Somewhat disparagingly, I’ve often thought the payment card companies came up with the PCI standards as an effort to avoid a legislative solution. Significant, public issues made people “demand answers” – and government regulation is an obvious answer. Except it’s outside of your control. If you can convince everyone that you’ve come up with rules to solve the problem … no need for those government types to waste their time and create more red tape! We’re all good here.

I thought of that when reading about the soldier arrested for using insider knowledge in Polymarket trades. “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” the company wrote. “Today’s arrest is proof the system works.” … an unregulated market were people see spikes in “trades” that appear to be driven on insider knowledge is bad for business. If you want to go and bet on which team ends up in the basketball championship, you aren’t betting against people with special knowledge that put you at a disadvantage. But bets like this? Who wants to put their money on “US invades Iran in 7 days” against someone sitting in the situation room delaying the troops movement because his bet was exactly 9:57PM UTC today.

Of course dude wants to show “the system works” — last thing he wants is to fall under securities regulations!