Ah good. The NBA/NFL/MLB/etc should let players bet on whether they win or lose. Letting those with the influence on events being able to make money on them has never degraded a system before.

Someone must have just mistakenly put in regulations against insider trading before, for no good reason. Luckily this isn’t anything like the normal tech play of figuring out a loophole or flat out ignoring the law and hoping you get too big before the regulators catch up.

If athletes didn't face consequences for manipulating betting markets, I think you'd see people become less and less likely to bet on sports outcomes. People naturally don't like a rigged game, you don't have to tell them not to play it.

With these betting markets, do you think it's critical that they exist, but with bans on insider bets? Because I'm not sure anyone you are moralizing at is taking up the argument that it's critical that they exist.

Sports betting is specifically not a prediction market precisely because the players are banned by both law and extreme consequences from their leagues for participating.

You cannot have an open-ended prediction market with the same protections. It's just impossible from a practical standpoint, much less theoretical one.

I don't think these should be legal since it's just enabling more random gambling, fraud, etc. or even worse for no clear societal gain. But if they do exist, the only purpose for them is to lure out insider information into the open. Pretending they are just folks gambling on 'random' outcomes like a fair coin flip is naive at best.