I been wondering how long it was going to take for someone official to realize that “prediction market” just means “gambling.”

That’s how the grift economy works; you take something illegal, give it a different name, and pretend it’s something new and unregulated. The trick is to undercut all competitors with investor capital and put them out of business as quickly as possible. That way, by the time regulators try to pass laws against you, argue that you’re “essential to the economy” now that you’re the only one who operates in that sector.

Uber - No, we’re not an illegal cab company, we’re a “ride share service”

Air B&B - No, we’re not an illegal hotel chain, we’re landlords who sign one-day leases.

Kashi - No, we’re not an illegal casino, this is a “prediction market”

Earn In - No, we’re not an illegal lender, we’re letting you access your future wages, today

Klarna - No, we’re not an illegal credit card company, we just let you pay in four installments

I wonder if a good enough lawmaker can write a law to nip that problem in the bud.

No they can’t, this is a good faith problem. Fundamentally. You can invent all the words you want and any law will somehow be a couple of terms short of covering the particular description exactly and without doubt.

You can’t solve this with properly formulated laws, you can solve this with a sufficiently participatory legal system, and British legal tradition is better for that than Roman legal tradition in the first place, but it still is derived from popular power.

In other words, from societies forming the responses by networks of sufficiently pissed citizens.

The alternative was the government and big fish being interested in doing the right thing somehow, not the case here.

This, I think, is related to how all over the world laws have become very precise, literal and with plenty of special cases, which wasn’t the case in the 60s even in socialist countries.

To replace good faith mechanism with literalism, which allows with sufficient power to create cases immune to law, because some special cases are not written into laws yet.

Also that naturally makes legal proceedings more expensive.

That seems to be the preferred road to riches today. Make an illegal business, make money as fast as you can while you trip up the legal system as best you can to maximize the time until you have to pay the piper, and if you can make enough before the hammer drops, you pay off the hammer and keep doing it. If not, you pay the hammer its cut (the slap on the wrist fine), then make off with the rest.

Another one to the list. Illegal cab company, illegal hotel network, illegal currency for money laundering and now illegal gambling site