Comment Text:
This type of exchange is considerably worse than gambling. With traditional gambling, all participants are aware that all other participants are gambling along with them. Every slots player's odds are the same as all others. Every bet on a football game or horse race is a guess. No outcome is certain.
These exchanges are not gambling: they are corruption engines. They are sophisticated systems designed specifically to encourage those with inside information to trade on that information for profit. Worse still, they encourage those who can control the outcome of bets to act in a way not that is natural for that situation, but in a way that is optimally profitable for themselves or others. In a truly dystopian fashion, it puts a profit motive behind extremely consequential circumstances: war, death, and otherwise.
Unfortunately, the only confidence that I have in the current administration is that they will not be taking public comment into account. My hope in typing this is that another user may see it, and trust that a man who gave seven years of his life in active combat zones because of his love of country is approaching this issue with good faith, not as some caricature of a screaming liberal.
This is wrong. It is morally wrong, it allows the rich and powerful to siphon money directly from the every-day participants (especially young men), and it leverages the power of insider trading to force action one way or another. We need to be able to trust that Trump isn't starting a war in Iran because his sons have a spread on Polymarket. We need to be able to trust that a military pilot doesn't intentionally "miss" a target because he has his life savings on Kalshi that some high-value target won't die this month.
These markets are engines of chaos and corruption, and no civilization worth its weight would ever allow them.
