(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Richard Barker points us to an update on ipredict, the New Zealand political prediction market. From the news article by Hamish Rutherford:
The site, run by Victoria University of Wellington’s commercialisation arm, VicLink, issued a statement to its website and on Twitter on Thursday.
According to the iPredict statement, Associate Justice Minister Simon Bridges refused to grant it an exemption from the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act, declaring that it was a “legitimate money laundering risk” because of the lack of customer due diligence. . . .
Geoff Todd, managing director of VicLink, said the website had been caught in a legal loophole which had caused problems globally.
“Predictions markets aren’t financial markets, and they’re not gambling, but the legislation is very binary. You’re either gambling or you’re a financial market.” . . .
The purpose of the website was to bring private information into the public domain, Todd said, meaning it was unreasonable to ask users to give their identities. A number of staff around Parliament, as well as MPs, are known to have used iPredict. . . .
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