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Prediction Market valuation has a lot more to do with the regulated existing gambling industry being stuck in a bit of a quagmire due to state by state licensing and this being a solid potential runaround to get into states and age-groups that aren't otherwise available.
Sounds like he's made something quite valuable then, a workaround for a major industry that has been regulated to hell and back by big government.
Yeah but this is a bit of a deranged cycle.
'Offer new gambling product that isn't currently covered by legislative grounds, tax/who can bet in particular' -> 'Figure out how to bring the super popular bits from existing apex gambling products like Sportsbetting, Slots Machine and Casino into your new gambling product using the loophole' -> 'Gradually crank your new product from 90% 'new innovative loophole' to 10% 'new innovative loophole' as people enjoy the perfect ed apex gambling products' -> 'Eventually submit to new regulations, frequently involving sanding off the edges/uniqueness of the original thing that made your product at all different. Also get hit with similar levels of taxation since the govt is always gonna squeeze gambling, so you've once again reinvented the wheel'.
I've worked all across the gambling industry. This cycle plays out every 5-10 years consistently. DFS & Social Casino were the prior big USA entrants. Prediction Markets are the latest incarnation, and are honestly even worse since 'exchange betting' wasn't even a good end-result and has essentially been dying off in other geos for decades now. Polymarket and Kalshi will and are in the process of slowly killing their non-sports offerings since they're controversial, hard to price, hard to create rules for and tend to generate bad optics.
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Yeah but the end state here is this also getting brutally regulated. It's how this industry works. It's just a shame that a lot of people are arguing in favor of prediction markets on vague 'I'm a rationalist and like the idea of superforecasters' grounds when they don't get that it's actually a machine for 18 year olds and Texans betting Football
How does the vig compare to Fanduel, etc? I'm guessing Polymarket sports betting takes a much smaller rake than the legal stuff labeled as gambling.
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Yes most likely but in the meantime people are expecting tons of money from it.
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Indeed,
For my part I continue to maintain that it is not only morally and logically incoherent, but economically irresponsible to treat prediction markets any differently from how we would treat betting on a horse race or a ball game.
I strongly dislike gambling. Especially sports betting. Im usually a libertarian/"let people enjoy things" kind of person but society is clearly barely able to handle online gambling, and it's fucking with young men especially. I hate it.
However, the prediction markets have found a good straddle, and I would like you to try and draw a line. How do you separate gambling from futures contracts/forwards? Where do we draw the line? It's really hard. Obviously from a "know it when you see it" perspective, "who will win the hockey game" does not provide the same economic benefit as "I would like to lock in the price of wheat 6 months from now".
But, in a world where we banned all sports/online gambling but Robin Hood allowed trading of fractional wheat forwards, and all the men aged 20-30 started being degens in the wheat futures market, what do we do?
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It's worse than that, because it also allows insider trading on literally anything you can stand up a market for, and you can also use them to directly incentivize specific behaviors without individually bribing someone or having a causal link back to the act to the person who funded it. And people complained about stochastic terrorism!
Jim Bell spent years in jail for promoting this idea.
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