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Company ‘Kalshi’ admits plot to capitalise from division

If you’ve not heard of ‘Kalshi’ before, it’s what’s known as a ‘prediction market’.

If you’ve not heard of prediction markets, hold on to that feeling, because you won’t enjoy your enlightenment:

The cost of living

Yahoo Finance describe betting markets as follows:

Prediction markets are exchanges where people can bet on event outcomes. The bets are usually made by purchasing binary contracts that pay out if the event unfolds the way you expect. In this context, binary means there are only two outcomes — often yes or no — and your contract bets on one of them.

So basically they’re like sports betting except you can bet on pretty much anything. They’re also more annoying than sports betting, because they use nerd words like ‘binary’ and have the whiff of crypto about them.

Prediction markets aren’t exactly like betting, of course, as CCN explain:

Prediction markets might sound confusing, but their core concept is actually quite simple: you trade “tiny” stocks in real-life events. Oftentimes, each stock pays $1 if something happens and $0 if it doesn’t. The price between those numbers tells you the crowd’s odds.

For example, a prediction market might ask: “Will Bitcoin be above $100,000 on December 31?”

If the “Yes” share trades at $0.70, the market indicates there’s about a 70% chance it will happen. The price fluctuates as new information becomes available, such as the announcement of a new Bitcoin ETF.

. …

In other words, think of them like a stock market for questions, rather than companies.

Much like cryptocurrency, this stuff seems more complicated than it is because you can’t figure out what possible benefit it presents to society.

Eventually, you accept the purpose is simply to give the rich a new means to extract wealth from us.

Kalshi—’Financialise everything’

In the video at the top, they ask co-founder Tarek Mansour how he plans to follow through on his plan to make prediction markets bigger than the stock market. The interesting part of his response was this:

The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.

He also says:

we are living in a world where like, we have an abundance of information, but there’s a lot of noise. And like, we don’t really understand what’s real from what’s not. And prediction markets are an antidote to that.

They do a very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people. And you’re seeing this sort of massive shift where people are using them whenever they think about questions about the future, whenever they’re debating about anything.

And I think that trajectory is going to keep going.

That’s a new consumer habit that I don’t think is going to be undone.

Are you confused about what’s going on in the world?

Well don’t worry, because you can financialise your confusion, and that will clear things up somehow.

Jesus christ.

It’s no wonder people are responding like this:

Oh, and major news outlets are planning to embed this into their operations by the way:

 

Dystopia

Prediction markets aren’t just predicting world events; they’re also shaping them.

When you attach a financial incentive to something happening, you give people a reason to make it so. This is why losers kept turning up at women’s basketball games and hurling dildos at the court, injuring at least two children in the process (you can learn more about that in the following video):

We don’t know how long it will take before UK politicians start pushing this shit on us, but we do know Reform took a £9m donation from a crypto guy, so it can’t be too long before the Kalshi come sniffing around them.

In other words, don’t bet on the UK escaping this fresh hell.

Featured image via EU Civil Protection / Citadel Securities

 

By Willem Moore

This post was originally published on Canary.