Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets (opens in new tab)

Sounds like a lot of second cousins are going to make amazing predictions.

THIS — make it transparent, not try to ban it.

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.

Seems like you’d get a secondary proxy market popping up overnight. Like domain privacy for degenerates.

There’s no one in the world that creating an alternate “real” identity would be easier for than someone who can influence or even determine military or covert actions. It’s probably even legal for them to do so.

I’m not sure I agree - look at the crypto crime that happens as hackers breach databases and are able to link crypto holdings with human identities to target them.

Public trades will make people targets and that will create weird incentives.

https://apnews.com/article/crypto-bitcoin-kidnapping-wrench-...

I doubt that would change anything, in this era of shamelessness. Being corrupt has become a virtue, and winning lots of money is cool, doesn't matter if it was from gambling on war with insider trading.

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.

And maybe you can start by mandating age verification?

We already do this with Congress, and there’s still insider trading

Another step would be to find ways to discourage bets on outcomes that the bettors participate in.

Very few armed forces members have enough information to make actual meaningful trades. The low ranking ones do not have enough money to make meaningful trades even if they did.

> if you just banned the high ranking members from prediction markets, I actually don't think very much would change

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.

Maybe this could be an alternative funding source for weather prediction, haha.

But wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug?

If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.

It’s a secondary title [1].

[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2025-17508/p-3

The latter two groups often overlap, even

> a tool for gambling

they require liquidity from people that are not in the know for adequate price discovery and exit liquidity worthwhile for participation

profit is the participation incentive

>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.

Political outcomes is the biggest. Businesses (and individuals) can be strongly (financially) affected by who's elected. I'd been very curious in the past about political outcomes but had never used prediction markets, so I built a little tracker that inputed the probabilities based on scraping ~14 betting sites. I had to do it on a market-by-market basis, and there were lots of edgecases. Having them all in one place (or two; kalshi and polymarket) makes life much simpler.

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.

Elections usually also have good liquidity.

That's like "South Park" S01E10 (1998);

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.

> They either win the election or get all their expenses refunded.

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.)

"David Letterman Was DISGUSTED When Trump Showed His True Character" in re: to promoting professional boxing and boxers: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E9MB4CUraGc :

> As soon as he gets out, he's going to fight in my casinos

That was an interesting read on Jim Bell.

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.

If they're smart they'll have multiple accounts with bets each way netting to ~0 on all kinds of topics, and just omit the losing trade on the information they actually have.

To the people downvoting you, you just said the administration is bringing corruption into the public view. Some people believe they are exposing and some believe they are currently doing it. Either way, corruption and profiting off of a political position is certainly top of mind for many Americans atm.

Blindly trying things without taking signals from outcomes of the past seems like madness. If you have evidence you have failed at walking many times, should you be putting your energy and efforts into running and jumping instead of continuing to pursue walking?

Most criminal activity is hard to change when it's already happening. There is no reason to mollify the problem further.

> manipulate the behaviour of officials by betting against

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.

It doesn't break the law.

Money in politics which causes politicians to be biased on the passing of legislation?