They won't collapse, but they won't reach their full potential. I would hate to be a16z sitting on their $10B post-money valuation Kalshi bags, that's for sure.
Insider trading is a feature, not a bug, say Shayne and Tarek, stupidly.
You can't have this amount of obvious manipulation and expect the average retail consumer to join. Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.
Even without insider trading it's a negative-sum game. Every dollar won is a dollar lost, and the platform takes a cut. Like all negative-sum games you should only participate if it's purely for entertainment or you have a clearly definable edge over the other players. If you can't spot the sucker, you are the sucker.
People like to gamble. I expect that the vast majority of interaction with these systems is seen by participants as gambling. "Who will win the presidential election" and "who will win the jets game" are similar kinds of questions. Both are negative sum.
And people do get upset and feel cheated when the bet isn't "fair." We just saw a big scandal where various athletes are changing their behavior in order to enable their buddies to win big in sports betting.
I really don't think that "well, we should just educate people about the fact that prediction markets are actually battlefields of insider information and their purpose is not to enable gambling on the future but instead to give society some model of future outcomes" is going to stick.
There has been virtually no adoption at all regarding crypto, except for being a financial product and in that regard it has already been adopted by people.
The average consumer is easily manipulated so there's not really a contradiction.
> Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.
The volatility and wild swings are a feature, not a bug, to retail investors who like this stuff. Investing in crypto is mainstream now. It's been advertised on TV for years. Download Robinhood, put money in, and trade the swings.
It's popular to "trade" crypto. The retail investors aren't buying to use it. They're not even doing crypto things with it, they're just getting an entry in the database of their investment platform. Everyone knows it's heavily manipulated and gamed, but they want to come along for the ride and make some money with the manipulators.
Prediction markets are exciting to the same audience for the same reason: Maybe outlier things can happen and you'll guess correctly ahead of time. That's the draw.
Oh man. Yeah, Sega Channel was amazing. It's true that it came pretty late in the Genesis' life and by that time, Sega was prioritizing Saturn but man, I loved SC and looked forward to the first of the month when all of the menus would switch.
At a certain threshold of wealth, you stop having anyone around you that will tell you anything other than platitudes about how great and wonderful you are. If he ever had any self-awareness or humility -- and that is questionable -- it's been Dunning Krugered and yes-manned into absolute shreds.
He's a weak, frail manchild masquerading as a cartoonish supervillain. Fuck him.
Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.
The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.
What do you mean here by front run? Don't most of these exchanges use normal limit books with visible resting orders available to trade against?
My understanding was that these shops were acting more as market makers, with the idea of guaranteeing liquidity and tight spreads in some number of markets.
If you think the listed bid-ask spread is mispriced you're more than welcome to move the market to whatever price you think is more appropriate.
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