David Yaffe-Bellany

And so if you have a crowdsourced verdict on that question, that could potentially be really helpful.

So on some of these markets, you can still make a version of that high-minded argument that Copeland came into this industry with.

But on some of the others, it's definitely a lot tougher to justify.

Yeah, and it has a sort of distancing effect.

Suddenly, these things become kind of abstract, the same way the price of a stock is sort of abstract to people.

And what the long-term consequences of that will be, it's hard to say.

But it's clear that this is a future that these companies want.

One of the co-founders of Kalshi says that he wants to financialize everything.

to turn every difference in opinion into a tradable asset.

It's the idea that any event in the real world could be communicated in financial terms as odds of this happening, odds of that happening, even if it's something as simple as the weather.

And to their founders, that's really exciting.

But to a lot of other people,

A world in which everything is reduced to dollars and cents is sort of depressing.

To a lot of people, it sounds like dystopia.

What's clear is that we're at the beginning of this.

The legal landscape is still taking shape.

There are some challenges to prediction markets happening in the states right now.

Still, as someone who's covered this sort of fringe financial stuff for a long time, I can feel momentum behind these markets.

There's a real appetite for them culturally.

And I don't see that changing.