Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
mint5 | on: Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
What predictions? Why is it useful to know what the odds are for Trump to the word “postage stamp” in a specific speech?

Why are the sports odds useful? Word mention market and sports market are the majority of bets after all. Seems like >90% of wagers are useless noise.

Name 7 recent useful ones you actioned based on, one for each day of the last week. I’m very curious what those may be that you use it daily.

When I looked a the site and checked out a few non sport/word wagers, the actual bets were pretty unhelpful because while their summary sounded potentially informative the actual fine print showed that a weirdly constrained timeline of a specific thing was the actual deciding factor, making them useless.

Jensson | parent
You can look at who is likely to become the next president for USA etc, it helps a lot to see what people who spent some effort looking into it thinks.
hunterpayne | root | parent
Bad example. Americans can only very recently even place trades on PM and even then its through other companies and most people don't know about this. Those markets are often very thin and manipulated by the campaigns themselves.

A better example is wagers on things like when the Iran war will end. That's actually useful 'wisdom of the crowds', and any insider trading is already illegal. Maybe someday those markets would get big enough to allow companies to hedge risks. That's an actual useful application of PMs.