Yeah but less direct incentive than "If my friends (and I) bet money on X, and I do X, they (and I) make money."

I agree in some ways.

Like, I think in a way it's just not viable to patch every little loophole a corrupt or morally bankrupt administration could exploit and all damage it could cause, and probably not without making the administration itself useless. It's a still a good idea to patch as much as feasible, in part to if slightly discourage the worse from seeking power in the first place. But in a way, it's garbage in, garbage out. Laws will never be able to magically turn corrupt and misguided decisions into ever good ones. The robust solution is promoting wisdom, ethics, civility and education, so people make good democratic choices for themselves and others.

It's a big difference. There's vastly less chance someone manages to expose state secrets through their bets on oil futures. The volume is higher, and the prediction is less specific.

Oil prices are affected by many other things too. It's valuable to isolate individual factors.

The idea is not economic hedging but gambling and corruption

Yeah we should ban derivatives too.

> Isnt this silly when you can calculate the chance of war in Iran by oil futures instead

This is why I'm opposed to prediction markets - they're gamified futures contracts (unsurprising given the founders at Kalshi are ex-Citadel and why Intercontinental Exchange executed growth equity rounds with Polymarket). A lot of degenerate gamblers are basically being taken to the cleaners as they lack the experience to actually mitigate risk or understand how to strucure futures contracts.

And an actual insider has much easier and much more legally defensible alternatives to conduct insider trading than using a platform that has KYC requirements.

Except this wasn't driven by Oil. It was driven by Israel.