Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence
reuters.com224 points by thm 4 hours ago
224 points by thm 4 hours ago
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.
Very close already. Death threats went to this journalist; seems someone bet on missile hits. https://factkeepers.com/polymarket-gamblers-vow-to-kill-jour...
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure. Both of your examples are people protecting their insurance interest. Onwership 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.
> The technical term is that you must have an “insurable interest” in what you insure.
Yep, we're in full agreement here
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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, the less likely you care about a betting market.
The real winners are people with little or no power to effect outcome, but with insider knowledge. And athletes.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Downvotes on HN is always fascinating. Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/coinbase-ceo-s-bizar...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
> I would not be surprised if people are murdered at some point to reap the payout of some related bet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_bom...
> 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.
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.
> 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?
They'll be illegal anywhere democracy wants to properly function. How can I bet on this ripe assumption? Is there a market somewhere?
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.
That opens up very fast to a very expensive arbitrage (on the manipulating party)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
something is deeply wrong with some humans
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"
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"
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?
>It’s icky to see someone make a moral argument to have something banned
Which are valid arguments in your opinion?
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.
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.
please stop calling them prediction markets. It's not even accurate, you do not buy a prediciton
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?
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.
Polymarket is a casino. A roulette wheel is not a "market". You can't beat the house.
Good
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.
Are they still doing blocks so configuring either Google's DNS or Cloudflare DNS will still unblock the sites?
Seems the blocks aren't in effect yet, I'm on Spanish ISP 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.
These services run on the blockchain, right? So in effect, there is no blocking them.
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.
how's it related to the Cloudflare ?
spain also blocks cloudflare for copyright infringement
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.
You can block the web user interface and effectively block Polymarket for 99.9% of users. No ban is ever 100% effective.
Prison bars are an unpatched DoS vulnerability that affects all blockchains.
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.
Oh so finally someone is calling a spade a spade.
well, it's gambling.
"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
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.
Do stock markets have gambling licenses?
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.
Who asked Spain, this country is irrelevant to anything.
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.
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.
Yeah great idea! Let’s also just legalise recreational fentanyl while we’re at it
Should there be taxes on alcohol and cigarettes? Should there be warnings on them? What about on heroin?
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"
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.
They require no gambling license to be a stock broker on the Bolsa de Madrid stock exchange.
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.
It's not a casino. You aren't betting against the house with polymarket, unlike with gambling sites. You're betting against other players.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Is it bad to take out a life insurance policy right before you have a medical procedure?
Show me the insider trading on polymarket that is providing you with this crucial info. Show it to me now.
Equities are underlying collateral. Prediction markets are literally just betting on an outcome, no underlying asset exists.
Prediction Markets act the same way as Gambling Exchange - the assets are denominated as both sides of the book minus the spread.
What collateral is underlying the massive, state-sponsored, Spanish lottery ticket and scratch off racket?
I don't think you'd find anyone arguing that the lottery isn't gambling, so I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here.
A casino is by definition a house that takes rake and is not the government or one of its subsidiaries ...
Collateral is not uncommon in gambling (e.g. pink slips). That does not seem to distinguish gambling from speculating.
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).
It seems redundant to have two different regulatory systems for slightly different kinds of speculation.
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.
There are all sorts of different regulatory systems for all sorts of slightly different kinds of things.
Your comment explains long queues to lottery ticket offices every time I visit Spain:)