About this app
What is Old West?
Uhh…sure. Replacing fiat dollars with BTC for “value preservation” is like speedballing heroin and cocaine as a valuable tool for maintaining emotional balance. Yeah, you’ll be balanced, on average I guess, except you won’t feel that way ever when you’re swinging between wild extremes and your pulse varies from 40 – 200bpm every other minute and you end up in cardiac arrest. But hey, I know, the world has gone completely and utterly mad, so what else is new?
Just the rumors of this had spurred BTC past $58,000 a token, but then whoops, it crashed again by about $10,000 in a matter of minutes. This is what corporate America wants to put on its balance sheets? A pseudo-asset that they won’t even know the value of any given minute? Speedballing by comparison seems quite the mild, conservative habit to engage in. But the BTC crowd certainly has one thing absolutely right. Having extra fiat money on your balance sheet, especially U.S. dollars, at this point in monetary history, is extremely dangerous, even suicidal. Corporations are going to have to get rid of them real soon, because the U.S. dollar is about to completely implode. And with the U.S. dollar, will go every single other fiat currency in the world in real purchasing power terms.
Once it becomes obvious, it will be too late to do anything about it. It doesn’t matter how great a company you have. If you are interested in preserving your company, there is only one thing you can do. Replace any extra fiat currency stuck on your balance sheet with real money, with gold, now, or you will sink together with all the inflated paper nothing units on your balance sheets.
How to play Old West
Ultimately, the gamble backfired.
Arbitrators found against the companies and ordered them to pay millions of dollars toward Laos’ legal costs and expenses.
One tribunal found in 2019 that Lao Holdings had acted in bad faith and ordered it to pay Laos $1.95 million. Another made a similar finding against Sanum and awarded the government $1.78 million.
About Old West
At the same time, prediction market operators are facing regulatory tussles in the US. State regulators are moving to shut down the firms under gambling laws. The companies say their contracts should be regulated at the federal level as derivatives.
However, the sector has grown substantially despite such disputes. Bernstein predicted in April that annual prediction market volume could reach $1 trillion by 2030. The research estimated volume was around $51 billion in 2025 and could grow to around $240 billion in 2026.
The partnership with Yahoo Finance wraps up as prediction markets push for broader distribution across financial media, sports, and entertainment platforms. For Polymarket, the loss of the Yahoo Finance hub is one distribution channel, but other partnerships remain intact.
