A Casino in Every Pocket – Gambling with The Future
Governments have a duty to protect their citizens from harmful and addictive products and to adopt a public health response to gambling.
By Anil Madan
Shortly after the attempted assassination attempt on candidate Trump in July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market, had seen a surge of interest in its betting markets tied to the presidential election. That article reported on a 20-year-old college student in Canada who bought thousands of contracts on the prospect of Trump’s winning the election and making $700 in less than one hour.
Gambling. Pic – Slot Casino Online
$700 is a trifling sum, but perhaps not to a college student. And if the short time he spent on the trade, or gamble if you will, is indicative of anything, it is that there is more to the story. Sure enough, the WSJ reported that in the preceding month, trading volumes on Polymarket had hit $112 million, but by July 18, that month’s volume had exceeded the prior month’s number.
One might be tempted to think that Polymarket’s system simply reflects market wisdom. There is something to that. Here is how it works. Contracts are based on a binary selection of yes-or-no to a specific question. So, in the past, the questions included Biden would drop out of the running. Each trader (or better or gambler) can purchase a “yes” or “no” contract. The price of the contract will range from zero to $1. When the question is definitively answered, everyone who holds a contract that got the answer right is paid $1 and everyone who bet the wrong way gets nothing, i.e., loses his stake. In a sense, the price reflects the collective wisdom of all those participating in this particular market, about the probability of the outcome.
The WSJ article went on to point out that Polymarket’s website showed that the college student had made over $150,000 since 2021.
About two and one-half weeks before the November 5 election, the WSJ reported that although polls across the nation showed the Trump-Harris race was neck-and-neck, the betting market, namely Polymarket was telling a vastly different story. There is Trump who had been even with Harris two weeks earlier at 50-50, now had a decided edge of 60% to 40% on the Polymarket platform.
This may have been an artifact caused by a $30 million bet on Trump by four account holders on the Polymarket site. Or, it was, just market wisdom. There was no serious charge that betting on Polymarket influenced the election.
A day after the election, the New York Post reported that the $30 million in bets were placed by a still anonymous French whale who raked in $48 million in profits. In all, the Post reported $3.7 billion worth of bets were placed on the Polymarket platform on the presidential election.
The so-called whale told the WSJ that he placed his bets simply to make money and he had no political agenda.
While this anecdotal evidence of betting on the presidential election is interesting, it appears to be only a small part of the surge in gambling worldwide.
The Lancet Public Health touts itself as the world-leading public health journal. The journal commissioned a study of gambling and published an article titled: ‘Time for a public health response to gambling’.
The Lancet article minces no words: “Gambling is not an ordinary kind of leisure; it can be a health-harming, addictive behavior. The harms associated with gambling are wide-ranging, affecting not only an individual’s health and wellbeing, but also their wealth and relationships, families and communities, and deepening health and societal inequalities.”
The commercial ecosystem supporting gambling has been transformed by its digitization. The Lancet Public Health Commission warns governments and policymakers to treat gambling as a public health issue with harms on a par with and exceeding those of alcohol and smoking.
The gambling industry sees a highly profitable market that is rapidly expanding with much room to grow. The Commission warns that we are on the precipice of an epidemiological landscape,
The numbers are staggering. In 2023, the Commission estimates that almost half (46.2%) of adults and 18% of adolescents had engaged in gambling. Whereas only 1.4%, a small proportion, of this represents problematic gambling, the number of women and men experiencing risk gambling is growing rapidly.Read More… Become a Subscriber
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 29 November 2024
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