[CamperBob2]

Intrade confuses me. It was illegal to use Intrade as a US citizen; in fact, some people I personally know who were into that scene had to maintain foreign bank accounts.

What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?

[refulgentis]

Giving it to you straight: GOP SCOTUS court packing via denying Obama’s nomination led to 6-3 supermajority, and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue. Sports gambling startups ate sports right up, then, innovators like YC funded companies that said “that, but for everything” and collided with a shameless pay-to-play administration, not the general “politicians take donations from companies” kind, the “name don jr as your strategic advisor” kind. (Kalshi) Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this) is de facto law of the land.

[thaumasiotes]

> and it ruled gambling legislation was a states rights issue.

What did that change? Gambling legislation was a states' issue before. You might have noticed that different states had wildly different gambling regimes.

(...and all federal legislation is a states' rights issue?)

> Now the argument that would have appeared batshit insane a decade ago, that there’s no federal way to prevent this[,] is [the] de facto law of the land.

You're talking about a law that was invalidated eight years ago, and passed 24 years before that. Which position would have looked insane more of the time?

[refulgentis]

Fair point that PASPA was the exception, not the rule, and that the anti-commandeering / "states rights" argument isn't some novel theory. It does happen to be deployed often in cases where businesses don't want to be regulated. (and, the elephant in the room, more famously....never mind, let's not go there)

I overstated the court-packing angle, Murphy was 7-2, not a partisan split.

But my actual point is narrower than the constitutional question: in practice, sports betting was confined to Nevada and reservations for decades. Once that dam broke, the path from legal sports betting to VC-funded "that but for everything" prediction markets to the current situation happened really fast, and there's no regulatory apparatus keeping up with it. Whether the dam should have broken is a separate question from whether anyone's minding the flood.

[thaumasiotes]

> What has changed, exactly, to make Polymarket legal where Intrade was not?

Polymarket opened a subbranch to handle US customers subject to US law. It's separate from Polymarket proper, which remains illegal for US citizens to use.