Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets(merkley.senate.gov) |
Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets(merkley.senate.gov) |
But for now, make sure you get in your bets er i mean predictions on this mega important market: "Elon Musk # tweets March 3 - March 10, 2026?"[1]
[1] https://polymarket.com/event/elon-musk-of-tweets-march-3-mar...
The public already does not believe this. Less than 25% approve of your work.
> This legislation strengthens the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s ability to go after bad actors
And this is designed to "increase trust?"
That'd go a long way towards curbing the corruption of these things, while preserving (or even greatly enhancing) their "predictive power."
And the transparency must be real-time and MUST include the full dox on beneficial owner of the contract/bet, with steep jailtime for falsification/fronting, etc.. They can even say it is for tax purposes — they win that bet, they should pay income tax (and be able to deduct the costs of their losing bets against that specific income type).
I want to know if a bunch of senators or DOD personnel bet on event X, and I want journalists and OSINT watchers to know it in realtime. That gives everyone information while naturally eliminating most of the advantage of insider trading, since nearly everyone will pile into the same trade and the odds/payoff will come closer to the reality.
Public trades will make people targets and that will create weird incentives.
https://apnews.com/article/crypto-bitcoin-kidnapping-wrench-...
I believe prediction markets and sports betting apps are societal failures that only serve to alienate the masses and further extract wealth to the top. Let's ban them all, we're not losing anything.
https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/End-Predic...
Good behavior starts at the top. It becomes a lot easier to crack down on low-level corruption if the guys at the top aren't doing it.
If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.
There's no such position. You may be referring to the Secretary of Defense.
This machine kills hope.
Read the original papers on them.
http://li.mit.edu/Stuff/CNSE/Paper/Hanson90.pdf
It also creates weird incentives. If I want to pay a politician to do something, bribing them would generally be illegal. But what if I instead bet lots of money that they won't do it?
they require liquidity from people that are not in the know for adequate price discovery and exit liquidity worthwhile for participation
On a personal note, I find these markets incredibly useful in day to day life. There's been a joke for a while that putting site:reddit.com in your google search is the only way to get (some) real information. It's becoming true that putting <search terms> AND (kalshi OR polymarket) is how to get accurate info.
Another worrying issue with betting is just how prevalent the last election was in betting markets. In elections won by thousands or even just hundreds of votes, betting markets can skew results where betters vote for someone just purely for the bet and persuade, shill for the person they bet on.
I can imagine betters placing a bet on a candidate and then launching a defamation campaign against the other.
it’s what the crypto anarchist paper Assassination Markets described in the 90s
freaked the FBI out at the time, I think that guy just got out of prison for “unrelated” reasons
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/at-largest-ice-...
> Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.
> Owen Ramsingh, a legal permanent resident who spent several weeks at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas, told AP that he overheard a security guard talking about a betting pool for which detainee would next die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into the pot, which would all go to the winner with the most accurate predictions on detainees harming themselves.
> Prediction market trader 'Magamyman' made $553,000 on death of Iran's supreme leader
They’ve been betting for 2 years but only recently starting profiting a lot.
I don't believe a targeted ban on participating in prediction markets would do much to weed out corruption while "predictions" hide behind government officials pumping memecoins, buying stocks, using proxies, or simply sharing war plans over messaging apps. The floodgates are already open, prediction markets are just the most honest and obvious version of the corruption.
This approach to legislation is an interesting contrast to the CCP's supposed 2.3 million people prosecuted for corruption, if you believe Wikipedia [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under...
100%. But you’ll get yelled at by the “freedom to do literally anything I want, no matter how detrimental to everyone else it is” crowd.
War Prediction Markets Are a National-Security Threat https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/polymarket-in...
Elected officials, servants of the public, should be required to make public their trades in public securities and on prediction markets. Public servants, elected or not, should have to disclose this to their relevant inspector general. (Yes, I know. We fired them.)
Seems like they actually are less predictive if you can get more votes with larger amounts of money.
Or taking a longer timeframe: if you think you are a great forecaster but aren't, and are very stubborn, with capped bets you might get to keep trading forever. With uncapped bets you lose all your money and can't trade anymore, leaving the markets to the people who are better than you at forecasting.
It will become common knowledge that these platforms are exploited by insiders so people "trust" apparent flagged insider bets, so people will try to piggyback insiders, then it will be revealed that a sophisticated party with infinitely deep pockets burns massive amounts of cash to manipulate odds and these piggybackers will be burned badly, so in the end classical gambling and sports betting will resume as preferred ways for gamblers to lose money because of their disgust with the manipulation.
Because of this, the prediction market will remain niche.
Both should face consequences but only one will.
This is a good effort. So is the ban on stock trading. This administration is such that it is bringing corruption to the fore in a way not seen in generations. Things are always hard to pass at the start. Keep pushing and this administration will create a massive opportunity to swing the pendulum if we can (as hard as it is now) retain some optimism.
I'd be in favor of senators doing prediction markets, just limited to small dollar trades so they can get better at predicting.
Right, it becomes regular bribery with middleman and a funny hat.
"I didn't pay the judge to dismiss the case against me, I just hedged by betting I'd be convicted and he just happened to be betting I'd go free, and now my money is coincidentally in his pocket.
How quickly we accept the death of even the ideal of rule of law in favor of embracing a return to an explicit rule by might, fuck-you-got-mine mentality.
In particular: the government is free to just publish any insider/true information that it wants the public to know about. If it shared that purpose then the market wouldn't need to exist.
American taxpayers pay a lot of money for a military and intelligence advantage. It's not clear it's in our interest for that knowledge to be made "public more quickly."
What we don’t want, and what we should enforce, is participants in prediction markets influencing the events they’re betting on (like the recent basketball betting scandal).
You need a market that has enough people paying attention and doing the work, and you also need a market that has enough liquidity.
Source: I have a PhD in capital markets.
Sort of on-topic Q for you: What is your general take on HN discussion on finance markets/technology. They don't come up often, but when they do, I find a majority of the comments show that people have very limited understanding of traditional capital markets (non VC).
I don't have a PhD but have worked in the industry for 20+ years mostly in trading technology across fixed income and equities.
Prediction markets have also directly affected my travel planning, helping me avoid a country that wasn't at war at the time but had (in my judgement) a too-high risk of war.
You're completely right about thinly traded markets; those are way, way less accurate. But they also offer the greatest opportunity for someone to bet the other way, which has the effect of 'correcting' the market.
For example, I’m guessing more liquidity in a market means a signal is more predictive. But how much volume is enough to make a signal reliable? What’s the scale? Is $100k unreliable and $100m really good?
Are there other factors that impact a signal’s predictive strength?
Damien (South Park) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_(South_Park) :
> The majority of South Park's residents bet on Satan to win the match due to his enormous size and muscular physique, but Satan ultimately throws the fight and reveals he bet on Jesus, thus winning everybody's money.
How would that work with something like the WH Press Secretary who has refused to give back some $350K in campaign donations (though currently FEC can't prosecute any campaign finance violations because they don't have a quorum because Trump has not nominated and confirmed enough FEC commissioners.)
> As soon as he gets out, he's going to fight in my casinos
Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_... :
> State of New Jersey, represented by Governor [Chris Christie], sought to have the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) overturned to allow state-sponsored sports betting.
How does Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association affect or affirm states' rights on cannabis regulation and legalization?
Wasn't Christie against Medicalization and Legalization?
IMO it's less fun to see scared gamblers at sporting events.
A quote from the film "Two for the Money":
"See, most gamblers, when they go to gamble, they go to win. When we go to gamble, we go to lose."
Thanks for pointing that out.
For the record, I meant the latter. Let the downvotes commence!
> In 1909, well before the Securities Exchange Act was passed, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a corporate director who bought that company's stock when he knew the stock's price was about to increase committed fraud by buying but not disclosing his inside information.
Based on anti-fraud common law alone the court decided it was illegal for an insider to trade stocks with non-public information. An explicit law would be nice, but a reasonable interpretation of basic law would see most of our ruling class behind bars. This is only highly-contested and technical because we've let our standards slip so far.
2) retail traders lose money and know far less than institutional investors, but do retail traders participate in the stock market? Of course they do.
Knowing that high-level DOD official were betting on us invading Iran does us no good if the only reason we invaded Iran was so they could win their long-odds bet. Sure, we can try and shame them, but now they're rich and we're fighting another middle-east war.
Why can't that same method be used to prevent or indict gov't insiders who tries to do the same?
It is an inherently hard problem to identify insider trading when trading securities, or in this case, bets/contracts, doesn't have participant identification and transparency problems
The same solution would be best for both — everyone can trade freely with the sole caveat that all ultimately beneficial owners are fully identified and the trades are transparently published in real-time.
Braying about "free market" when in the actual market players can hide their identities and covertly manipulate it, while having an underfunded agency supposedly tracking them down after the fact, is just a farce.
A solution structured so it naturally and dynamically self-corrects is far better than an enforcement bolted-on after the fact. And yes, there would still be enforcement of requiring transparency to enforce proper identification.
Of course it does, if we’re willing to do ever-so-slightly more than jerk off on TikTok about it.