A Future You Can Bet On: An Essay on the Growing Need for Betting Intelligence (BETINT)
The Wheel of Fish from the movie UHF
I. When Everything’s a Bet, the Future’s a Gamble
We wonder what percentage of Americans would say they’ve never gambled. Any number larger than the percentage of Amish and electricity-free hermits left in this country would suggest a lack of awareness about what “gambling” actually is.
Gambling isn’t just poker tables, DraftKings, or lottery tickets. Spin a wheel on Temu or Shein, open a loot box in your favorite mobile game, tear open a pack of Pokémon cards or Labubu blind boxes, collect McDonald’s Happy Meal toys that have slot machines in them, or roll for your favorite waifu in a gacha game, that’s gambling. You may not have signed up for it, but you’ve been in a casino this whole time.
What once looked like gimmicks or game mechanics has been quietly becoming the norm for everyday transactions. Transactional certainty is giving way to probabilistic play. Everything (from digital shopping carts to content feeds) is beginning to contain a roll, spin, or “surprise me” button.
Prediction markets (i.e. platforms that allow people to bet on anything from sports to elections to social trends) are ascending. Polymarket and Kalshi are already valued in the tens of billions, and that number will climb. With Trump Media & Technology Group publicly announcing plans to enter prediction markets, these mechanisms are not going away under the current administration that will benefit from them. Meanwhile, investors like Andreessen Horowitz are eager to expand them even further in a bid to help companies that are struggling to grow revenue in a slowing economy where consumers are spending less.
With all of these factors in mind, it’s our belief here at BetBreakingNews that the U.S. is heading toward an economy where gambling is not an activity, it will be the architecture. We believe that the day is coming when every purchase will include a gambling mechanism where instead of simply paying for something transactionally, you’ll be nudged or forced to play for the chance to win it.
This paper is about the future we see where transactional purchases become endangered, and most economic activity revolves around betting, chance, and the constant monetization of uncertainty. To help conceptualize where this belief is coming from, let us give you four keywords that will define this coming order from an economic, social, and psychological lens: Hypergamblification, Luck-Based Economy, Monetized Reality, and Market Awareness.
II. Terms That Will Define the Near-Future Experience
Something that seems so obvious it hardly feels worth mentioning is the idea that you purchase items and services with money. Straightforward enough, right? But that basic premise becomes unstable in the face of economic stagnation, tens of thousands of people losing their jobs in the rise of AI/Automation/”technological update”, and a wave of program defunding and spending freezes under the current administration has further reduced disposable income and social support.
So what can companies do when consumers have less to spend but the corporate appetite for profit only grows when raising prices or shrinkflating products invites backlash? From the trends we brought up earlier in this paper, we think companies will start to discover the subtler but more addictive option of turning ordinary purchases into games of chance.
The cultural climate has already normalized gambling thanks to the explosion of sports betting, prediction markets, and all the “non-gambling gambling” mechanics we outlined in Section I. Increasingly, we’ll be offered the chance to pay a smaller price for the chance to get something cheaper. Imagine: you can buy a carton of eggs for $4, or pay 50 cents per spin to “win” the carton. Many people will take the cheaper gamble, believing luck might tilt their way, while companies will profit from the probabilities stacked quietly in their favor.
This migration from transactional purchase to probabilistic play is what we call hypergamblification, the process by which everything that used to be a transaction becomes a gamble. And when this model becomes ubiquitous (i.e. when there are more gambling options than straightforward transactions for any purchase be it from gas to rent to healthcare to tuition), we will have entered what we call a luck-based economy.
In a luck-based economy, economic activity is dominated not by stable exchanges but by probabilistic outcomes, with risk structures that benefit the companies in the same way casino games benefit the house. It may sound unbelievable, but the infrastructure is already under construction. Observe the trajectory of how prediction markets would want to expand: broader scope of topic, yet finer granularity within topics, and increasing “permissionlessness” where anyone can create or participate in a market about anything.
That scaling mirrors the rise of the internet. Just as every element of “real life” eventually found its way online, we’re heading toward a world where everything will have a simulacra’d market attached to it. This is monetized reality, a condition in which every fact, perception, or event can be priced, traded, or hedged through a bet. Every maybe, every what if, becomes a marketplace of belief. The cognitive domain (the realm of ideas, expectations, and narratives that is discussed within national security concept development circles) turns into an arena where these sometimes hard to measure things all now have a monetary value attached.
And as the market layer overlays everything as reality gets monetized, two new cognitive conditions emerge: market awareness and market self-awareness. Market awareness is the recognition that all these different things are being tracked, priced, or speculated upon and market self-awareness is the behavioral adaptation that follows once you realize there are markets that involve you as a “player” (likely made without your consent) and you are aware of how your actions, performance, or statements can influence those markets. Trying to opt out of these markets would be like trying to opt out of capitalism itself: you can reject it in principle, but it still dictates the terms of your survival.
A recent example of market self-awareness would be Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, publicly admitted to trolling prediction markets by deliberately saying specific words on his company’s earnings call that traders had set up markets around. Some called it manipulation. But in reality, Armstrong was simply acknowledging that these markets existed and that he had agency within them. He didn’t ask to be bet on, but he wasn’t about to pretend ignorance of the market where the results are controlled by his actions.
This is what market self-awareness looks like in practice and it won’t stay confined to CEOs. Politicians, journalists, athletes, even students or local officials, all will eventually navigate markets that exist about them. These feedback loops transform markets from tools of observation into mirrors of performance; once you know that you’re being wagered upon, you begin to act with that knowledge.
Together, these forces (hypergamblification, luck-based economy, monetized reality, market awareness, and market self-awareness) define the behavioral and economic substrate of the near future. They describe a world where participation in gambling is no longer optional; it’s embedded in every interface, transaction, and performance metric. Life becomes a casino you can’t leave not because of moral failure or addiction, but because the casino has become the economy itself. The luck-based economy and monetized reality will surround everything and opting out only costs you more. Assessing if this future is good or bad is almost beside the point. What matters is that it’s already happening. With Trump Media’s plans to move into prediction markets and a broader tech-investor push to expand them, hypergamblification will be the next major innovation meta once the current AI bubble pops.
III. Betting Intelligence (BETINT) as a Necessity for Understanding the Monetized Reality
The last section may seem dark and hopeless, but there is a light: the ability to understand the markets that shape you or that you can shape. That light is what we’ve called betting intelligence (BETINT) in our previous writings (see 1, 2, 3). Intelligence in this context refers to the same sense used in OSINT, SIGINT, or HUMINT; different disciplines of collecting and interpreting signals. BETINT is the discipline of analyzing prediction markets, sportsbook odds, and event-betting flows to infer real-time belief, deception, coordination, and risk behavior. Its purpose is to turn these probabilistic traces into timely insight and action.
BETINT isn’t a gold-standard INT that replaces the others; it completes them. The modern information environment no longer ends at discourse or data, it extends into probabilistic expression. When people stake money on an outcome, they’re revealing a fusion of belief, incentive, confidence, and perceived truth.
When someone bets on whether a country will attack another, whether a sex toy will be thrown onto a basketball court, or who will win the Nobel Peace Prize, the motivations can vary but the most reliable bets often come from those who have an active hand in shaping the result. That’s why knowing where these markets exist, what they cover, how much money is flowing through them, and what influence you or others might exert over their outcomes becomes essential.
BETINT equips countries, institutions, companies, and individuals alike to navigate this landscape. Market awareness requires market literacy and BETINT is the analytic layer that helps decision-makers separate signals from spectacle, crowd bias from informed belief, and genuine probability from manipulation.
Our goal is to show what the near-future environment will look like and how BETINT can help everyone in this new economic reality not only understand it, but also navigate and even capitalize on it. The true value of BETINT isn’t just in predicting the future; it’s in mapping how belief about the future is being traded, coordinated, and weaponized in real time. “Know thyself” hits differently when the act of reading markets becomes the act of reading ourselves.
IV. When Everything is a Casino, Are you Still not Allowed to Cry In It?
This paper addresses what we believe is the most important and under-acknowledged issue facing national security and societal stability. It’s the reason we stepped away from our respective fields to build BetBreakingNews.
We’ve long understood the potential (and the danger) of prediction markets at scale. As far back as 2002, DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market project showed the strategic possibilities of having prediction markets at scale. Even with our team’s years of experience in the betting space, even a year ago we wouldn’t have predicted how fast hypergamblification would become inevitable. It began with Kalshi introducing sports-related markets on its platform through a clever loophole that allowed sports betting in states where it wasn’t yet legalized. Then the real turning point came when the Trump administration embraced prediction markets (including political ones) and investors rushing in to push gambling and betting mechanisms into more corners of the economy than ever before.
Every possible event, product, or outcome will be transformed into a betting opportunity. That is the trajectory for at least the remainder of Trump’s administration, and given how weak the opposition to the president’s mandates has been so far, this isn’t a future that can simply be regulated or legislated away. Once these systems take hold with the public, any attempt to uproot them later will face a population too accustomed (and too financially invested) to let them go without serious resistance.
This paper tried to discuss this with moral neutrality; as the saying goes, “there’s no crying in the casino”. We’re simply playing the hand we’ve been dealt and showing anyone willing to listen how to become a sharp, advantage-seeking player in this next economic phase through the use of BETINT. When everything can be bet on, the only way to stay ahead is to understand where the odds are set, who is setting them, and what those odds reveal. The casino of existence is already here. And it’s going to be everywhere soon enough. Try not to cry.
