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Prediction Market Site InTrade Bans US Customers
MyFirstNameIsPaul writes "In an announcement dated Monday, Nov 26, 2012, Dublin-based InTrade stated 'that due to legal and regulatory pressures, InTrade can no longer allow U.S. residents to participate in our real-money prediction markets.' The Washington Post reports that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a complaint in federal court against InTrade for 'illegally facilitating bets on future economic data, the price of gold and even acts of war,' demonstrating just how far the long arm of U.S. law can reach."
"InTrade can no longer allow U.S. residents to participate in our real-money prediction markets"..."demonstrating just how far the long arm of U.S. law can reach"
US law being applied to US residents?! Outrageous!
If they want to deal with customers, they have to deal with the local legality of their product and/or service. It's not like the US getting mad at online gambling sites is new, you know.
Why is it illegal to wager on a prediction?
Or is this just being treated as a special case of on-line gambling, which apparently the world would end if allowed.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Is the long arm of the law reaching too far? Sounds like a gambling company was operating in the US, or at least for US customers. Gambling is illegal (unless the government is in on it, a discussion for another day :) in the US. Therefore they filed a complaint. Sounds like everything is legit.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
The US law affecting the US citizens, what's that got to do with "long arm"?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This is a great example of Republicans and especially Democrats limiting your freedom.
--libman
The least they could do is still allow us to wager on sports. That's still legal last I checked.
USA citizenship used to be similar to having a first class ticket, today....
You can't open a foreign bank account (and they taught you to believe that if you have a foreign bank account you are unamerican). Now you can't be on Intrade? Try and set up your own Intrade in USA, you'll be shut down.
Why is this all happening? As the government gets bigger and bigger, it gets into more and more aspects of people's lives. Individual freedoms are important, I know many here believe that individual freedoms means 'freedom for business to abuse you', however business cannot abuse you if you don't want it to, you can simply not deal with an abusing business, see how it turns out for that kind of business in a free market.
But where are you going to go if your government abuses you? They are certainly now making it harder and harder to drop US citizenship. There are now fees associated with that, not much for now, only about 400 bucks, but that only means they are going to raise it eventually much higher than that, maybe to your portion of public debt? How about your portion of unfunded liabilities? Contingency liabilities? If that's the case, there will be no difference between the iron curtain and the IRS curtain, and IRS already can deny you your passport or even revoke your passport so you can't go outside of country if you owe more than some dollar amount in taxes (25K or so).
Ron Paul was laughed at when he said that the wall at the Mexico border may just be used to hold Americans in.
How do I read this from these Intrade news? It's one step at a time, that's what it is. Prevent you from having a bank account outside, prevent you from dealing with companies outside, eventually prevent you from being able to exchange your currency, have capital and exchange controls; US border patrol is already crazy, it's not a stretch.
You can't handle the truth.
It begins~
And so begins the downfall. Baby steps.
That's it, making a cave society.
Blocking your residents from using a website is not a long reach, as enforcing any law within your borders does not constitute a long reach.
You can wager on where the price will go on Gold, the economy, interest rates, etc ....
It's called the options and futures market here in the US. It's heavily regulated and requires capital.
The thing is with this site is that I wouldn't trust it. At least here in the States, something nefarious happens on an exchange or with a broker, I can at least get arbitration packed with industry insiders via FINRA (Finra.org)
I, for one, am very glad these unlicensed options traders are getting stamped out! There's no room in the economy for these shenanigans! Just think what could happen if people started massively trading options on unregulated exchanges - people would start speculating, maybe betting on, say, housing prices going up or down, and before you know it, we could have a housing assets bubble that would burst, bring down the economy and require massive government bailouts! I'm so glad that options trading is restricted only to regulated, licensed exchanges where such things couldn't ever happen......
The lesson here is this: if you're a small person trying to speculate - that's bad! If you're a giant investment bank trying to speculate - go right ahead, just as long as your dealer^H^H^H exchange is "regulated".
It says here that the restriction came after Intrade allowed predictions on gold and oil prices even after agreeing to prevent US customers from doing so. The general ban came later but might be a response to this CFTC suit.
http://bb.intrade.com/intradeForum/posts/list/494909.page
Stop doing business with 'em.
Yeah so when the German government decides to go postal on Google for not censoring Nazi-related searches on Google.de, which may or may not be hosted from US territory, I'm sure you'll be more than fine with Google having to bend to the will of Germany, right? Or how about China...? Ohhhh and what about when Pakistan decides to charge YouTube executives with blasphemy for being "incorrigible" about allowing blasphemous videos on YouTube?
No brokerage in the UK will allow a "US person" to open an account. This has been true for at least 3 years and probably more.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
almost as bad as what the US is doing to Kim Dotcom
I had money down at InTrade betting that this was going to happen. Now how am I supposed to get my money!?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Then why can I trade on the London Stock Exchange? It is not a US regulated market. Is it that we consider UK regulated markets as US regulated markets?
I'd assume so, given all the treaties that the USA has with Great Britain.
Have the dweebs who were jacking off to "financial markets reform" showed up yet?
(Or are they collecting their bribes from the rentseekers at Goldman Sachs, who wrote Dodd-Frank?)
governments and corporations cannot be trusted to control communications
we the people need an internet that no government or corporation has any control over
there are various mesh network projects out there, please consider running a node, or at least a tor passthrough, freenet node, and/or i2p router
if we make these networks robust and ubiquitous enough then the powerful people wont be able to shut them down without giving up their pretense of legitimacy
Whatever false sense of prestige you think US citizens had was manufactured through exploitation if not outright oppression of other people (done by the US government). US didn't get ahead by being better than others. US got ahead because other people fell behind
US citizens in 18th and 19th century was first class because the blacks, Indians, Asians and other minorities were discriminated and pushed down to become de facto second classes.
Then the world wars happened, and US citizens became first class simply because the rest of the world was in shambles. Plus, people where taught that the communists were evil inferior beings, so clearly the free and capitalist (ha!) Americans were first class.
But now that the rest of the world got back up on its feet, America is now seen for what it really is all along: the backwater former colony that it was prior to its Civil War and Industrial Revolution.
Capcha: "insecure", which is what many Americans are going to feel when they realize that they and the system their Founding Fathers created aren't that special
http://betsofbitco.in/ has no restrictions on location. They're probably totally legal here as well, because except for sports gambling, and futures markets specifically, there are no US federal laws prohibiting gambling. Several laws (The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, The Federal Wire Wager Act, 18 U.S.C. 1084) prohibit the transfer of funds by wire for purposes of gambling, but gambling itself is only regulated at the state level (with the two specific exemptions above.)
Same in Germany
InTrade predictions are less gambling than the stock market. At least the predictions on InTrade are less affected by random unscrupulous manipulators. Take the predictions of the ice cover on the Arctic, for instance: if you did your homework, you knew there would be very little ice cover on the Arctic this year, and could bet accordingly.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Isn't that what BitCoin is for?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I, for one, am very glad these unlicensed options traders are getting stamped out! There's no room in the economy for these shenanigans! Just think what could happen if people started massively trading options on unregulated exchanges - people would start speculating, maybe betting on, say, housing prices going up or down, and before you know it, we could have a housing assets bubble that would burst, bring down the economy and require massive government bailouts! I'm so glad that options trading is restricted only to regulated, licensed exchanges where such things couldn't ever happen...... The lesson here is this: if you're a small person trying to speculate - that's bad! If you're a giant investment bank trying to speculate - go right ahead, just as long as your dealer^H^H^H exchange is "regulated". http://www.readenews.com/2012/02/10-classy-speakers-to-match-your-white.html
In a sane setup, the US regulators would go and prosecute US residents who used illegal services
A simpler way would simply to make any debts associated with locally illegal services unenforceable. That way everyone's laws can stick to their own borders and it becomes very hard to offer services from one country where they are legal to another where they are not.
Hello, anyone in there??? How would people buying and selling EVENT futures based on housing prices, on an Irish exchange, affect the ACTUAL prices of housing? Housing prices were driven up by low interest rates, lax credit qualifications putting more people into the market, and HOMEBUYERS SPECULATING on the homes themselves. No futures market is going to affect that. The only affect is in the other direction. That's by design.
Do you have any idea what Intrade does, and what their contracts look like? It sounds like you don't.
No of course not, actual prices could never be affected by futures speculation, this has been proven over and over again, just look at commodities, say precious metals like silver, er... Never mind, I meant the energy sector, look at crude oil and gasoline prices, where you can clearly see that... No, wait, wait, I uh... Surely there must be, um, something,,, /sarcasm
Seriously, you honestly think the packaging of real estate mortgages into futures-like securities had no effect on the actual prices of homes during the run up to the meltdown??? Or that what's being discussed here is so very different from that?? Are we living in the same universe? In my world the real estate bubble was almost entirely driven by the big banks and big institutionalized traders, the poor home owners mostly just got taken along for the ride, either intentionally or by happenstance.
Sounds like they're all hedges. Even wars need to be hedged against. Same with weather futures (which are legally traded). Most people assume that's just gambling until you explain that the weather futures are to hedge against other commodities being affected by weather. Frozen Concentrated OJ is the first that comes to mind.
The US brokers and exchanges are just upset they're not getting their cut in this case.
Captcha: autocrat - rich guy that made his money with automatic trading algorithms.
Unless "the law" means "whatever the U.S. government wants." They filed a complaint in their own courts, which have no jurisdiction over Ireland, and an Irish company caved in under what was an empty threat.
Liberty in your lifetime
Look up the term "bucket shop" for instance. It is one thing to say be a registered CFTC regulate exchange and regulated FCMs (Futures Commission Merchant), IBs, etc. In this case if I buy a gold contract THERE IS GOLD behind that contract, there is sufficient liquidity to guarantee that the trade will settle, the DTC or some other facility will insure that trades ARE settled, order flow is monitored for front running, etc etc etc. The main point there is however that the liquidity exists and that the investor is actually participating in the market.
For instance a bucket shop would simply let you 'buy' gold for instance, but in reality they would just take your money. If gold goes down and you exit the market they get to keep some of that money. If OTOH it goes up and you take your profit they can't cover it (except by raiding someone else's account). InTrade isn't participating in markets, it is just letting you 'bet', which is not the same thing. You're playing the market effectively AGAINST them.
Interestingly the only market where this effectively DOES work is spot FX. Because there is nothing but cash in FX in different currencies all FX trading IS in effect betting. Even then the US now pretty much forbids retail FX trading, the business has moved overseas.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Actually, that's not true. The US doesn't ban gambling or exert a federal government monopoly on it, though it does regulate certain kinds of gambling, and prohibit some kinds. (The particular issue here, options trading, isn't a government monopoly -- the exchanges that are approved to do it are regulated by the government, but not operated by the government.) Many US states limit gambling and assert a government monopoly on certain types of gambling (e.g., lotteries), but that's not the federal government.
Unless you are a broker with a seat on the exchange, you can't (you can enter into a contract with a US-licensed brokerage firm who also has a seat -- or perhaps has a relationship with a firm that has a seat -- on the LSE, and have them make the trade on your behalf.) The London Stock Exchange -- like most stock exchanges -- does not directly solicit regular investors (in the US or elsewhere) to trade directly on the exchange, and, unlike Intrade, hasn't previously settled a complaint from the appropriate US regulators charging that it did so by agreeing to a specific set of actions it would take.
No, the actual answer is that options trading (not gambling) is regulated (not prohibited) in the US, including -- specifically -- foreign-operated trading houses that provide "persons located in the US direct access to the electronic trading and order matching system".
That's a bad analogy, since the part of the law which empowers the CFTC in this case empowers them to address foreign trading houses which permit "participants located in the United States with direct access to the electronic trading and order matching system" operated by the trading house. (7 USC Sec. 6(b)(1)(A), emphasis added.)
Businesses don't have sovereignty to encroach upon.
The Canadian and British examples you cite give reason to doubt that FPTP is the sole source of that stable US national duopoly, but they fall well short of making it clear that FPTP has nothing to do with it. In fact, FPTP isn't the sole source, but has quite a lot to do with it.
FPTP creates a strong pressure to a two-party system, but can result in regional two-party systems. (And, in fact, there've been durable regional duopolies in the US that don't reflect the national duopoly, such as the long run of the Farmer-Labor party as the second party along with the Republicans in Minnesota's two-party system, which only became aligned with the national duopoly when the FL party joined wth the Democratic as the DFL party in Minnesota.)
In the US, the fact that in addition to FPTP we also have a strong and separately elected executive administration rather than a government established by a Parliamentary majority (which might be formed by an ad hoc coalition of parties none of which has its own majority) increases the pressure for a national two-party system beyond that seen in countries that have FPTP in a parliamentary system. The stronger pressure for a national two-party system (and thus, the higher bar for a party to survive, as its harder for what nationally might be a minor party to survive as a regional first- or second-party) also makes for a more stable party system that is harder to break into than would be the case in an FPTP parliamentary system.
Tens of Millions of US dollars changed hands on Intrade when Obama was re-elected.
Seems that the many people in the "Fox Information Containment Bubble" thought is they would triple their money. The Obama supporters (and anyone who read 538) realized a 50% return on investment.
OMFG. BRAIN HURTS.
Wish I had gotten in on it in time. It's like a tax on stupid people.