the major news outlets weren't the first to call the election for Donald Trump it wasn't even a polling group or a political organization instead it was poly Market that be everone to the punch confirming the results hours before it hit the news it's not the only reason they've been in the headlines in the wake of the election the FBI raided the home of poly Market CEO Shane coplan and confiscated his phone although he wasn't actually arrested so who got the Spooks so spooked poly Market is a relatively new company that offers people a different way to gamble users can buy shares on the outcomes of real world events with the odds depending on what people are willing to pay for either result it's in practice a completely deregulated system using usdt and poly Market about page just Keen to tell you that there is no house and they don't actually take a cut of the wages or have any stake in the outcut they've also said that the raid was nothing more than political punishment from the outgoing Administration but the whole site does seem to exist in a legal gray area poly markets detractors have accused it of being just another Shady crypto experiment designed to tape people's money while the company itself and their supporters see it as a less exploitative Improvement on gambling and the future of an industry that's always going to exist but before we can ask these questions and dive deeper into poly markets we need to take a step back and consider the context of all of this happening in these days gambling is everywhere and it's had a massive effect on culture most notably in the World of Sports until recently though there were lots of barriers for entry to betting on sports to do it legally you generally needed to go into an actual brick and morar store there were ID checks and other barriers to entry so compared to today it did take a lot more time to start wagering gambling was present on TV as well as well but there were still restrictions that kept gambling participation rates pretty steady over time but today it's a completely different story and now people are gambling on every single thing in society from which movies hit in the box office to which presidents come into power all the way to which Wars are won in 2018 the US Supreme Court reversed a federal ban on sports betting leaving it up to the states to decide and most have chosen to legalize it which also coincided with the rise of mobile gambling apps and since 2018 there's also been a massive rise in the amount of people with gambling addiction problems both surveys and Charities running gambling addiction hotlines have confirmed it a research paper by Stephan Shapiro from the University of South Carolina showed that Sports and betting have an almost symbiotic relationship a rise in popularity of one leads to more attention for the other and vice versa over time the two industries have become completely unmatched we've seen similar results in the UK where regulation has been lacks for years now nearly every football team in the UK has a betting company logo on their Jersey gambling ads now almost run non-stop during Sports Programming in the US American football and its fre pauses have even let them sneak in between individual plays and this video isn't to say that gambling as a whole is a terrible thing but it's the positive association with gambling that could be slightly concerning and we're not just talking about sports we're talking about kid gamblers and the promotion of gambling on anything and everything for teams in a 2014 report the UK gambling commission noted a massive rise in problems with gambling among 11 to 17y olds the amount of kids who would qualify as having problems with gambling more than doubled from 0. 7% to 1. 5% and that's only in the space of a single year these are children who have been having problems with hard gambling but a different kind of softer gambling has been promoted to children for years through predatory practices that have become common in video games as games have evolved companies realized they could make far more money through a so-called premium model the basic gameplay is usually free without a Content Cosmetics or even in-game advantages costing extra the real money comes in from game purchases and microtransactions over time they found out that the best way to make the most money with the system was to create an in-game Casino system they started as's a way for players with less time on their hands to access items they could otherwise grind for however this wasn't enough for some companies so they turned to the one business proficient and ensuring its customers return casinos and things started to spiral out of control when companies saw how much players spent on loot boxes games like Call of Duty would start introducing loot boxes to award players with cosmetic items nothing that would ever enhance the game playay or even give you any money back players love changing the appearance of their main character to suit themselves better and add their own identity to the character finding items became a fun little gimmick that came with leveling up loot boxes triggered feelings similar to what one might experience while gambling the anticipation that comes with the mystery of what's in the box the excitement that followed finding an item that you've been looking for for a while all the disappointment that settles in when you realize you weren't so lucky this time around loot boxes used to be discoverable in game or granted to you for free upon login these days multiple games require spending real money to get them and we're talking about major gaming companies where you've already paid to access the game itself and not only does this incentivize especially children to spend ridiculous amounts of money on digital items but they're also paying far more because of the gambling mechanics all without their parents' knowledge you see loot boxes operate on a system of Rarity they're designed to be as similar to slot machines as possible and while it makes major gaming Publishers tons of money it also prepares them for a lifetime of gambling and all of this is fued a new Renaissance for gambling which brings us straight back to PO Market if you're still fumbling around with a bulky outdated wet let me introduce you to EXA the creators of the world's smartest wallets these aren't your ordinary wallets that slim Sleek compact with features that will make your life so much easier you see extra wallets are super slim holding over 12 cards in cash while studing half the size of traditional wallets the signature trigger mechanism lets you access your cards with just the push of a button it's simple fast and so satisfying and if you're worried about security EXA has you covered with the RFID blocking so that your data stays safe from Wireless skimming and theft plus they're also made with sustainable materials like vegan Italian leather and space grade aluminum 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X to for / Moon and use the code moon to take advantage of this amazing deal trust me once you try EXA you'll never want to go back to your old wallets they've been one of the leading horses in a race to monetize a new way of gambling a peer-to-peer Marketplace for betting on the outcomes of real world events the S mixes crypto gambling in the stock markets all into one in normal gambling people place wages on an outcome in roulette for example if you place a bet on black and the bull lands on one of the black numbers then you win poly markets and other sites like it are a little different instead it's like you can buy shares for each outcome so you could either buy shares that the bull will land on black or that it won't land on black the amount you can win is decided by what other people are willing to pay if most users think there's a 55% chance it will land on black then the share will cost 55 cents and pay out $1 if you're right this system means that you can either just bet on the outcome or wait for the result by buying shares of one of the outcomes or you can buy and sell shares before the outcome even happens either making a profit or a loss based on how the consensus has changed it all means that no third parties taking a cut but other problems come up instead as we'll find out if you're going to believe the founder Shane copin social media posts po Market began in a bathroom on a laptop sitting on top of a laundry basket but it wouldn't stay that way for long launched in 2020 the site was functional months before the election in November by offering a way to bet on the outcome it picked up steam and by around October po Market had already attracted $4 million from crypto and venture capitalist investors after the election died down though the site fell into stagnation for years then in 2022 the C FTC banned them from letting American citizens use the platform and find the site $1. 4 million but strangely this didn't seem to make much of a difference at all whether the ban actually worked is up in the air and it's hard to tell whether poly Market's compliance extended Beyond lip service but it wasn't until the 2024 election cycle the poly markets growth picked up again this time though it was going to get a whole lot more popular than anyone expected as reported by Fortune the trading volume on poly Market stay at around $40 to $60 million for the first 5 months of 2024 then in June it almost doubled to 110 million the site was picking up speed and a month later this tripled again climbing past 500 million by September finally with the election around the corner it Rose by another 500% to 2 and A2 billion since then trading volumes have dropped but not nearly to the levels they were at before the election the business model and the site itself seem to at least have some staying power and recent news might be an indication that some people are very worried about its growth while the media and opinion PS that Trump and camar in a dead heat the consensus and poly Market was much more in Trump's favor in the market for who would win on the 1st of November a few days before the election Trump was sitting nearly 63% with Harrison just under 37% when Trump won poing Market also declared Victory I know you guys got a lot of flack for that and I I just appreciate you guys up for it and hopefully you guys feel feel the same sense of uh victory that we do now you could give a lot of reasons as to why a trump Administration could be more likely to let them operate without much regulation and it might let them have us base users again and during the election people were slandering poly markets as being outrageously right-wing or due to their predictions that Trump would actually win the election unlike mainstream polling that suggested the race was close the user base's bias to being pro Trump was also proven correct as well adding weight to their claims of representing the true voice of the people but just a few days later though the FBI suddenly raided poly Market's offices in New York confiscating copland's phone and laptop while other similar exchanges have been allowed to operate and that users place bets on us politics poly Market had not got and the go-ahead meanwhile it's almost certain that lots of US citizens have been using the platform bypassing the region lock with VPN whether it's poly Market's responsibility to investigate and stop this though is a legal question so while they were obviously breaking their deal they also have tons of plausible deniability that could possibly see them through a lawsuit if nothing else comes up but of course po markets were quick to claim that it was all a case of political punishment by the outgoing Democrats the main objection that poly Marcus detractors have raised is based on the fact that it's unregulated they say opens the doors to insider trading Market manipulation and other predatory practices just a few days before the election fortune. com published a piece accusing poly Market of being a full of wash trading a scam where users buy and sell lots of the same shares over and over again to make it look like a hot commodity the crypto firms that came up with this analysis State up to a third of the activity surrounding the presidential Market the largest on the site was wash trading other smaller markets on the site are even more vulnerable to manipulation their low training volumes make it far easier for people to artificially move the markets with relatively small amounts of money it seems like these kinds of things are almost expected in unregulated online financial markets but perhaps the biggest reason behind the US's new Crackdown on poly markets could be that it's something they don't control or make a profit from with no third party taking a cut or managing the odds poing Market gives people a crystal clear view of what the consensus is on certain events it offers a perspective of the world that they can't control and is therefore dangerous governments also rarely have a problem with gambling if they're the ones in from it the lottery which is often a massive slice of the country's entire gambling industry is insanely profitable for them it's like printing money but without the inflation because they're taking it out of people's pockets if py Market's model of peer-to-peer gambling takes off for other things it could severely Dent both these profits and the ones they tax from regular casinos and bookmakers it's not something they want to happen while it might be unlikely with so much money on the line why would they risk anything at the end of the day poly markets isn't the problem and gambling itself in moderation isn't a terrible thing the issue is that poly Market is just a symptom of a culture that's let gambling go way too far and the media is only concerned because it's a tiny part of the industry that the establishment isn't taking a cut from all the other rigged forms of gambling where you're pretty much guaranteed to lose money are absolutely fine in their rise and regulation has been almost willingly useless in 2021 the UK government took measures like adding a minimum time between spins of 2.
