Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/18/you-can-bet-on-it-utah-lawmakers-form-united-front-in-push-to-ban-prediction-markets

by thm • 2 months ago

106 102 2 months ago

theguardian.com

jackp96• 2 months ago

Neither conservative nor Mormon, but online gambling is an addictive scourge that ruins lives, and I'd love to see it banned broadly. And go ahead and ban paid loot boxes as well.

I don't love casinos or lotteries, but at least there's the friction of having to travel to a physical location to feed your addiction.

And then there's the whole "insider trading" and "gambling on war" angles that come into play with prediction markets.

egorfine4• 2 months ago

As much as I hate what gambling does on the society, I'm still not sure if banning this activity counts as freedom. I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose.

OTOH allowing those kind of activities WILL end up with people opting in for the greater evil and thus some kind of limits should be enforced by governments.

I have no idea what would be the right approach, but outright banning prediction markets and casinos is definitely not the right one.

SoftTalker5• 2 months ago

some kind of limits should be enforced by governments

I'm not sure why we think this works.

Gambling is considered bad, and banned in many states, but many of those states run a lottery. This is just a straight up theft from the poor who are least well equipped to understand they are playing a rigged game, and not rigged in their favor.

myroon5• 2 months ago

One difference between federal-level prediction markets and state-level gambling is that most states had limited gambling to 21+, so most state governments wanted more nuanced options than outright bans

gottorf7• 2 months ago

I'm still not sure if banning this activity counts as freedom. I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose

America is the land of the free, but I think there have been and will continue to be reasonable disagreements on the question of, free to do what? It's evident that "freedom" isn't a pure, unrestricted thing in the anarchist sense. We all agree that through the democratic process, laws can be made to declare some things not free to be done.

And to the degree that various taxpayer-funded social programs exist, the cost of grown consenting adults destroying their own lives are directly borne by the rest of us.

but outright banning prediction markets and casinos is definitely not the right one

In general, I think a gradual "ban" in the form of taxation is often times better, especially for things that society is trying to discourage out of its sinful or destructive nature; think cigarettes.

soco• 2 months ago

The contract between citizen and state is that we offload some rights and responsibilities to the state, which in turn does things and protects us. How's addiction handling in this pciture, should the state protect us from it? Like it should protect us from unruly neighboring states, unemployment, financial ruin, whatever (I'm not focusing on a particular country)?

screye• 2 months ago

Nations do not apply a standard of 'total freedom' for most other vices. It is known that grown consenting adults can't compete against an algorithmic assault on their self-control systems.

Nations have established middle grounds for gambling. To gamble, drive a couple of hours down to an exempt casino and set fire to your money if you so wish. Bootleg operations are permitted as long as they stay low. Prostitution has similar regulations. Sports betting, Onlyfans & Prediction markets remove those necessary frictions from each vice, preying on men (it's mostly men) at their most vulnerable.

Prediction markets : gambling :: weed : cigarettes

afavour• 2 months ago

As much as I hate what gambling does on the society, I'm still not sure if banning this activity counts as freedom. I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose.

I don't think it is freedom. But. If someone destroys their own life the rest of us who share the same society pay a price, be that government money supporting their rehabilitation, incarceration, or the non-financial impact of people being homeless on our streets etc.

So as much as I favor freedom I also think there should be limits. I think "freedom always without exception" is a pithy statement that doesn't lead to positive outcomes in reality.

dfxm122• 2 months ago

Some things are banned for the good of society. Please remember that no man is an island, each is a piece of the continent. A man with an addiction he can't afford rarely destroys just his own life.

However, I will ask you to consider that under discussion are very specific bans. Call these something else if it makes you feel better. I think these are normally called "regulation." But, what's being discussed is still completely compatible with "freedom", especially with added context of the elected lawmakers enjoying the support of their constituency for their actions. This also leaves the door open for a future electorate to legislate something else.

NeutralCrane2• 2 months ago

I think an on over-fixation on “freedom” is what leads to many of the societal ills we (uniquely) deal with in America.

Freedom itself is itself a nebulous concept. Are my freedoms restricted when I can’t drive 80mph through my neighborhood? Yes. On the flip side I enjoy the “freedom” of living in a more controlled, safer environment. Is a corporation’s freedoms restricted by the laws that prevent them from dumping toxic sludge into the river upstream from me? Yes, but my freedom from living downstream of that pollution is preserved. Are my freedoms preserved when we allow broad access to firearms in this country? Yes, at the cost of my kids freedoms to attend a public school without the risk of being shot by a mentally ill psychopath.

Here we are considering the freedom to destroy your life via gambling vs the freedom from being targeted by corporations with much greater resources than you trying to get you to do so, and the freedoms of your family who may choose to not gamble and still have their lives destroyed as a result.

An “pure” worldview of maximizing personal freedoms over-simplifies the trade-offs and is doomed to fail in the real-world as a result. Realistically maximizing societal well-being requires a more moderate approach.

nomadygnt• 2 months ago

I agree to a point. But it should be regulated as what it is, which is gambling. Prediction markets doing everything in their power to avoid regulation is just scummy.

yndoendo• 2 months ago

I find the whole _Freedom_ trope to be nothing but a straw man fallacy.

What is _Freedom_?

Should I have freedom to enjoy a movie or conversation uninterrupted? Should I have the freedom to modify a motorcycle or car to be excessively loud that it shakes windows while driving by and interrupting people so they have to pause their movie or conversation?

Freedom for the movie viewer or conversationalist goes against the freedom of the loud motorcycle or car driver? They both cannot have freedom because each will impeded on the others. So who is gets their version of _Freedom_?

phs318u• 2 months ago

I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose.

Perhaps. But almost universally, most societies consider it a crime to encourage or facilitate another’s self-destruction.

QuiEgo• 2 months ago

I believe that grown consenting adults do have a free will and should have the ability to destroy their lives if they so choose.

Part of living in a society is giving up some of your freedom to make the system work. I can't choose to kill myself of my own free will by smoking in an airplane anymore, no matter how happy it would make me, because it might not only hurt me, but everyone around me.

I think that's the line for me: When your self-destructive behavior causes harm to others, not just your self, it's fair for society to ban it.

If a bunch of people are going to end up a burden to society in the aftermath of their self destruction through gambling, it's fair for society to say "no".

This tradeoff has been debated my philosophers for millennia. We still haven't quite figured out a universal answer. Laws of nature vs laws of man and all that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rv-4aUbZxQ

mcmcmc6• 2 months ago

One distinction I think really needs to be included in any gambling bans is whether it’s a game of chance or skill. Betting on yourself is quintessentially American. I’d argue betting on someone else’s game of skill (eg sports betting) is a game of chance.

Would be interesting to see how a new prohibition amendment on gambling on games of chance would work.

criddell• 2 months ago

game of chance or skill

The line isn't all the clear, is it? Is poker skill or chance? What about betting on a horse? Or buying a stock option?

Recursing• 2 months ago

For more on this https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...

it is clear from studies and from what we see with our eyes that ubiquitous sports gambling [...] is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors.
This is not a minor issue. This is so bad that you can pick up the impacts in overall economic distress data.
the financial consequences of legalized sports betting [...] include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!). [...] a 28% increase in bankruptcies is far more than I would have predicted. The typical adult bankruptcy rate is about 0.16%, so this would mean about 4bps (0.04%)/year of additional bankruptcies, or an over 1% additional chance a typical person goes bankrupt during their lifetime. [...] A bankruptcy is extremely socially expensive, on the order of $200k. That alone is almost triple the profits, and clearly wipes out all the social gains. Legalized online sports betting is currently a deeply, deeply horrible deal.
[...] there might be a 3% overall increase in domestic violence as the result of legalized sports betting [...] This is a huge direct cost to bear. Domestic violence ruins lives. It also is a huge indicator that this is causing large amounts of distress in various forms, and that those gambling on sports are not making rational or wise consumption decisions.

aczerepinski• 2 months ago

Good call on lootboxes. I’d love it if video games that include them would be forced to do age verification to whatever extent casinos need to, and be 18+.

ekianjo4• 2 months ago

Not just kids get addicted

fragmede• 2 months ago

GLP-1s reputedly address the same reward center as gambling for some people, so there's that.

which• 2 months ago

The "return to player" numbers for lottery tickets are on the order of 60% https://wizardofodds.com/are-lottery-players-smart/. Many states have online lottery apps, they do TV and radio ads, etc. Why should that be allowed? Of course some of the only forms of gambling where skill actually matters (poker and sports) come under constant attack...

If you bet randomly on the winner of NFL games on DraftKings you'd expect to lose 4-5% of your money per bet over time. I'm not sure the people here with a cultivated disinterest in professional sports know this but it is much more entertaining to watch a game when you have money on the line. We know that all but 1-2 percent of people are able to control themselves and not become problem gamblers. The UK fines casinos for not doing enough to stop problem gambling, the US can do the same. You can do income checks, have a national self exclusion system, and ban advertising.

Lastly, prediction markets are the only way for Americans to bet on sports and not be banned for winning too much (short of using sketchy agents for Betfair and Asian books that can randomly steal all your money)

toss1• 2 months ago

>all but 1-2 percent of people are able to control themselves and not become problem gamblers

That says absolutely nothing about the blast radius of damage from the 1-2% who do become problem gamblers and end up leaving their families impoverished and destitute, robbing their children of chances for education, etc. This cascades into issues and expenses for society in terms of more dependent and fewer productive members.

Similarly only a small percentage of people also are problem drinkers enough to drink and drive, and the small percentage of trips while impaired result in accidents. Yet the blast radius of the damage by that small percent is such that we decided long ago that serious laws and enforcement is a good idea.

Just because only a small percentage of people

carabiner• 2 months ago

As I get older I'm starting to realize, the Christians were right about everything.

matheusmoreira2• 2 months ago

Same experience here.

SoftTalker5• 2 months ago

Not sure I'd go as far as "everything" but the wisdom on how to live, how to treat others, behaviors that are good and bad, etc. is all pretty solid.

amanaplanacanal2• 2 months ago

Mostly it's just the regulations around sex that are wack. Jesus has great advice around taking care of the poor, the sick, and the refugee, which are given short shrift by the Christian nationalists on the US.

denus• 2 months ago

I consider it more of a "stopped clock" situation; I've found myself getting more and more disillusioned with Christians as I get older, but this is one thing I can agree on.

water-data-dude2• 2 months ago

As a gay dude I'd agree, lol

Christianity has some good stuff (love thy neighbor, etc), but I'd rather we not lean too heavily on it for public policy, for obvious reasons

garaetjjte• 2 months ago

Ah yes, in Utah, the capital of MLM scams?

boredhedgehog• 2 months ago

We should distinguish between the moral condemnation of a behavior and the desire to outlaw it. The latter is hardly Christian in any universal sense and seems to be mostly an effect of Protestant puritanism. For example, many saints have argued to tolerate prostitution and other vices for the sake of man's weakness.

exabrial2• 2 months ago

can we stop calling them "prediction markets" and please call them what they actually are: gambling

egorfine4• 2 months ago

Some prediction markets can be gambling, some not. Gambling is a broader category that does not include all of the prediction markets.

mcmcmc6• 2 months ago

Can you provide examples of prediction markets that aren’t gambling?

throwaway85825• 2 months ago

Some industries chang names every 10 years to avoid regulation. Loan sharing became Buy Now Pay Later.

xixixao• 2 months ago

Honest question which I think is at the heart of the question: What’s the difference between these and NYSE / Robinhood?

jrmg• 2 months ago

You actually own something when you buy stock.

mcmcmc6• 2 months ago

Buying a share of a company affords marginal utility outside the value going up or down, in that you ostensibly have a vote on how the company is run

matheusmoreira2• 2 months ago

Abtractly, there is no conceptual difference. Everything is a gamble. We are always betting on everything. We are always positioning ourselves in relation to everything else in the world. Often unconsciously and unknowingly.

It becomes problematic when we make a game of it and add financial stakes. Gambling is a lot like drugs in its ability to hijack the brain's reward circuits. I stopped investing in cryptocurrencies because seeing +400% profits was like crack. I never gambled any money I couldn't afford to lose but there are people out there who were leveraging their entire lives to FOMO into markets.

Nasrudith• 2 months ago

They do both involve taking risks for money admittedly but there are crucial differences.

You actually participate meaningfully in the outcome via investing instead of just price discovery and the successes are derived from the valuation or income of the venture instead of the losers. The participation is not only in impact on their credit rating and sales but also concrete choices in government of it.

Not to mention in principle there is an actual activity being backed by the investment to produce non-zero sum gains. While there may be risks involved in say, running a turnip farm or sending a ship across the ocean, you are still supporting a useful activity for its own end. Crucially as well there is motivation to do the task even without the market, even though it may enable it.

If you can manipulate the outcome of the turnip farm (as opposed to the market) to make it succeed that is doing useful work and not just cheating a bet. A guideline of the distinction would be - would charging somebody for making the outcome successful in a not otherwise criminal way be a Kafkaesque injustice?

You can in fact use the market to gamble via options intended for credit or insurance but stopping those by stopping the market entirely would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

krackers• 2 months ago

I don't think there is a difference today. Stocks used to be about long-term value but now the same gambling-esque mentality has applied to stocks as well, see things like GME. The modern stock market is basically a prediction market for attention/virality, in the same way that cryptocoins are.

exabrial2• 2 months ago

I've never understood this comparison. To me it's simple: Investments actually produce net gain in the economy. Some people use the NYSE _like_ gambling, but the key difference is value is created.

Investing takes x capital, put it into a machine, and x + (yield * x) comes out. In gambling, x is put in, x always comes out, but on the way out x is simply distributed among a different population.

Investing literally creates net value (or loss, technically) that didn't exist before. Gambling cannot do either: x is always constant, however x is divided up differently.

There's many videos about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnRslDPlkg4

nhumrich3• 2 months ago

All stocks are incentivized to go a specific direction. You could consider Options more like gambling, but for that reason they are restricted to specific people. We also have things to prevent bad incentives, like insider trading laws, which prediction markets don't have.

So, I guess the answer is, regulatory control.

ekianjo4• 2 months ago

Its not gambling if you can influence the outcome

throwaw12• 2 months ago

Coming soon:

* researchers found that prediction markets are actually good for your wellbeing

* lobby group is lobbying to fight against Utah lawmakers who are working against the wellbeing of people in Utah

Sol-• 2 months ago

Shame that prediction markets seem to have failed a bit, since they seem in principle like a good idea. You force participants to have skin in the game and remove the usual mood affiliation and ideological bias that afflicts the professional commentariat in the media.

Perhaps a solution instead of banning them would be to create a class similar to accredited investors that are allowed to participate. And stuff like market manipulation should just be prosecuted in old fashioned ways like we prosecute any crime.

WarmWash• 2 months ago

I think they should be legal, but the amount of marketing and pushing around them is so bad.

It's like you make something legal, and some group of people try as hard as possible to push the limit as far as they can, and in turn ruin for everyone.

jcfrei• 2 months ago

I'm surprised prediction markets don't get more support here on HN. There's a lot of benefit in having a probability estimate for various kinds of events. One example of many: https://polymarket.com/event/may-2026-temperature-increase-c

These markets are a straightforward way to cut through all the noise of the current media conglomerates. Rather than getting bombarded by inflated headlines a glance at polymarket or kalshi is often enough to know whether something is actually happening or it's just the media corporations trying to get your attention.

Of course there should be limits with regards to what kind of markets are allowed on these platforms. But in a lot of areas there's genuine price discovery happening that's not available anywhere else.

mcmcmc6• 2 months ago

90% of the activity is sports gambling or insider trading, there’s no benefit that outweighs the negatives

jerf2• 2 months ago

They don't work. They only work if all the participants in prediction markets don't notice their incentive to cheat the market. One example of many: https://moneywise.com/investing/cryptocurrency/polymarket-ri...

A market that only works as long as participants in the market also pretend that they aren't in a market is nonfunctional.

Let all reasoning be silent when experience gainsays its conclusion. The beautiful libertarian theories have failed.

jrflo2• 2 months ago

I think this is far from widespread. It's very difficult to tamper with the majority of markets, and nearly impossible to do so without getting noticed (hence, the news story about this case).

gottorf7• 2 months ago

Funny, someone cheated a temperature-related bet a few weeks ago: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/23/nx-s1-5797876/polymarket-pari...

ekianjo4• 2 months ago

And those weather stations only have 1 degree celsius precision?

mapmeld• 2 months ago

It's very strange that they think prediction markets "cut through all the noise of the current media conglomerates" and yet the temperature bet is easily manipulated, and any bets about war and other foreign affairs are resolved by reading news reports from the field and not some new group of independent arbitrators or investigators. The war journalists are even being pressured by the gamblers to change their reporting https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...

water-data-dude2• 2 months ago

Prediction markets seemed neat when I first heard about them, but they've proved to have "theory meets the real world" externalities I wouldn't have ever considered. Insiders betting on (and possibly influencing) military/diplomatic stuff, reporters getting threatened, weather stations getting hit with hairdryers. It's wild.

ekianjo4• 2 months ago

Very difficult to have good faiths actors participating in prediction markets. A lot of manipulation is possible and of course insider trading.

ZeroGravitas2• 2 months ago

That market doesn't look very useful. Seems to resolve only a few days before at the time that weather forecasts would be available.

jrflo2• 2 months ago

I agree that there's something interesting here, but the majority of markets are absolute garbage. "Drake Iceman First Week Album Sales", "Arsenal vs Burnley", "Another GTA 6 Trailer Released by May 31", for instance. I am much more interested in the price discovery on markets relating to politics, global trade, pandemics, etc., but sports betting has proven to be largely a net negative for society imo.

bitmasher92• 2 months ago

1. I have only moderate confidence that the odds on prediction markets represent true odds.

2. I think the existence of prediction markets can change the outcome of events. See the Super Bowl Streaker as an example.

3. I don’t have a strong use for prediction market odds. In the few areas of my life that require forecasting I have sources of information i understand and trust more, sometimes with private data not available to the general public.

jmye• 2 months ago

3. I don’t have a strong use for prediction market odds. In the few areas of my life that require forecasting I have sources of information i understand and trust more, sometimes with private data not available to the general public.

100%. I have no earthly idea what the value of these markets is for things I'm not an expert in (I assume they're roughly equivalent to asking the bots and teenagers on Reddit and pretending that's crowd-sourcing, given what they show in things I understand well), and I have no use for them in things I am an expert in.

But hey, at least government employees/soldiers can cash in on secret operations before they happen? That's fun, or whatever.

NeutralCrane2• 2 months ago

You need a prediction market to know if the Second Coming of Christ is imminent?

gwerbin2• 2 months ago

Prediction markets were a lot more useful and benign when it was nerds staking small amounts of money for fun. I still think they're fun but it's clear that the prediction market platform companies aren't interested in staying a fun niche business for nerds.

lizknope• 2 months ago

I'd like to first see all advertisements for gambling banned. Then lets take a look at the data after 1-2 years.

Or if you allow it put a warning like the surgeon generals warning on tobacco. Clearly state that most people lose money.

Smoking is legal but advertising cigarettes is illegal. I grew up in the 1980's where smoking was everywhere. We even had a smoking area at school. Today I don't know anyone that smokes. Obviously people still do but it is much less common

bitmasher92• 2 months ago

I think this approach of allowing something to quietly operate legally is a really interesting model.

therealdrag0• 2 months ago

I much prefer it to the heavy hand of paternalism.

groundzeros2015• 2 months ago

Labeling doesn’t do anything but increase compliance costs

amanaplanacanal2• 2 months ago

I know some countries have banned tobacco advertising, but unfortunately it is still legal in the US.

gwerbin2• 2 months ago

In classic US fashion it's illegal in certain specific contexts but not others.

sometimelurker• 2 months ago

I think the biggest problem with prediction markets can be solved with some law that would remove anonymity from those who trade, from the perspective of some regulating body* . now I know what I just said and I'm sure to be downvoted to hell for suggesting such a thing, but this would make it much easier to fight insider trading, assassination markets/equivalents, ect

You could just force the biggest entities in this space to comply and people wouldn't care enough about secretly betting on wars so it would all work out.

* if you make it so that everyone sees what their neighbor betted on then overall predictions will become less accurate due to social signaling

Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets

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