I thought this one was the most interesting:

‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...

being pedantic here but

> You aren't allowed to set up a life insurance policy on someone else's life, or a fire insurance policy on someone else's home

This isn't really true. Lots of people take out life insurance on others as a hedge for many reasons, small business partner is one. Same fire insurance, we had a case where someone pledged a building as collateral and we took out separate fire insurance on the building so we'd get paid out immediately.

I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.

> But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?

You can sell your life insurance policy to somebody else. It's a way of getting money to sick people to use while thy are still alive.

Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual. That is indeed legally fine, though potentially distasteful.

Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.

> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket.

No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.

> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.

You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.

The CEO of Coinbase finished an earnings call by reading all the buzzwords you could bet on to be mention during the call. So a CEO can manipulate these things and who knows if it was just a marketing thing or if he shared his plans.

> No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket

They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical

Except, gambling isn't illegal here - in fact, it's very common. There are lots of casinos within a few mins walk in any city in Spain. All the prediction markets need to do is comply with existing laws.

Except it generally worked for gambling for a very very long time. The existence of a black market does not mean something should be legal. Human trafficking happens, but that doesn't mean we should legalize and tax it. (extreme example I realize, but I use it to illustrate a point)

> Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.

Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting, or issues with gambling? All the stats I can see suggest the opposite, and there's already plenty of tight restrictions on local gambling businesses (sports sponsorship ban, welcome bonus ban, almost no public advertising, etc). At a quick google, it looks like the 'Spanish gambling racket' for sports is tiny, gambling problem stats far lower than UK/France/Italy, and most gambling that does happen is the lotteries etc instead, which has its sins, but is a very different beast.

Is there something specific you're getting at?

I don’t see the need to have gambling, but if they are going to have it, I can see some merit to the idea of making sure the proceeds of these silly games at least stay local. It’s not like engineering or something, where protectionism allows local businesses to survive while falling behind the global market, resulting in worse products.

Sadly correct and I expect that many other countries will follow suit very soon, they don't really care about gambling addiction or related problems.

Hard disagree. In the prediction market case, we're seeing many categories of people being incentivised to act on markets: soldiers, diplomats, staffers, journalists, businesses, sports and esports teams, as a quick, non-exhaustive list.

Do you think regulation of all possible categories of people who could behave adversely to influence prediction markets would be preferable to just regulating the market itself?

You raise a good point: There's nothing intrinsically good about betting and trading venues, and the sane default option might well be to prohibit it. We allow stock and bond trading as it fulfils important functions [1].

What you describe (profiting from creating havoc by some "short" bet) is indeed problematic and is regulated.

This is also one more reason why trading should not be unconditionally anonymous. Another reason: proper trading venues have rules against "squeezing", namely that no entity may hold more than some threshold ratio of the open interest. That's obviously impossible to enforce with anonymous markets.

[1] Tradings allows individuals to time-shift consumption, it funds productive enterprises, it incentivises convergence of market price with fundamental value, which in turn is what enables efficient investment allocation, and it allows the emergence of an economy-wide equilibrium of savings and investments. Note though that all of these functions might well be fulfilled by having, say, one minute of trading a day.

At least the stock market is supposed to have a purpose besides gambling, to raise investment for companies. (Whether it's actually successful at that is a separate matter.) And anyways, your scenario would probably be considered insider trading, and that's already banned.

That opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)

> Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem

What in the fuck are you talking about? This is a public policy problem and has been literally for 3,000 years.

It's one of the oldest and most pervasive public policy problems that has spanned nearly every culture that's existed since there was culture.