Hacker News

points by saghm 5 days ago | 0 comments

> 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.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

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.

[–] parineum 4 days ago

You're describing insurance. The distinction between gambling and insurance is basically betting on something you have a financial stake in.

"Hedging" is like insurance but the thing you're insuring against is another bet.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

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.

[–] saghm 4 days ago

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, but 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.

[–] freejazz 4 days ago

Yeah I'm an attorney and I post here a bit and it's always shocking to me that a lot of people here don't realize this. The idea that society would be better off banning insurance because it's like gambling is a severely incomplete thought. Really getting caught up in the broadest view possible, while disregarding all of the key details. It's entirely opposite to the approach taken by the law, which is to examine the key details to determine what actually is happening, and not get too caught up in labels.

[–] saghm 4 days ago

For reasons I still don't understand, a lot of engineering-minded people seem to think the law is trying to be math and doing a bad job at it, when as far as I'm able to understand, it's actually just very much not trying to be math by design. I have no legal training of any sort, so it certainly doesn't require any sort of specialized knowledge to understand this, just having humility and being open-minded enough to recognize that my own expertise is not necessarily relevant to understanding how a system designed for an entirely different domain works.

[–] freejazz 4 days ago

It's an absurd proposition. Come up with words that capture every single possibility and what should be done about it? That's not possible. Even in programming, you capture the exceptions categorically, not necessarily individually. Building nets to catch errors, not rules to deal with every single scenario that could EVER be possible.

And then they rant about patents! Like it should be easy to come up with a pithy statement that is meant to delineate what should be protectable from what shouldn't for EVERYTHING that has yet to be invented! Like that's a trivial task!

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> Insurance, prediction market, futures market, gambling - imo a lot of these are semantic distinctions

Guess at which level insurance and gambling are regulated?

[–] saghm 4 days ago

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.

[–] bethekidyouwant 4 days ago

who decides? (always by definition an authoritarian)

[–] JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

> 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.

[–] saghm 4 days ago

No, I don't think the common definition of "authoritarian" is "literally every possible form of government ever".

[–] rapind 4 days ago

These platforms are 99% sports gambling though so without the sports, they probably wouldn’t exist.

[–] whimsicalism 4 days ago

I don't think that's true of polymarket and it is definitely not true of when I first started using these markets.

[–] cowlevel 4 days ago

AFAIK it's true by betting volume even if it's not their best known feature