Prediction markets have flattened the uncertainty of the future into a clean “Yes” or “No” choice. Will the Federal Reserve cut rates? Will Chalamet’s name be joked about at the next Hollywood event? Will it rain tomorrow? The betting game has never been so frivolous and so accessible. For a price, anywhere between fifty cents and fifty thousand, you can bet on a “Yes” contract that pays out if the event happens. These markets have turned a small experiment into a reflection of society’s growing need to extract a dividend from everything and everyone.

Wall Street, which has historically guarded their innovative prediction skills like family jewels, has started to use prediction markets for real-time macroeconomic signals. However, in spite of being touted as a real-time reflection of opinion shifts, the more objective wisdom of the hive-mind promised by prediction markets is actually dominated by a few powerful traders.

A recent analysis revealed that this idea of tapping into the wisdom of thousands is a facade for a small, highly concentrated group of wealthy traders or “sharks” dictating the odds to serve their own profits. The analysis found that more than seventy percent of users lose money, while the wealthy traders wager millions to swing the probability of everything, from a game to an election. With journalists quoting these odds as if they reflect reality, the trends are thus validated, propagating a system that lacks regulation and oversight.

The most dangerous facet of prediction markets is the moral bankruptcy of betting on the suffering of people. Placing wagers on whether a nation will be bombed or soldiers will survive should never be part of a business model. When people start benefiting financially from the destruction of a city or the loss of life, it stops being a trading exercise and becomes the sign of a society heading towards tragic moral decay.

Prediction markets do not just predict the future but place incentives on specific versions of it, which can be harmful for our collective well-being. They incentivize diverse forms of corruption, whether it is a defense official using state secrets to hedge bets or a speculator wielding a hair-dryer over a weather monitor to cash in on the heat wave. When every possibility is indiscriminately converted into a tradable asset, the truth becomes irrelevant and payouts take precedence over ethics.