Prediction Markets = Legalized Gambling? A $15B Risk to Society

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Okay, I want you, everybody out there, know, send me an email, send me a message. I don’t care. I want you to name one positive thing. One positive thing for our society when it comes to the prediction markets. One thing. I can’t think of one. I cannot think of one. I don’t care. Polymarket, calcium, polymarket is now raising money.

at a $15 billion valuation. Cal-She, $22 billion valuation. And those are the leaders in the industry. Actually, Andy Kessler had a really good piece on this today. Technically, they’re not calling it betting. Okay. It looks like a duck, quacks like a duck. It’s a duck. Okay. You…

buy or sell shares or contracts based on a future events happening or not. So, you can pay 20 cents to get a dollar. So that’s four to one odds, you know, your prediction comes right or what you’re predicting or bet what you’re betting on, you win 80 cents. That’s a bet, isn’t it?

So bet what’s interesting on cal she 90 % 90 % of the wagers are on sports. And of course, there’s a there’s a built in fee, big, big, bookie. Right. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission says that it has jurisdiction over prediction markets, which override state laws that prohibit or regulate gambling.

I would be if I was any governor of any state that had any sort of sanity whatsoever, I’d be suing. I’d be suing to the cows come home 10th Amendment. I don’t want any part of this because it’s frickin gambling. Kessel writes despite the semantics, you don’t even trade shares on prediction markets, but instead trade swaps as defined in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. Calling them swaps.

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avoids state regulation and stricter insider trading laws. If anything, these event contracts are more like options and futures or swaps, but really they’re bets. That’s all they are, they’re bets. You know, I was thinking about this too, because this is going to happen. Okay, so without a doubt, it’s probably happening now. Probably happening now, because you can bet on all of these events, things that are happening. You can do it in college sports.

How long do you think this is probably happening? Now, are you gonna get various different people in the underworld?

that’ll go to a kid, do their homework on a kid and say, hey, bump into them, bumping them at school. yeah, I know who you are. But you know what? We know who you are. And we know where your mom lives.

We know your mom was. I strongly suggest you have a really poor game tonight.

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You know what they say? I can’t… The NCAA, mean, kids in college, you don’t think that they’re gonna be targets? You could wager on anything!

You don’t think that this is gonna happen? Like I said, probably happening now.

Well, again, imagine being some 19 year old in college. Getting shaken down by some scary folks.

And they won’t tell your coach. They’re not going to help you. Don’t tell the school. Don’t call the cops. OK. Oh, you see this on my phone? Oh, yeah, that’s that’s a picture of your mom going to the grocery store.

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You’re having a bad game tonight, right?

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Yeah, yeah, you know the NFA they have security. This again, they a ton of money in the NCAA too, but if you think they’re gonna, you know, they’re too busy buying players right now and paying NIL money, there’s no way. This is going to be a disaster. A disaster, and we all know this, and they know this. They don’t give a shit.

You don’t think that they know that this is gonna go up. They don’t care.

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They don’t care. Certain people, like I said, it doesn’t matter how they go about earning money. It doesn’t matter. There’s a large swath of population ethical bypassive birth. We all know this is bad. Nothing positive is coming out of this. We all know this is just freaking gonna be evil on society. We return the nation to a freaking casino. And I praised the president last week because he called it out too. Mr. President, do something about it.

Do something about it. Put an end to this now.

You wanna make America great again. Okay? I don’t care. People wanna get, you know you wanna do all that? Go back to your freaking bookies, man.

Keep that crap underground. It was like it was better when they had frickin’ like red light districts or porn. Now you can get all over your TV. Same shit. We’re supposedly progressing in society. You know, we’re not progressing people. Okay, you know what true progression is? I was just using great homilies past weekend. I Mike Schmidt just talking about it. You’re going in the wrong direction. You’re going in the wrong direction. You don’t keep going.

You stop and you turn around and you go back. That’s true progress. Recognizing that things are effed up, you turn around and you go back.

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I can’t put the genie back in about bullshit.

Okay, you can. None of this stuff is good for society. Anyway, states want to control and obviously tax gambling. New York sued crypto exchanges with prediction markets. The CFTC is suing Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois over jurisdiction. Friends want there, they want to have control of this too. Indian tribes want to protect their gambling franchises.

Back in April, 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld CFTC jurisdiction for Cal-She, but a dissenting judge wrote that offerings are virtually indistinguishable from the betting products available on online sports books such as Draft Kings and FanDuel. And those sites are legal in only about half the states. And again, there’s one court case after another.

Mr. President, no one gives a shit.

about your frickin’ ballroom, man. No one does. People care about their household finances, what things are costing, what they’re paying at the pump, and also what’s happening to society as a whole. I would almost gander that people that actually even use these things wish that somebody would take it away.

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Watchdog on wallstreet.com.