the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Act of 1974, relevant state laws, and how the constitution would control the interaction bewtween these. /s
I despise gambling and would very like if there was less of it. But that's not a legal opinion, those are just my feelings. There are good faith legal arguments that these state laws cannot override federal laws and that the federal laws allow these prediction markets. We live in a country with an enormously complex legal system and with a volume of legislation that is, without question, far beyond what any single individual could reasonably comprehend. This often means that what is legal and illegal is unclear. I think this is one of those circumstances.
I agree, this needs to be decided by the court. But it's not really an issue of a state law trying to supersede a federal law. It's a state law superceding the authority a _regulator_ believes it has.
Kalshi has a serious uphill battle here. As the Judge said in granting Utah's motion and delying Kalshi's motion for a preliminary injunction:
> Shelby determined the text of US law makes it clear that state regulation is not forbidden. US law states that CFTC jurisdiction does not “supersede or limit the jurisdiction conferred on courts of the United States or any State,” and “explicitly provides for State regulation of its gaming laws in all but a few specified cases,” he wrote.
> “Congress is aware that some States permit gambling while others do not, and the CEA explicitly provides for State jurisdiction,” Shelby wrote.
Right but the CFTC is saying their authority is based in federal law.
Judge Shelby’s interpretation quoted above seems in conflict with how the 3rd circuit ruled in Kalshiex v. Flaherty, which is why I think the law is not entirely clear yet. I would be surprised if SCOTUS eventually weighs in
POTUS can't pardon state convictions. This will be decided in courts. One perspective is that US taxpayer is paying kalshi's legal bills, but still the final outcome is not within Trump's ability to change.
Nobody should ever be threatened with prison time because of a jurisdictional dispute between federal and state governments. That's antithetical to the rule of law, regardless of the specifics of the law or the jurisdictional dispute.
They should be thrown in prison for knowingly violating a law. Trying to play a semantics game (prediction market vs gambling) to get out of it is just scummy. Everybody knows it is gambling.
Creating a company with the intent to circumvent the law is definitely something that should be punishable with stricter measures than simply breaking the law directly.
As much as I am a fan of being able to see the current probability of a future event by checking prediction markets - the argument that there is a meaningful difference between predicting the outcome of a sports game and betting on the outcome of a sports game strains credulity.
The whole “we provide the most accurate way to predict the future” upside-as-a-counterweight-to-the-downside-of-gambling has always seemed like a hollow benefit to me. I mean, like, okay, let’s say they actually do provide that. Who’s to say that’s a beneficial result? Are we really better off having more accurate forecasting of election results? Or does that just improve boogeyman MBA-types’ abilities to affect election results?
So, if there's a difference between the probability that an event happen versus the odds offered on the prediction market, one could simply arbitrage off that and make money without taking risk. Every first year trader at Jane Street or Citadel would learn that. Am I missing something?
When will we start holding the people who found and operate companies whose sole purpose is to break the law accountable, rather than letting them hide behind "limited liability"?
I think I understand the basics of business and business law in the US. It is disgusting how easy it is to hide behind a corporation or LLC to avoid criminal charges and civil liability.
Limited liability is a concept in all of the developed world. Are you saying it's possible to have a developed society without limited liability? Why should I believe that? Do you just want anarchy or autarky? I feel like you might disagree with more than just limited liability.
I dont have time for the mind games of it all. If someone wittingly did something, or unwittingly but negligently did something, and it caused harm to society, it doesnt matter if theyre an individual acting alone or part of a "corporate identity." That person did the crime and they should be held accountable. Kalshi isnt doing illegal gambling, the directors of the company are.
How many billions of dollars in taxes went unpaid? How many overnight accommodation laws were broken? How much consumer harm has occurred due to lack of rights where they might otherwise have redress? Just a few that come to mind.
So Airbnb is responsible for the individual hosts who decide to do something illegal? People have been doing short term rentals for a long time, including online, before Airbnb - what specifically did the company do that was so bad that its the same level as the gambling enabled by Kalshi etc?
I think sometimes people need a visceral demonstration of what bad laws are actually preventing. Uber was a pareto improvement in my view: we are in a better world both for consumers & for low-income wages having ridesharing as a backstop.
On the other hand, I've come around to the view that sports betting is a net unqualified bad -- and I didn't necessarily feel that way before the Kalshi/PM explosion.
This is the old, "Easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission"
A lot of these companies have taken this approach. Break laws until someone finally notices AND does something about it. The runway to a slap on the wrist is often times more financially beneficial to companies - there is no incentive to stop if you run a billion dollar company and breaking the law gets you a $50M dollar fine you make back in a single month.
I thought SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) was supposed to prevent a lot of this, but I guess companies just continue to find loopholes to exploit.
Uber and Airbnb are unambiguous good for the world?
You might want to look up Barcelona and the issues airbnb causes there. Basically it follows out the cities as you can make way more money doing Airbnb than renting to people living/working there.
As to Uber, I'm not sure if the driver experience is unambiguous good. For some, sure. For the ones that depend on it, I'm sure they'll disagree
Uber is a major driver of the gig economy and all the lack of worker protections that that includes.
They’re also arguably a major driver/originator of DoorDash and Uber Eats, a company that famously takes an enormous percentage of every restaurant’s order fee, compounding either the increase in costs of restaurant food, or causing restaurants to struggle further or both.
They’ve done good - they’ve made it easier to get a job when you otherwise can’t, and they’ve reduced car reliance for some people; but “unambiguous good” is too far a bridge.
Uber and AirBnB were things we should have taken far more seriously.
That being said, they weren't effectively offering unregulated gambling on any difference of opinion. Gambling is a vice. We've made it a regulated vice, but it's very much still a vice. If you get rid of the "regulated" part, people, including those with the ability to present a case in front of a grand jury, are going to see you as a 1980s cosa nostra capo and act accordingly.
This would be a great post for Kalshi's lawyers to make. Hard to believe it though. To be clear it is a not a fundamental proposition of the legal system that every illegal activity be tested before it "actually" becomes illegal. It is a business' obligation to not violate the law, not the other way around.
"Facing felony charges" doesn't tell me much, and the current state of the world tells me those charges will be dismissed as soon as some money moves around.
in Utah felony charges means potential prison time.
As far as what the current state of the world tells you, what would you have done then? Should Utah have dispatched assassins? They are taking the leaders of the company to criminal court. I can't believe I have to stand up for Utah here.
I feel you’re being deliberately obtuse. Facing charges doesn’t mean charged, charged doesn’t mean tried, tried doesn’t mean convicted, and convicted doesn’t mean incarcerated and/or fined.
There are many more steps in the justice system where they could get off easy, and there’s plenty of precedent for that.
Thankfully that part of the law didn't stand under closer inspection. As anyone on this website should know, it's technically impossible to identify all VPN users or geolocate VPN users behind their VPN. Anyone can set up a VPN on a raspberry Pi and leave it at a friends' house in another state. Under the law they tried to pass, adult websites would be liable for this.
Sympathetic but that's not relevant. GP is not talking about what kinds of things corporations should be held accountable for, but whether their officers should be held accountable. At the heart of this is whether the punishments for corporations are sufficient if they don't actually deter illegal behavior.
I'm not sure the VPN law stains this enforcement action. As you mentioned, courts struck down the VPN ban but not the content one.
I can think porn bans are stupid and gambling laws should be enforced. Hell, I personally think Utah's gambling ban is too strict. But I'll defend their right to choose as much for their people just as I believe their porn and VPN bans are not within their rights to collectively legislate.
I'm not sure specifically about the moral crusade against Kalshi and Polymarket, but I am glad to see that at least one state is serious about its sovereignty and is willing to go to the mat with criminal charges. Utah 100% has a right to enforce this and I hope they are successful. And taking on the feds too, that is a gutsy move.
We need at least one state to do this when large corporations violate privacy laws.
Not sure - to the extent to which Kalshi is a nationwide futures market, it is hard to imagine a more clear "interstate commerce" example. Congress should probably just pass a law delegating regulation of "sports futures" to the states to remove any legal ambiguity. Sports gambling is obviously pretty net bad for young men.
Futures is a contract for an underlying asset. If I hold a futures contract for 100 bushels of wheat, Im getting 100 bushels of wheat when that contract expires. A lot of traders will sell the contract before the expiration date, but the person they sell it to is going to receive those goods. A real future solves an actual problem: permitting people and companies to buy goods with a future delivery date.
If I trade a "future" on Kalshi, what asset is being traded? It's obvious bullshit.
Nobody is forcing you to gamble. If you think it's a "net bad" then simply don't do it, it doesn't need to be illegal for consenting adults to make transactions with eachother.
Great! I'm sure you won't mind if our Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice goes through your financial transactions, browser history, messaging, friends list, and geolocation records looking for signs of improper behavior. We're here to help you avoid impure thoughts!
Government intervention into what is essentially private consumer behavior (not like this is a deal between MSFT and Intel or whatever) is dangerous, incompatible with the values of personal freedom and should be invoked only in extremely rare and narrowly scoped circumstances.
Now, I'm willing to accept that people will disagree about what deserves intervention and how much is acceptable. We can bicker about how much retail sports betting, guns, drugs, adult content, etc, etc, should be curtailed, that's fine.
But the hill I will die on is that people, such as yourself, who use a situations like this, where the overwhelming majority will probably want some amount of intervention as a soapbox to peddle intervention into people's private behavior for it's own sake like it's some sort of good default policy are evil at their very core and should be ridiculed, shunned and marginalized for the benefit of us all.
Unfortunately, gamified gambling on your phone is so bad for society that I think it should be banned or heavily limited even at the expense of the freedom for consenting adults making transactions with each other.
Same argument around banning hard drugs. They just make society worse. Obviously hard drugs are more clear cut and definitely worse for you, just saying, similar situation in principle.
> Congress should probably just pass a law delegating regulation of "sports futures" to the states to remove any legal ambiguity.
Or they could do the opposite, and just say that apps like this are gambling, which they are, and not a "futures market" that has any real value to society.
I find value, for instance I speculate heavily on future AI capability advance as a way of hedging my own career. I don't find value in sports gambling.
For every bet, there's one person who finds value, and another who doesn't. Neither of those alone are sufficient to determine value to society as a whole.
> who decides? (always by definition an authoritarian)
By this measure any regulation of a commons is authoritarian. Fortunately, societies with this attitude tend to bee-line their ways to ecological collapse.
Insurance, prediction market, futures market, gambling - imo a lot of these are semantic distinctions.
I support banning sports gambling/insurance/futures because it is a big onramp for foolish people to maneuver themselves into disastrous financial decisions.
Quite a lot of the law is "semantic definitions" in the sense you're using the term. Things like intent and external circumstances are pretty typical for legal systems to take into account If you're looking for the law to be mathematically pure, then this might be a problem. If you're looking for the law to be flexible enough to handle real-world circumstances while still having some enforcement power that can be agreed upon, this is a feature, not a bug.
Arizona filed criminal charges against kalshi and its executives in May and lost before it could even go to trial. The growing consensus among the courts is that states do not have the right to enforce this. Needs to go to the Supreme Court now
I'm seeing "U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi in Arizona, a Trump appointee, denied Kalshi's request for a temporary block on Tuesday and ordered the company to demonstrate why the case should be in federal court given the new state charges" [1]. That's quashing a request for a preliminary injunction.
Not throwing out the case.
Meanwhile, "federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts, respectively, issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports betting in their states, while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi. The Nevada lawsuit was remanded to state court."
Gambling, at least in casinos, means betting on very random and unpredictable things like the roll of a die. That's the distinction between games of chance and games of skill.
In reality, every thing we do in life is a gamble. Even investing in US Treasury Bonds. (And if you don't think so, look at the national debt again.)
I think gambling is defined by the players' behaviour more than the game's structure. There are professional poker players who I would argue do not gamble. They're playing risks as much as an insurance adjuster.
On the other hand, someone investing their life savings into McDonald's meals in an attempt to win a sweepstakes isn't buying burgers.
So the question really is, how many Kalshi and Polymarket users display signs of problem gambling? From what I'm seeing, it isn't negligible [1].
CFTC is preëmpting state gambling laws under commodities regulation. That sounds, to me, like a major question. The sort Chevron deferred to regulators. But which our current SCOTUS just said should be decided by the Congress. To my knowledge, the Congress has said nothing about prediction markets. Which means it's in the domain of states.
Otherwise, fuck it, let's launch a prediction-market based national health insurance market. I'll sell you a contract that pays my medical bills if I have a health event.
In a morally relativistic, legally positivistic hyper-individualism that ignores the objective truth and prioritizes individual “autonomy” over substantive moral ends, you can pervert any positive law to mean whatever you wish - this is how pornography came to be regarded as protected free speech. (The classical legal tradition views law as an ordinance of reason directed toward the common good.)
So I wouldn’t be surprised under the right social and cultural conditions and the right people in power that it could become regarded as a protected liberty. It is rather frightening that this relativism – deprived of objective anchors and standards – doesn’t strike people as terrifying. Too many people take for granted the status quo they are accustomed to, or they are so fixated on satisfying some appetite du jour that they fail to grasp the waiting Dionysian fallout[0].
Congress didn't identify the markets it was regulating by common names or trade names. It doesn't matter if its generally called a prediction market, a commodities market, or a futures exchange. What matters is if it qualifies as a Designated Contract Market as per https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-I/part-38 so if you want to actually have knowledge of what Congress said on this topic your going to have read all of that.
There is already a split decision on this between the 3rd and 9th circuits so it seems likely SCOTUS is going to take this up. I expect they'll be the ones deciding if this in the domain of the states or not. If they don't pick it up then its going to vary by circuit, such that it will be in the domain of some states and not others.
> What matters is if it qualifies as a Designated Contract Market
DCMs are a creature of rule, not statute. The statutes that animate it are the CFMA of 2000, Dodd-Frank "special rule" for event contracts and CEA § 5. The core question, whether the CFTC has the authority to regulate this kind of DCM, is still open.
> There is already a split decision on this between the 3rd and 9th circuits so it seems likely SCOTUS is going to take this up
> not sure specifically about the moral crusade against Kalshi and Polymarket
We're broadly feeling the effects from broad-spectrum gambling addiction. It's hitting our kids. It's hitting our young men. It's hitting our elderly. Restrictions on social media, regulation around gambling and folks trying to drink less are all, it seems, part of a common theme.
I love that brief moment it gives me to decide if it's really worth it or if I really even want to read the article after all. It's the same thing with ads before a video clip - just a moment to think 'Do I really want to even watch this video clip?'. Nope - close tab.
Kalshi is a trading platform. It's been more reliable than the stock market in my experience.
In the times I traded sports contracts, I was able to reverse a trade during the event to prevent a total loss of contract investment, and buy back in if the momentum changed. But usually for the times I bought sports contracts and allowed it to complete, I was outperforming the stock market on a daily basis.
The only stock market trade that outperformed was BWET at the start of the Iran War.
Kalshi ran a series of Youtube videos last year that were deepfakes of athletes saying really outrageous stuff. It was hilarious. It was also deeply provocative and exploitative. It showed exactly who they are... people who will test the edge of decency.
This is a deep fake of an athlete but this not a Kalshi ad.
I don't deny that deep fakes exist. However, I am skeptical that Kalshi made ads of with deep fakes of athletes endorsing their product.
That seems like a slam dunk lawsuit. It also sounds novel enough that I would expect plenty of news coverage of both the ads and the inevitable litigation.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] threadthey were never an innovating marketing play... it was the culmination of a gambling company committing to regulatory capture as evinced by Donald Trump Jr (totally not) sitting on BOTH BOARDS as a "paid strategic advisor" or whatever lie they want to spin.
To me it's absolutely crazy that the "gamble on anything" apps are being advertised as some kind of polling software. I've already seen at least one race called into question because the gamblers bet on the wrong pony.
They're pure corruption engines designed for insider betting. The top brass of these companies need to be made example of.
is there any surprise then that Trumps are on the boards of both?
i would not premise an anti-prediction market argument on their accuracy being bad, you are building on shaky foundations. the better argument is the paternalist protecting stupid people from themselves imo.
Here is their official stance on gambling: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi...
I am not sure how much, if any, impact or influence this has had on Utah law.
Given the way that the church has explicitly encouraged state legislators to shoot down recent laws it's not surprising to think they'd be pushing for this.
And the way they've influenced voters in Idaho and Arizona recently.
... Gambling is motivated by a desire to get something for nothing. This desire is spiritually destructive. It leads participants away from the Savior’s teachings of love and service and toward the selfishness of the adversary. It undermines the virtues of work and thrift and the desire to give honest effort in all we do.
Those who participate in gambling soon discover the deception in the idea that they can give little or nothing and receive something of value in return. They find that they give up large amounts of money, their own honor, and the respect of family members and friends. Deceived and addicted, they often gamble with funds they should use for other purposes, such as meeting the basic needs of their families. Gamblers sometimes become so enslaved and so desperate to pay gambling debts that they turn to stealing, giving up their own good name.
Now, Robinhood is a brokerage, regulated by FINRA, and has been fined for misbehavior in the past. So I am more than willing to believe that there is daylight here that I’m not seeing. But anything that lets you speculate attracts a certain clientele, and I think the most important distinction is whether or not the platform itself is an interested party.
Lots of folks gripe about how Kalshi adjudicates contracts.
&&
policy makers, assistants, journalists, and the like are insider trading - and the president of the united states is intentionally market manipulating for profit
Also speculators serve an important purpose: hedging strategies require speculators on the other side. It is not just a "certain clientele," there are people who run profitable businesses on speculation (it amounts to collecting insurance premiums from people who want hedges).
Somebody needs to tell Utah it needs to change its laws to adapt to their business plan, ASAP.
A pyramid scheme uses new investor money to pay fake returns to those who have already invested.
A casino provides games to bet on where expected value for the player is negative. A sportsbook balances their book by modifying the odds to remain as neutral as possible and capture the spread (see ‘vig’).
There’s not a whole lot of similarity there.
It makes sense why they went towards sports gambling, because the market is so big.
There is plenty of data that shows they actually don't work very well outside of surfacing insider knowledge (which the commercial prediction markets superficially pretend to be against).
For decidable events where you can't have full picture insider knowledge like elections, prediction markets are pretty awful at accurate predictions.
Most uncertain things that people need to hedge (currency, commodity prices) already had a hedge.
In practical terms can someone really give me an example of how they benefited from knowing the future (materially, not emotionally) from a prediction they got from Kalshi? I am honestly curious.
That's way too narrow of the categories. Here are some more cases, and you tell me where can I hedge it? And don't tell me the answer is "go to Goldman Sachs and they create any kind of derivatives to hedge for you", that only works if you are a huge enterprise. I'm talking about SME, or even one person company with $1-5M ARR.
(By the way, I do trade on Polymarket / Kalshi, had a job interview with Kalshi many years ago but did not take their offer since I disagreed a lot with their product design. So all of this is my own opinion).
1. Suppose I run an ice cream shop in midtown Manhattan, and my foot traffic depends on how good the weather is. If it's sunny and dry, I expect a lot of traffic, vice versa, if it's thunderstorm, hurricane or snow, I would run the day without any revenue (and a lot of ice cream waste). What is the way for me to hedge weather risk that could seriously affect my business?
2. Suppose I'm a restaurant owner in Koreatown in LA, and during World Cup I run a restaurant expecting a lot of Korean coming to my area (and my restaurant). So I would ramp up my business, hiring a lot of staffs, sourcing a lot of ingredients from the vendors. Then the biggest risk (and anticipation) is that Korea would be knocked out very early, which unfortunately that precisely happened. So the foot traffic evaporated, and with that the revenue. How could I hedge that risk?
3. Suppose I'm a distributor / reseller who needs to import goods and products from other countries and resells it back to US for profit. Barring the import / export regulations, the biggest risk is tariffs: the orange man can (and did) impose 50% tariffs from China, and all the sudden I face a severe supply-demand imbalance with a lot of contract cancellation and such. How can I hedge such tariff risk from the orange man? (Obviously, the alternative is that I wish we could have elected a more competent leader, but at least 75 million American disagreed with me).
What happens when the people with pitch forks come for your derivatives and call it gambling? They did during the 2008 financial crisis. It sounded pretty much exactly like your take here, one abstraction jump away.
Then after they've come for your derivatives, they come for your banks. Because what is a bank except skimming off the top of the company doing the real business?
Then they come for your company. Because what is a companies except skimming off the top of the workers doing the real business?
And then you're standing in that bread queue wondering how it happened, even if it was all 100% predictable.
I mean look at all the oil market manipulation in the Iran war. The pattern was repeated so many times: short oil, announce a ceasefire deal with imminent on Sunday before the markets open, cash out on Monday, rinse and repeat.
The argument is that we get transparency on what's likely to happen. I don't think there's any evidence of this. I've seen any number of very poor predictions coming from Kalshi and Polymarket. I have also seen some clear manipulation.
We should call this what this is: gambling.
Unfortunately they also place a larger financial inventive on influencing the outcome of future events. Or incentivizing corruption within the inner circles of these events. Because the larger financial upside in these transactions is to bet against what the market thinks, and influence the outcome.
This is so fallacious. Putting money behind something doesn't make a prediction of a non-knowable more accurate.
Tarot card readings by a psychic must be more accurate predictor than a tarot card reading by an amateur because professional tarot card readers have a financial incentive to be right, so people continue coming back to them for advice. Getting a tarot card reading therefore makes this basically most accurate predictor!!
I'd be in favor of a prediction market for which which asteroids are likely to collide with something, and when. Though we'll have to shut it down once it becomes feasible that somebody might go up and nudge one.
Here, let me predict a future where someone will die. On the other side, let me pay for a hit on the same person. /s
^It's a bit extreme and exaggerated, but it's like that on purpose to make a point.
Do we want an accurate public prediction of events with national security implications?
Most of the things we actually need to predict (winner of the Superbowl not among them) already have large and liquid financial markets behind them.
If you have advance knowledge of an attack, there are much less conspicuous ways to profit off that.
What about this administration makes you think that's important to them?
it is true that a smart operator may like to profit only in the less conspicuous way, but what would cause you to think that applied to Trump and his family?
Granted, the son whose wedding you skip has got to be lower down the food chain.
This is a bad take. What they are doing is quite obviously legal right now. Federal law trumps state law and the feds have an opinion, despite being weird and controversial.
There are a number of ongoing legal battles about the federal laws but until they work their way through the courts, it's "legal". Also, it could all get resolved with a new presidential administration in two years. This is the correct solution.
We shouldn't cheer for personal prosecutions over definitionally legal activity. Nothing good will come of it. See also: Sending mifepristone across state lines, or traveling out of state for abortions.
Federal law does not categorically trump state law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption
Whether pre-emption applies in this case depends on whether the courts accept Kalshi/Polymarket's claim that they operate a futures trading platform, not a gambling platform. If and only if that claim is accepted is there a pre-emption argument, and only then would the opinion of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission be relevant.
As long as the business is legal to operate, there is no justification for criminally prosecuting the people engaged in that business.
No. There's no "states must permit gambling" Federal law for state bans to conflict with currently; states are free to ban it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_States
"While gambling is legal under U.S. federal law, there are significant restrictions pertaining to interstate and online gambling, as each state is free to regulate or prohibit the practice within its borders."
Matt Levine has gone into great detail about the legal chicanery that brought us here, but it summarizes as "it's not gambling, it's futures trading".
This seems like nonsense to you and me (and Matt Levine), but our opinions are irrelevant here. The courts' opinions are, and so far they've been coming down on the side of the prediction markets. Mostly.
So by definition - as weird as it is - it's legal. So far.
The Second Amendment isn't even really Federal law, nor is the rest of the Constitution. It's the supreme law that sits above Federal/state law and constrains what Federal/state laws can do.
(And the Tenth Amendment protects state laws significantly from Federal laws, where applicable.)
The Fugitive Slave Acts were two of these conflicts. The first one overruled any state that offered sanctuary while also making it a federal crime to assist runaways. The second one aggravated tensions between slave states and the rest of America. Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, it was not legal for a suspected runaway slave to deny being the slave described in the paperwork. States were required to assist slave catchers. Also, suspected runaway slaves were not permitted any sort of trial. It legalized kidnapping any black person who vaguely fit the description on the paperwork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850
Prior to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, some states regulated credit default swaps as insurance products while some state's statutes said that CDS were gambling (and outlawed it completely). The CFMA overruled the states that had outlawed CDS. This was one of the major causes of the 2007/2008 financial meltdown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizatio...
I despise gambling and would very like if there was less of it. But that's not a legal opinion, those are just my feelings. There are good faith legal arguments that these state laws cannot override federal laws and that the federal laws allow these prediction markets. We live in a country with an enormously complex legal system and with a volume of legislation that is, without question, far beyond what any single individual could reasonably comprehend. This often means that what is legal and illegal is unclear. I think this is one of those circumstances.
Kalshi has a serious uphill battle here. As the Judge said in granting Utah's motion and delying Kalshi's motion for a preliminary injunction:
> Shelby determined the text of US law makes it clear that state regulation is not forbidden. US law states that CFTC jurisdiction does not “supersede or limit the jurisdiction conferred on courts of the United States or any State,” and “explicitly provides for State regulation of its gaming laws in all but a few specified cases,” he wrote.
> “Congress is aware that some States permit gambling while others do not, and the CEA explicitly provides for State jurisdiction,” Shelby wrote.
Judge Shelby’s interpretation quoted above seems in conflict with how the 3rd circuit ruled in Kalshiex v. Flaherty, which is why I think the law is not entirely clear yet. I would be surprised if SCOTUS eventually weighs in
I would amend your “breaking the law” comment to “willfully ignoring all regulation, taxes, and labor provisions” perhaps but, same sentiment.
On the other hand, I've come around to the view that sports betting is a net unqualified bad -- and I didn't necessarily feel that way before the Kalshi/PM explosion.
A lot of these companies have taken this approach. Break laws until someone finally notices AND does something about it. The runway to a slap on the wrist is often times more financially beneficial to companies - there is no incentive to stop if you run a billion dollar company and breaking the law gets you a $50M dollar fine you make back in a single month.
I thought SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) was supposed to prevent a lot of this, but I guess companies just continue to find loopholes to exploit.
You might want to look up Barcelona and the issues airbnb causes there. Basically it follows out the cities as you can make way more money doing Airbnb than renting to people living/working there.
As to Uber, I'm not sure if the driver experience is unambiguous good. For some, sure. For the ones that depend on it, I'm sure they'll disagree
Uber is a major driver of the gig economy and all the lack of worker protections that that includes.
They’re also arguably a major driver/originator of DoorDash and Uber Eats, a company that famously takes an enormous percentage of every restaurant’s order fee, compounding either the increase in costs of restaurant food, or causing restaurants to struggle further or both.
They’ve done good - they’ve made it easier to get a job when you otherwise can’t, and they’ve reduced car reliance for some people; but “unambiguous good” is too far a bridge.
That being said, they weren't effectively offering unregulated gambling on any difference of opinion. Gambling is a vice. We've made it a regulated vice, but it's very much still a vice. If you get rid of the "regulated" part, people, including those with the ability to present a case in front of a grand jury, are going to see you as a 1980s cosa nostra capo and act accordingly.
The problem lies in the legal gray area of what constitutes gambling, and therefore "illegal" gambling. That's what the courts have to decide.
I think most people would say this is gambling. But our legal system has to rule on that before we can start putting people in jail for it.
Why are casinos operated by Native Americans legal but casinos operated by black people illegal?
I don't think "illegal gambling" is illegal for the reasons you want it to be illegal.
You might want to look up what the reservations are, legally speaking
You don’t even have to read the article, the headline says it all…
As far as what the current state of the world tells you, what would you have done then? Should Utah have dispatched assassins? They are taking the leaders of the company to criminal court. I can't believe I have to stand up for Utah here.
There are many more steps in the justice system where they could get off easy, and there’s plenty of precedent for that.
We play this game every time anyone is charged. When Holmes was being sentenced there were still folks who were convinced it was a scam.
Lazy nihilism is understandable as a personal coping mechanism. It's bewildering as something folks feel a need to share.
Thankfully that part of the law didn't stand under closer inspection. As anyone on this website should know, it's technically impossible to identify all VPN users or geolocate VPN users behind their VPN. Anyone can set up a VPN on a raspberry Pi and leave it at a friends' house in another state. Under the law they tried to pass, adult websites would be liable for this.
I can think porn bans are stupid and gambling laws should be enforced. Hell, I personally think Utah's gambling ban is too strict. But I'll defend their right to choose as much for their people just as I believe their porn and VPN bans are not within their rights to collectively legislate.
We need at least one state to do this when large corporations violate privacy laws.
If I trade a "future" on Kalshi, what asset is being traded? It's obvious bullshit.
Utah is not suing over the rest of kalshi besides the sports gambling part.
I have several people that had their lives severely impacted by these things and they were all regular people.
Now, I'm willing to accept that people will disagree about what deserves intervention and how much is acceptable. We can bicker about how much retail sports betting, guns, drugs, adult content, etc, etc, should be curtailed, that's fine.
But the hill I will die on is that people, such as yourself, who use a situations like this, where the overwhelming majority will probably want some amount of intervention as a soapbox to peddle intervention into people's private behavior for it's own sake like it's some sort of good default policy are evil at their very core and should be ridiculed, shunned and marginalized for the benefit of us all.
Same argument around banning hard drugs. They just make society worse. Obviously hard drugs are more clear cut and definitely worse for you, just saying, similar situation in principle.
You think they were fucking gambling on their iPhones in 1890? They weren’t even doing that in 2012! Get real.
Or they could do the opposite, and just say that apps like this are gambling, which they are, and not a "futures market" that has any real value to society.
By this measure any regulation of a commons is authoritarian. Fortunately, societies with this attitude tend to bee-line their ways to ecological collapse.
"Hedging" is like insurance but the thing you're insuring against is another bet.
I support banning sports gambling/insurance/futures because it is a big onramp for foolish people to maneuver themselves into disastrous financial decisions.
Guess at which level insurance and gambling are regulated?
EDIT: Looks like the 9th and 6th circuits have since agreed and rejected Kalshi and CFTC's argument.
Source?
I'm seeing "U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi in Arizona, a Trump appointee, denied Kalshi's request for a temporary block on Tuesday and ordered the company to demonstrate why the case should be in federal court given the new state charges" [1]. That's quashing a request for a preliminary injunction. Not throwing out the case.
Meanwhile, "federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts, respectively, issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports betting in their states, while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi. The Nevada lawsuit was remanded to state court."
[1] https://www.wlky.com/article/arizona-kalshi-criminal-charges...
More likely a wasteful move. Federal preemption is well established.
[1] https://kalshi.com/markets/kxrt/rotten-tomatoes-scores/kxrt-...
Gambling has to do with putting money in a proposition, not with sports. "I bet you I can drink two points before you" is not a financial statement.
In reality, every thing we do in life is a gamble. Even investing in US Treasury Bonds. (And if you don't think so, look at the national debt again.)
I think gambling is defined by the players' behaviour more than the game's structure. There are professional poker players who I would argue do not gamble. They're playing risks as much as an insurance adjuster.
On the other hand, someone investing their life savings into McDonald's meals in an attempt to win a sweepstakes isn't buying burgers.
So the question really is, how many Kalshi and Polymarket users display signs of problem gambling? From what I'm seeing, it isn't negligible [1].
[1] https://newsroom.ucla.edu/in-the-news/la-therapists-are-seei...
In what? Source?
CFTC is preëmpting state gambling laws under commodities regulation. That sounds, to me, like a major question. The sort Chevron deferred to regulators. But which our current SCOTUS just said should be decided by the Congress. To my knowledge, the Congress has said nothing about prediction markets. Which means it's in the domain of states.
Otherwise, fuck it, let's launch a prediction-market based national health insurance market. I'll sell you a contract that pays my medical bills if I have a health event.
So I wouldn’t be surprised under the right social and cultural conditions and the right people in power that it could become regarded as a protected liberty. It is rather frightening that this relativism – deprived of objective anchors and standards – doesn’t strike people as terrifying. Too many people take for granted the status quo they are accustomed to, or they are so fixated on satisfying some appetite du jour that they fail to grasp the waiting Dionysian fallout[0].
[0] https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/euripides-bacchae-sb/
Congress didn't identify the markets it was regulating by common names or trade names. It doesn't matter if its generally called a prediction market, a commodities market, or a futures exchange. What matters is if it qualifies as a Designated Contract Market as per https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-I/part-38 so if you want to actually have knowledge of what Congress said on this topic your going to have read all of that.
There is already a split decision on this between the 3rd and 9th circuits so it seems likely SCOTUS is going to take this up. I expect they'll be the ones deciding if this in the domain of the states or not. If they don't pick it up then its going to vary by circuit, such that it will be in the domain of some states and not others.
DCMs are a creature of rule, not statute. The statutes that animate it are the CFMA of 2000, Dodd-Frank "special rule" for event contracts and CEA § 5. The core question, whether the CFTC has the authority to regulate this kind of DCM, is still open.
> There is already a split decision on this between the 3rd and 9th circuits so it seems likely SCOTUS is going to take this up
Links to the split opinions?
We're broadly feeling the effects from broad-spectrum gambling addiction. It's hitting our kids. It's hitting our young men. It's hitting our elderly. Restrictions on social media, regulation around gambling and folks trying to drink less are all, it seems, part of a common theme.
Closes tab.
Even insurance is similar, Kalshi markets can be used as a form of insurance.
Yet AFAIK Utah doesn't ban either of those.
Like a resort hedging their income against bad weather.
Or a sports bar hedging their city's team getting knocked out of a tournament early.
And that's the part where you ask yourself, "I wonder why that is?" and "Do my analogies parallel reality as much as I currently think they do?"
Or I can cut to the chase: cut the crap, it's gambling and you know it. Semantic pedantry isn't going to convince anyone to the contrary.
In the times I traded sports contracts, I was able to reverse a trade during the event to prevent a total loss of contract investment, and buy back in if the momentum changed. But usually for the times I bought sports contracts and allowed it to complete, I was outperforming the stock market on a daily basis.
The only stock market trade that outperformed was BWET at the start of the Iran War.
I don't deny that deep fakes exist. However, I am skeptical that Kalshi made ads of with deep fakes of athletes endorsing their product.
That seems like a slam dunk lawsuit. It also sounds novel enough that I would expect plenty of news coverage of both the ads and the inevitable litigation.