Even if it was the same --I think it's not-- you'll need a "SIBE operator license", and cannot do it solo, you have to be an employee of an authorized firm (bank, broker or dealer).
delichon•May 26, 2026
It seems redundant to have two different regulatory systems for slightly different kinds of speculation.
RandomLensman•May 26, 2026
There are all sorts of different regulatory systems for all sorts of slightly different kinds of things.
orwin•May 26, 2026
I think it's fine. Here renting (or teaching) light sails (light catamaran) needs a different license than renting (or teaching) any sail cruiser, including catamarans, despite being basically the same object (boats with sails). Feels that the small differences are enough to justify a different regime.
wsatb•May 26, 2026
How do you defend these slimey companies? They’re actively running a mob casino and you still have people acting like government is the bad guys here. That doesn’t mean there can’t be better regulation of other markets, but comparing prediction markets to stock markets is a huge stretch.
delichon•May 26, 2026
Disagree, I find their product valuable and use them daily as a source of unusually high quality predictions. When used for this purpose insider trading is a feature that improves the quality of predictions. I see some fraud as in any market, but the overwhelming majority of transactions are voluntary, open and relatively informed within a highly transparent system.
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
sorokod•May 26, 2026
A thought experiment: how would you feel about betting on a market that is an the outcome of a medical procedure? On a negative outcome? On a market for a negative outcome of your own procedure?
gventura18•May 26, 2026
Is it bad to take out a life insurance policy right before you have a medical procedure?
arter45•May 26, 2026
If the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
warkdarrior•May 26, 2026
Not if it's your own procedure.
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
mint5•May 26, 2026
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•May 26, 2026
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.
superloika•May 26, 2026
You lived all your life without these evil companies. Life will go on when they are banished. I don't think you will miss "unusually high quality predictions" after a week.
freejazz•May 26, 2026
Show me the insider trading on polymarket that is providing you with this crucial info. Show it to me now.
philipallstar•May 26, 2026
It's not a casino. You aren't betting against the house with polymarket, unlike with gambling sites. You're betting against other players.
rtkwe•May 26, 2026
It's not like equities markets are unregulated, be serious.
lifestyleguru•May 26, 2026
Your comment explains long queues to lottery ticket offices every time I visit Spain:)
deaton•May 26, 2026
Oh so finally someone is calling a spade a spade.
solenoid0937•May 26, 2026
These - especially Polymarket - should be illegal globally, as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
hmry•May 26, 2026
Yeah. 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. For obvious reasons. But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?
philipallstar•May 26, 2026
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.
CPLX•May 26, 2026
What the hell are you talking about? You are absolutely not allowed to bet on whatever you'd like with another individual. Depending on what you're betting on (for example, the price of a stock or the throw of a card), it falls under varying different regimes. This is highly regulated and has been for most of the whole of human history.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
anthk•May 26, 2026
In Spain in elderly caring homes there was a tradition to bet on Bingo matches for simbolic prices (barely one or two euros, enough for a coffee and that's it). It was legalized on paper recently, but technically everyone turned a blind eye.
Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
kube-system•May 26, 2026
> Well, you are privately allowed to bet on whatever you like with another individual.
What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
josefritzishere•May 26, 2026
That "facilitating" argument didn't work out for Silk Road.
jubilanti•May 26, 2026
Nope. "We're just an intermediary between people" is a 100+ year old yarn that casinos and bookies have been trying to spin. If you're presenting a point of entry to a betting line and taking a cut, congrats, you're the house. Doesn't matter if you adjust the betting line manually based on intuition or algorithmically based on betting volume. Sometimes it doesn't get enforced because of corruption, but if this was the case, then why aren't there tons of independent unregulated poker casinos where players just play against each other? If you facilitate and take a cut, you're the house.
chollida1•May 26, 2026
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.
hmry•May 26, 2026
No no I appreciate the pedantry, thank you for the correction
compiler-guy•May 26, 2026
The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Both of your examples are people protecting their insurable interest. Ownership is the most common insurable interest, but there are many other ways to have one.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
chollida1•May 26, 2026
> The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
sandworm101•May 26, 2026
Unless you short the property. Essentially, sell it now on the bet that it will drop in value later. Then it burns down and you repurchase the vacant lot and return the property to the original owner.
Evil, but most everything in real estate is evil.
emsign•May 26, 2026
And that's exactly the problem with Polymarket and such, it gives an incentive to be destructive because that's easy. Entropy is easy.
With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing. Polymarket doesn't care.
WinstonSmith84•May 26, 2026
> With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
mschild•May 26, 2026
To perhaps be a bit more pendantic.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
PyWoody•May 26, 2026
> I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
criddell•May 26, 2026
> 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.
petcat•May 26, 2026
> should be illegal globally
Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
Copenjin•May 26, 2026
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.
bee_rider•May 26, 2026
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.
pimterry•May 26, 2026
> 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?
jmorenoamor•May 26, 2026
Ludopaths often try to put on the same level national lotteries with sports betting and other means of information based betting.
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
anthk•May 26, 2026
>Is this intended to imply that Spain has particularly high levels of sports betting
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
amelius•May 26, 2026
Someone should place a bet on the lifespan of the polymarket founders.
piltdownman•May 26, 2026
Prop betting on a transparent and equitable Exchange is a perfectly reasonable and egalitarian proposal - it's the Betfair Exchange vs Betfair Sportsbook model expanded outside of the scope of sports.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange problem.
CPLX•May 26, 2026
> 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.
st_goliath•May 26, 2026
> I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
> as they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
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.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
jubilanti•May 26, 2026
> 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.
freejazz•May 26, 2026
> 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
entropicdrifter•May 26, 2026
Yeah, they unironically just attacked a strawman and sat of their laurels
WarmWash•May 26, 2026
They can take any position they want and do whatever they want, the point is that these oddball markets are very thin so there just isn't much money there to harvest. You can only bet $50M at your chosen risk if you can find enough people to take the other side, and these markets simply don't have many participants betting much money.
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
freejazz•May 26, 2026
It seems like it's a huge assumption on your part that the bets you are describing are in the "0.89" range and not something significantly higher, even disregarding what others pointed out about this having already provably occurred.
solenoid0937•May 26, 2026
I don't think the markets are thin, there are some bets that have made people many millions.
ambicapter•May 26, 2026
> 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.
cyanydeez•May 26, 2026
So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
PowerElectronix•May 26, 2026
Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.
bobthepanda•May 26, 2026
The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.
ambicapter•May 26, 2026
What fair market price are you talking about? The price decided by the prediction market?
zeroonetwothree•May 26, 2026
If you compare prediction market implied odds to the actual odds that ended up they match very closely
AtNightWeCode•May 26, 2026
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.
> they incentivize people with power to manipulate the real world in horribly destructive ways to win a bet.
How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
AtNightWeCode•May 26, 2026
Historically similar services have also been used to try to manipulate the real world by using bets for creating opinions. Like if you get to vote between candidate x and y and x leads by 75% to 25% on Polymarket maybe you don't vote for y even if the real numbers may be way closer.
PowerElectronix•May 26, 2026
That opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)
AtNightWeCode•May 26, 2026
It is marketing money so it is not even for arbitrage. And you don't need to provide all the liquidity. Just enough to tilt the result.
cyanydeez•May 26, 2026
They'll be illegal anywhere democracy wants to properly function. How can I bet on this ripe assumption? Is there a market somewhere?
jmyeet•May 26, 2026
I would go further than this: all forms of online gambling should be banned, globally. It's probably sufficient to remove them from app stores and to remove their access to the international financial system, which is very doable.
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
super256•May 26, 2026
Maybe we should ban the stock market too.
In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock.
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.
FabHK•May 26, 2026
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.
solenoid0937•May 26, 2026
KYC helps here. Crypto based gambling markets bypass this.
lxgr•May 26, 2026
Or maybe we should somewhat regulate the stock market, require identification of traders, have a regulatory body that can retroactively investigate suspicious trade patterns and determine the identity of who's behind them?
Whoever did that deserves a few years in prison. Normally I'm not too much of a friend of draconian BS - but accurate reports of temperature, air pressure and wind speed are incredibly important for the safety of air travel.
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
abc123abc123•May 26, 2026
Insider trading is already illegal. What needs to be regulated is not markets, it is politicians. Once that is done, markets can peacefully continue the way they are.
specproc•May 26, 2026
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?
The genie is out of the bottle. Crypto-only underground prediction markets will always exist. I think it is better to heavily regulate legal options instead of pushing them underground. That didnt work for drugs or prostitution, and it wont work for gambling.
rapind•May 26, 2026
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)
littlecranky67•May 26, 2026
Pushing it to black markets takes away the possibility of heavy regulation (which absolutely should be in place), and stigmatises victims (gamblers), making it harder to come clean to friends and family. I agree with your assesment that no one should even start to gamble, I just doubt that declaring it illegal will achieve that.
officialchicken•May 26, 2026
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.
embedding-shape•May 26, 2026
For some reason, American companies have a really hard time following existing laws and regulations here. AirBnb and Uber both had the same approach of basically saying "Oops we didn't know" until the law (and others) cracked down on them, I'm sure someone could find older examples too, and surely tons of examples outside of Spain too.
irthomasthomas•May 26, 2026
I think they are illegal already in most places under the insurable interest doctrine.
Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.
wanderlust123•May 26, 2026
That happens already at a much larger scale, without prediction markets.
These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
expedition32•May 26, 2026
Unfortunately there are ways for people to spend money on these sites. That's why the Netherlands has legalised gambling because the bad websites couldn't be stopped.
sometimelurker•May 26, 2026
> illegal globally
I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
josefritzishere•May 26, 2026
Well, that makes perfect sense. The whole world will eventually do the same. gambling with software is still gambling, just like accounting with software is still accounting.
IAmBroom•May 26, 2026
You are stunningly more optimistic than I.
jespinel•May 26, 2026
Governments should not interfere with the private decisions of adults. If people want to gamble, let them. If you do not like gambling, then do not gamble. But do not use the government to force your "moral/ethical" preferences on everyone else.
peer2pay•May 26, 2026
Yeah great idea! Let’s also just legalise recreational fentanyl while we’re at it
akramachamarei•May 26, 2026
Yes
satvikpendem•May 26, 2026
As long as it's safely overseen and accessible to be administered as well as having treatments on standby, it would actually be much safer and kill far fewer people than today.
add-sub-mul-div•May 26, 2026
There are entirely practical reasons that "private decisions of adults" can worsen society as a whole. We need laws and we can debate about nudging that line back and forth, the answers aren't easy. But acting like there shouldn't be a line is nonsensical.
seydor•May 26, 2026
yeah, lets make a government to enforce that.
kube-system•May 26, 2026
That works in a world where everyone has equal knowledge and ability all of the time. Unfortunately, when that is not the case, sometimes humans have been known to take advantage of others. Due to this, every society on earth has created rules against various types of these situations.
jespinel•May 26, 2026
> That works in a world where everyone has equal knowledge and ability all of the time.
That ^ is mostly true today.
If you have access to Polymarket or Kalshi, you have internet access. If you have internet access, you have access to more public knowledge than any previous generation.
Whether you use the internet to educate yourself or to gamble should be your choice. But starting today, it is no longer your choice in Spain.
kube-system•May 26, 2026
In 1997 that's the effect we thought the internet was going to have -- soon everyone would be smart and nobody would get scammed!
That didn't happen. The internet didn't solve disability, it didn't solve education, it didn't solve misinformation, didn't stop scams. In fact, it has made some of these things worse.
mint5•May 26, 2026
Should there be taxes on alcohol and cigarettes? Should there be warnings on them? What about on heroin?
kay_o•May 26, 2026
As someone that works large events on weekends, holy fuck alcohol should not be legal. Nearly every single problem we get is because of alcohol. Someone on heroin or weed or e is almost certainly less problematic.
typon•May 26, 2026
Next time there is a fire at your house I will say "he's an adult who should have been careful playing with dangerous things like fire, we shouldnt waste society's money and resources on saving his house"
jespinel•May 26, 2026
Sure! I can also be an adult, have fire detectors and insure my property against fires instead of hoping for the goodwill of the community or the government.
bena•May 26, 2026
Fire insurance doesn't do anything for your house regarding it being on fire.
Fire departments are good for the community at large as well so the fire at your house doesn't become the fire at my house.
charlieyu1•May 26, 2026
I agree with this.
Pretty shocking to see all the replies you got though. Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
ozgrakkurt•May 26, 2026
You can see this idea in action right now if you search “usa drug zombies” or similar thing on the internet.
_diyar•May 26, 2026
These services run on the blockchain, right? So in effect, there is no blocking them.
jdiez17•May 26, 2026
You can block the web user interface and effectively block Polymarket for 99.9% of users. No ban is ever 100% effective.
piltdownman•May 26, 2026
Off-ramping to fiat would be criminalised and pursued beyond the wildest dreams of La Liga/Cloudflare. A gambling site you can't withdraw your winnings from is of no interest to anyone.
m00dy•May 26, 2026
how's it related to the Cloudflare ?
TZubiri•May 26, 2026
spain also blocks cloudflare for copyright infringement
embedding-shape•May 26, 2026
To be a bit more specific, some Cloudflare IPs are unavailable for a few hours a week as Cloudflare, compared to other CDNs, aren't responding or acting on legal requests from Spanish judges.
nicman23•May 26, 2026
bitcoin
kube-system•May 26, 2026
Prison bars are an unpatched DoS vulnerability that affects all blockchains.
No because they're not gabling. They also don't have an alcohol license too.
cwmma•May 26, 2026
no they have a securities license. Also while a lot of stuff in stock markets are gambling like, the stock market is a positive sum game where very basic techniques (e.g. index investing) have positive expected values.
The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.
throwawa1•May 26, 2026
When I see people making money on Iran attacks, and murder of heads of state - it shows clearly something is deeply wrong with Polymarket. Its a level worse than Vegas or Indian casinos. A literal ticket to hell. I'm all for banning these evil sites.
croes•May 26, 2026
something is deeply wrong with some humans
throwawa1•May 26, 2026
Its just a dark mirror episode. I can't imagine waking up and thinking "boy I'll really make some money if we kill Ayatollah Khomeini today"
PowerElectronix•May 26, 2026
The other side of that argument could be something like: "Dude, Khomeini better not be killed, it'd suck for me, an average iranian dude. I'd probably bet he dies so I can hedge my personal financial wellbeing for that case"
bigyabai•May 26, 2026
Which is also hardly imaginable.
Terr_•May 26, 2026
There are several intertwined things which bother me about the "these are good because they let people hedge" argument, which I'm having a hard time disentangling here... but one facet is that the betting market is not good hedging, just convenient hedging.
For example, average Iranian Dude might (statistically) be better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on durable goods that may become scarce and (ideally) would have resale value even if nothing goes wrong.
nekzn•May 26, 2026
It’s icky to see someone make a moral argument to have something banned, and even worse if they want the government to be the arbiter of morality.
Did we really kill God to have some bloodsuckers in suits tell us what’s right and what’s wrong?
canelonesdeverd•May 26, 2026
>It’s icky to see someone make a moral argument to have something banned
Which are valid arguments in your opinion?
nyeah•May 26, 2026
If your argument supports "murder for hire should be legal," then the problem is your argument.
allthetime•May 26, 2026
So I take it you have a problem with laws against murder, fraud, theft, etc.
Aside from the government, who is it that you prefer to do judgment and enforcement?
nekzn•May 26, 2026
I’m not saying immoral things can’t be banned. I’m saying that to ban something we must be able to construct an argument that does not hinge on morality. For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
And yes, you can construct an argument to ban polymarket that does not rely on morality too. But don’t try to sell it to me with a “we will ban it because it’s eeeeevil”.
FabHK•May 26, 2026
> to ban something we must be able to construct an argument that does not hinge on morality. For example, theft is bad because it deprives you of your possessions. No need to invoke morality.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it bad to deprive you of your possessions?
And given that the house always wins, is it not depriving the gamblers of their possessions?
satvikpendem•May 26, 2026
That literally is a type of morality, utilitarianism. Kantian deontology is not the only form of morality structure there is.
allthetime•May 26, 2026
To deeply simplify - why do we ban things?
I'd say, because we as a group decide they are "bad".
Not sure how you can remove moral judgments from any discussion of banning
ifdefdebug•May 26, 2026
well I see more problematic the people actually doing the Iran attacks and murder of heads of state. Betting on those is distasteful, but doing those things is where the damage lies.
Barrin92•May 26, 2026
the entire point of the argument is that they're the same people. Military bets appear to have significantly higher rates of insider trading than baseline[1], which implies two things, both catastrophic. One is that the markets leak classified information (which is the entire point of the market and it should be a national security no brainer to close it for that reason alone) but the even worse scenario is causality in the other direction, that a bet leads someone to take a military decision.
I don't usually see advertisements, but I was in a position recently to see a real-life television stream, and I was quite surprised to see them run an advertisement for Kalshi. I was pretty surprised that something like this would be advertised to normal people. I'd half expect the next ad to be for a hitman, or for beating your wife, or something. Seems crazy that this is tolerated whatsoever.
seydor•May 26, 2026
please stop calling them prediction markets. It's not even accurate, you do not buy a prediciton
izzydata•May 26, 2026
Can you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?
seydor•May 26, 2026
polymarket is selling bets, not predictions and other people are buying them. they are not being sold by people.
It's like calling the casino a probability market.
flexagoon•May 26, 2026
I think the term "market" comes from the fact that it uses stock market–like pricing and allows you to sell your bets at any time. Ie. you buy "shares" of some outcome for 0.3$ if the probability is 30%, and then if the probability at any point goes to 50%, you can sell the "shares" for 0.5$ each.
(Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
seydor•May 26, 2026
sure, a bet market which is gambling, not a 'prediction market'. those are not predictions
ASalazarMX•May 26, 2026
That's just gambling with frills.
PowerElectronix•May 26, 2026
Could they be called that if they sold fortune cookies?
seydor•May 26, 2026
fortune cookie vendor would be more accurate
cucumber3732842•May 26, 2026
"We're blocking this thing"
"Why, because it's bad?"
"No, because they they're not giving the right parties[1] a cut"
Never change government, never change.
[1] Based on my experience with casinos it's probably a bunch of make-work compliance industry and/or compulsory middle men who pretend to put a veneer of fairness on things
Fnoord•May 26, 2026
You need a license to operate in Spain. The license is fairly available (EU regulations enforce this). So, Polymarket is able to obtain a license if they wish to operate in Spain, if they follow the fair rules to obtain a license. Don't want to obtain a license? Don't want to follow the rules in Spain? No problem, but no business in Spain. Websites blocking works like that, too. Which makes sense: local law > remote law. Else I could host some websites selling LSD to Americans on the clearnet. No US government would accept that, zero chance.
Other countries such as USA work in a similar manner. Work permits such as green card, to name an example.
The people who complain about regulations and law either don't understand why they exist or how they work, or they have an interest in the abolishment of it because they benefit from that.
Then you get that BS about how USA is better off than EU. Well, if you're healthy, educated, and employed, sure. Otherwise? You can just use your eyes. Go drive through a rich and poor neighborhood in both. The poverty in USA is horrendous, and the effects are shown. We got poverty too, but not as severe. No need to go to that area between West and East coast. You can experience this right near the Bay Area. San Jose is supposedly a mess. I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
warkdarrior•May 26, 2026
> I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
Fry's closed in 2021.
emsign•May 26, 2026
There you have it.
cucumber3732842•May 26, 2026
You can replace Spain in the article with any other jurisdiction and my comment would be unchanged.
This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great).
Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not?
Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in?
The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.
Fnoord•May 26, 2026
And you can replace Spain with any other country (including authoritarian regimes) and my comment would be unchanged. It is a matter of respecting local jurisdiction, local law.
I didn't expect you to agree either. I wanted to inform the reader and lurker, not convince you. Why you have to resort to 'you are exactly the kind of person' is beyond me.
Since you decided to edit your post, so have I:
Yes, a government can outsource/delegate such, if the quality is good, why not? For example, the audit has to be thorough and the outcome non-discriminatory.
As far as I am concerned it is a very sick platform because (well anything related to cryptocurrency is) some of the bets are about dark things, seemingly allowed. For example, imagine being able to bet when the next murder of the Zodiac is happening, and how it'd occur. Same with the missile example. Should we therefore ban or regulate it? I don't know what is wisdom. But I do know EU and Spain can decide on this for themselves. One thing of note: insider trading is illegal in EU, yet Trump's clan hobby (yes, in past presidency it occurred as well, but not as severe, nor as ridiculous).
il-b•May 26, 2026
Regulation is good because somebody might buy LSD. Nice.
stackedinserter•May 26, 2026
Who asked Spain, this country is irrelevant to anything.
croes•May 26, 2026
So why did you write a comment
anthk•May 26, 2026
Without Spain everyone up from Po Valley would be pretty much bankrupt trying to spend cheap money on Holidays and half of South America woudn't be able to commerce well with the EU and ditto with cheap gas from Argelia and the like. Crap out Spain and Center Europe collapses tomorrow.
And not just the Lutheran Europe. South America, USA, and tangentially Russia and China too.
Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma...
Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
throwawaypath•May 26, 2026
Polymarket is a casino. A roulette wheel is not a "market". You can't beat the house.
theragra•May 26, 2026
There is no house? Betting is against other players
InsideOutSanta•May 26, 2026
The service is the house, and they take fees on bets, so they are the only ones guaranteed to win.
satvikpendem•May 26, 2026
By that logic market makers in the stock market are basically like a casino too. No one is of course guaranteed to win in anything but at least the stock market doesn't ban you for making too much money like a casino does.
RIMR•May 26, 2026
I mean, yeah, pretty much.
satvikpendem•May 26, 2026
I can actually consistently make money in the stock market, not so in a casino.
spwa4•May 26, 2026
Are they still doing blocks so configuring either Google's DNS or Cloudflare DNS will still unblock the sites?
embedding-shape•May 26, 2026
Seems the blocks aren't in effect yet, I'm on Spanish ISP (Vodafone) here and can still access polymarket.com and kalshi.com. Traditionally, Spanish ISPs tend to do DNS blocks yeah, at least when it comes to long-lasting piracy and other "clearly illegal stuff" like Women's rights.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
Al-Khwarizmi•May 26, 2026
I'm on Movistar and can't access it without my trusty VPN that I have for football match times :)
embedding-shape•May 26, 2026
Interesting, added my ISP to my previous comment (Vodafone). Do you have a lot of stuff you use daily that goes away during the games? Personally the only thing that seems to stop working is Docker Hub, everything else seems OK, trying to figure out if it's just my ISP that is lenient or what's going on...
Al-Khwarizmi•May 26, 2026
It changes depending on the day. But yes, some days it's really a lot (affecting forums, news sites, etc.). I think Movistar applies stronger blocks than most for some reason, in fact I've been seriously consider changing ISP for that reason but I'm too lazy (plus in 12 years with them I think I've had a single outage which was solved in an hour or two, so even if I oppose them morally, it's convenient to stay...)
christkv•May 26, 2026
Lol it could not possibly be the coincidence that there were bets on ex prime minister Zapatero going to jail before the 30th of June or other meme bets making the rounds in Spain in the last couple of days.
Unai•May 26, 2026
There are bets everyday, so no matter when the ban is announced, you can always attach a conspiracy to it.
christkv•May 26, 2026
Most of Spain did not even know polymarket existed until a couple of days ago.
Unai•May 26, 2026
Not sure how you want me to respond to that. Are you getting that from a feel of yours or some statistical analysis of familiarity with polymarket in Spain? I don't think it matters much anyway, I bet most human beings don't know what polymarket is. But still, you think it warrants a conspiracy? To what end? None of this makes much sense to me.
linuxhansl•May 26, 2026
Good.
Just naming things differently does not work in other countries.
If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
imagetic•May 26, 2026
Good
satvikpendem•May 26, 2026
Interesting comments here. I'd rather have prediction markets than casinos or sports betting services, because in the latter, you're playing again the house which can and will ban you for winning too much, while prediction markets are simply market makers taking a fee.
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
sd9•May 26, 2026
It's not cut and dry to differentiate between the act and the wager.
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.
seydor•May 26, 2026
It's a roulette that you can actually manipulate. that 's why it's worse.
afinlayson•May 26, 2026
Didn't we learn our lesson in SimCity? Crime went up when you added a casino.. but governments gained a little tax revenue... We seem to get the crime (see insider trading) but no tax revenue... Maybe I'm just showing my age...
ethin•May 26, 2026
Good. Now take the next step and ban them outright.
22 Comments
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/
I think that self fulfilling prophecy attempts by deep pockets trying to sway markets by bucking trends generally transfers money from more to less foolish bettors.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.
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.
I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
Polymarket is facilitating bets between people, not bets with the house. Gambling and insurance are both bets with the house.
Yes, there are de minimis exceptions. Your office NCAA pool, for example, is often legal, but it has nothing to do with what we're talking about and is also irrelevant to a business facilitating it via 18 U.S.C. § 1955.
https://russpain.com/en/news-3/authorities-consider-legalizi...
>Rarely exceed 25 euros.
Maybe in Christmas, because the weekly play was just about low prizes.
What jurisdiction are we painting with that broad brush? This is far from universally true, even in the US.
> 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.
This is done because the insurance company wants you to prefer that the covered event doesn’t happen, which avoids some conflicts of interest.
These prediction market events don’t have the usual insurance interests involved.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
Evil, but most everything in real estate is evil.
With an insurance this trick won't work, because the insurance company will notice what you are doing. Polymarket doesn't care.
This has worked well millions of times (and occasionally failed too with people ending in prison or with huge fines). Where I can agree however is that Polymarket makes that much easier.
You're not allowed to take out life insurance on someone you don't know or have a relationship (business or otherwise) with.
Life insurance on a business partner works. Life insurance on your spouse as well.
Life insurance on the leader of a random country? Unlikely
It being the driving plot behind Double Indemnity probably started it. I always thought it was true until your comment, too.
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.
Let's not pretend that Spain of all places is caring about horribly destructive psuedo-gambling.
Banning "unregulated gambling" is just pressure to make sure that the Spanish gambling racket stays intact for the bookies already at the top.
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?
Not a fan of lottery myself, but at least it's just some random numbers drawn from a drum. There is hardly any dark pattern or illegal incentive there. It is just you against Thomas Bayes.
La Quiniela, a lottery based on soccer matches' results. Every middle aged man filled some weekly forms (win for locals/draw/win for foreigners) as if it was a religion. If you matched 14 from 15 results (much better with 15), you could get a big prize. Also, Jai Alai matches on the North of Spain had huge bets on results too.
Younger millenials and Gen-Zers will just play on RETA which is kinda the same as La Quiniela but online.
Allowing prediction markets to overlap with criminal incentives is a platform TOS and moderation problem; not a prediction market or betting exchange 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
I would argue that the ratio between "power" and "money to be won" is too big (at least right now) for this to materially matter. No fortune 500 CEO is going to postpone a product launch so they can win $5,000 on polymarket. But some random guy will get his hair dryer to win a socially meaningless weather bet.
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.
Basically the more socially consequential the outcome you control, the less likely you care about a betting market, and the less the betting market cares about you.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
No, but a low paid frontline worker with the ability to throw a last minute wrench into the gears absolutely would.
They would win a lot more than a trivial amount by taking adverse positions, no? Seems like you're making up your own hypothetical
Think of it like kids betting pennies what subject the teacher will open with the next day. The teacher doesn't care about winning $0.89, but the kids do.
You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.
Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.
How does the same line of argument not also suggest that stock markets be prohibited?
The astute observer might say "ah but what about crypto gambling sites like Stake?". This problem isn't as intractable as crypto bros might have you believe. You simply issue arrest warrants for people who allow your citizens to gamble in violation of your local laws and you threaten any bank, brokerage or financial institution that allows them to convert their crypto in fiat currency. This is fairly easily covered by KYC/AML regimes alreaqdy. It won't be perfect. It doesn't have to be. As soon as someone can't be an open billionaire by selling crypto gambling without fear of being extradited to the US if they travel internationally, the shine disappears real quick.
In 2017 someone tried to bomb the bus of the BVB soccer club, after he bought puts options on the BVB stock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
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.
It also incentivizes leaks from insiders, sometimes endangering others. A soldier was charged for betting on a military operation. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
And of course throwing pro sports, but that's been happening for ages. Sports has always been crooked: eg the Eupolus Scandal from 388 BCE.
‘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...
It's bad enough when such systems fail due to whatever sort of issue, but the last thing aviation needs is people intentionally blowing holes into the swiss cheese security model -.-
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?
Its a small step from betting on ships sinking to making sure they go down.
These markets decentralise that information asymmetry.
I would replace them with https://manifold.markets/ or maybe heavily regulate them. they do have practical utility in forecasting
That ^ is mostly true today.
If you have access to Polymarket or Kalshi, you have internet access. If you have internet access, you have access to more public knowledge than any previous generation.
Whether you use the internet to educate yourself or to gamble should be your choice. But starting today, it is no longer your choice in Spain.
That didn't happen. The internet didn't solve disability, it didn't solve education, it didn't solve misinformation, didn't stop scams. In fact, it has made some of these things worse.
Fire departments are good for the community at large as well so the fire at your house doesn't become the fire at my house.
Pretty shocking to see all the replies you got though. Over the last 10-20 years there seems to be a drastic increase of people who think government control is a good idea.
https://xkcd.com/538/
The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.
For example, average Iranian Dude might (statistically) be better-off using their bet-money for targeted purposes, like stocking up on durable goods that may become scarce and (ideally) would have resale value even if nothing goes wrong.
Did we really kill God to have some bloodsuckers in suits tell us what’s right and what’s wrong?
Which are valid arguments in your opinion?
Aside from the government, who is it that you prefer to do judgment and enforcement?
And yes, you can construct an argument to ban polymarket that does not rely on morality too. But don’t try to sell it to me with a “we will ban it because it’s eeeeevil”.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it bad to deprive you of your possessions?
And given that the house always wins, is it not depriving the gamblers of their possessions?
I'd say, because we as a group decide they are "bad".
Not sure how you can remove moral judgments from any discussion of banning
[1]https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/04/30/polymarket-s-mil...
It's like calling the casino a probability market.
(Which of course doesn't make it any better or less of a casino, this is just to say that the word market didn't come from nowhere)
"Why, because it's bad?"
"No, because they they're not giving the right parties[1] a cut"
Never change government, never change.
[1] Based on my experience with casinos it's probably a bunch of make-work compliance industry and/or compulsory middle men who pretend to put a veneer of fairness on things
Other countries such as USA work in a similar manner. Work permits such as green card, to name an example.
The people who complain about regulations and law either don't understand why they exist or how they work, or they have an interest in the abolishment of it because they benefit from that.
Then you get that BS about how USA is better off than EU. Well, if you're healthy, educated, and employed, sure. Otherwise? You can just use your eyes. Go drive through a rich and poor neighborhood in both. The poverty in USA is horrendous, and the effects are shown. We got poverty too, but not as severe. No need to go to that area between West and East coast. You can experience this right near the Bay Area. San Jose is supposedly a mess. I'd love to compare my visit to a Fry's in San Jose 2005 with today's.
Fry's closed in 2021.
This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great).
Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not?
Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in?
The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.
I didn't expect you to agree either. I wanted to inform the reader and lurker, not convince you. Why you have to resort to 'you are exactly the kind of person' is beyond me.
Since you decided to edit your post, so have I:
Yes, a government can outsource/delegate such, if the quality is good, why not? For example, the audit has to be thorough and the outcome non-discriminatory.
As far as I am concerned it is a very sick platform because (well anything related to cryptocurrency is) some of the bets are about dark things, seemingly allowed. For example, imagine being able to bet when the next murder of the Zodiac is happening, and how it'd occur. Same with the missile example. Should we therefore ban or regulate it? I don't know what is wisdom. But I do know EU and Spain can decide on this for themselves. One thing of note: insider trading is illegal in EU, yet Trump's clan hobby (yes, in past presidency it occurred as well, but not as severe, nor as ridiculous).
Spain is a hub between Atlantic and Mediterranean countries and South America and a good chunk of the US. Trade against Atlantic countries isn't something alien to us (just ask the Brits in the Industrial Revolution) and the Mediterranean, well, since Iberia, Carthago and Roma...
Spain sucks because the economy can't compete with North Italy? Well, it's miles ahead against South Italy, even the South of Spain hasn't a second world vibe like Italy down from Rome. We are more balanced at least and South with companies like Airbus are thriving.
It not until recently ISPs got asked to do blocks by IP, as Cloudflare wasn't responding to legal takedown requests, hence we currently seem to experience both types of blocking, but the IP-based blocking happens a few hours per week, the other ones are permanent.
Just naming things differently does not work in other countries.
If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Prediction markets are also regulated by the CFTC as they're futures contracts technically.
One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.
It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.
Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.