In no way is it better now that we have online gambling. The entire industry should be illegal and barred from participation in the traditional banking system.
Nowhere near solving cancer, but hey we got TikTok and Facebook and crypto and AI swarms and endless porn and gambling, and an increasingly radical, divided, depressed, and anxious humanity.
While I in no way support habitual gambling, the second you push for something like that, you will have a sizable group of "freedom activists" up in arms. More likely, I see it being more-heavily taxed to make it less appealing.
Even without the addiction problem, a business that allows you to bet on anything happening in society is bound to be the largest vehicle for corruption in the history of mankind. This is a threat to democracy and stability that actually undermines our freedom. Prediction markets should never have been allowed to exist, and if the US is willing to protect this industry, the rest of the free world should sanction it out of existence.
I share this perspective and hate the straw-man from pro-prediction-marketists that those opposed are moralists and puritans who can't accept that people like to bet on sports.
Prediction markets are a way of effectively placing a "bounty" on something you would like to happen. Or capitalizing on one of these existing bounties because you're able to affect the result. It's a way to commodify power (and information of course, which is what these platforms bill themselves for), converting it into money, which can you can build further power with.
Any law or regulation has a freedom activists group against it. That's normal, any government has an oppression mechanism that enforces it's will. The whole "civilization" was born when people started restricting somebody's freedom in order to achieve some goals (e.g. water rationing in the Ancient Nile).
So it's not surprising someone would be against restricting gambling. The hard part is to how the gov should do it. But it's not government's job to please every single person.
Easy for the gov to do it: make hosting a gambling platform in the US illegal, make providing access to online gambling illegal, treat money earned from gambling services like money earned from narcotics trafficking, threaten to punish payment processors if they work with gambling providers, etc.
Online gambling was literally illegal in most of the US a decade ago, even on the modern post-social-media internet. You _could_ still do it by jumping through hoops like using a VPN to access foreign gambling sites, but you couldn't get it in the App Store on your iPhone, and you weren't spammed with ads for it every time you watch football.
It's not hard to imagine going back to that world; it wasn't that long ago.
Same goes for drugs, tobacco, alcohol etc. oh look how that ended up. There's a reason why Prohibition has been repealed in every major country that tried it.
Alcohol is older than recorded civilization, while online gambling has existed for about half of one human lifetime, and has been mainstream for less than a decade. We're watching the negative consequences play out in real time. This isn't prohibiting something innate to humanity; you could still go to a casino and gamble before DraftKings existed.
10 years ago I had some friends who were into online sports betting. It required getting a VPN, accessing offshore servers, signing up for sketchy websites, and linking an online bank account. It was enough hoops to jump through that the average person wouldn't bother. Back then I would have agreed with you: let the people play! But I'm only 33 and I've watched online gambling cripple peoples' lives in just the last few years. It's a huge problem and should be made illegal again. You should not be able to access it in one click from the App Store.
Just like all prohibitions, if you take away access to X, people will just find other (often illegal/dangerous) ways to do X. We can make gambling less convenient and push it back into the backroom poker rooms and illegal bookies who break peoples' legs, but it would be more effective to solve the problems of despair, desperation and hopelessness that are driving people to gambling in the first place. That's a lot harder, so here we are talking about bans.
Strange response, do you believe that society has always had access to online gambling, in the same way that alcohol and drugs have been around forever?
So where was this multi billion dollar industry before? This demand is highly elastic and new, which you cannot say about any of the others you mentioned.
alcohol prohibition has always been difficult because it's so tied into food and social culture. Tobacco use has been extremely successfully restricted, harder drugs and gambling also remain prohibited in many countries.
You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)
Even if you set aside the addiction issues, these gambling companies are duplicitous. They sell the illusion you can make money participating, when actually you are going to lose money in all liklihood. The business model is basically to be as fraudulent as they can get away with. Kalshi has its own twist — more of a platform to connect fraudsters with marks — but it’s just a way to provide a step of indirection to make it possible to get away with it.
Some people are comparing banning gambling to banning alcohol or tobacco.
Many of the ideas that later became the United States were discussed in a bar while drinking, the same cannot be said anywhere for solo gambling. Whether you like it or not, alcohol and tobacco are woven into the social order.
You should try looking up betting, coffee houses, and the 18th century, or the founding of the London stock exchange. Gambling plays more of a role than you might want to admit.
The elephant in the room that the article nor the comments address is the credit and debt culture in North America and lack of regulation around it.
Gambling is a bad addiction but the long term impact is much lower if you can't possibly spend more money in this addiction. How in hell can someone accumulate 75k$ of debt through credit cards and loans spent in gambling. No financial institution should be allowed to open a second credit card account or loan to someone who hasn't shown ability to timely reimburse its current debt.
What about investing on margin? We should introduce margin calls for credit cards. Owe more on credit cards than you have in the bank and you have to pay it all back at once.
I misread the title and thought it said he /founded/ Kalshi, which would have been a hell of a story. The actual title says "discovered", but I guess that doesn't quite fit for HN.
I hadn't heard this was a feature that you could self-exclude / ban yourself from the main apps. Interesting. I think the "he was banned" part is a bit misleading then.
> I hadn't heard this was a feature that you could self-exclude / ban yourself from the main apps.
The other way you can self-exclude or ban yourself from the traditional gambling apps is just win too often.
By definition if you use traditional (non-'market') gambling apps and aren't banned by the owners of them then you're statistically a loser or at best neutral over time.
If you were a winner over time they would ban you to stem their own losses. They are legally allowed to do this and do it all the time.
The loopholes discussed in the article 100% should be closed, making it easier for problem gamblers that want out to get out, but there will always be the convenience factor that will cause at least some damage. Ease of access also means ease of misuse unfortunately.
> She went on: "If you ask our millions of traders, they would emphatically tell you that an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model: our profits aren't tied to trader losses, so we don't have the same predatory incentives."
Really wish the author had pushed back more on this. They have different predatory incentives, benefitting from encouraging people to make a large number of slightly stupid bets rather than a smaller number of very stupid ones. I would love to hear Kalshi explain what non-predatory value the 15 minute crypto markets have.
You are mistaken. For every person making a "slightly stupid bet" there's another person who is making a "slightly smart bet". With Kalshi, they aren't the casino who encourage people to make a bunch of bets with negative EV. They are a marketplace that allows one smart person to make a bet with one dumb person (according to your parlance). As long as the markets are fair with no manipulation, things should balance out.
It's like the stock market, where there's always one buyer and one seller. The marketplace, ie. NYSE or Nasdaq for example, don't bias in any particular direction they just being one side together with the other.
They don't care whether the bets are stupid or informed. They don't make more money out of losers than they do out of winners, unlike traditional gambling platforms. (Though this in no way means that you have to like kalshi)
Maybe Kalshi doesn’t care about this, but if the goal is accurate predictions, prediction markets need someone to lose money to fund the sharps, or the markets won’t be big enough to be worthwhile.
In some traditional markets, a source of funding is investors who are hedging, essentially buying insurance.
KalshiEX, the platform, makes a bit more money from losers because they subsidize sophisticated winners through their market maker program.
Kalshi Trading LLC, the market maker which is fully owned by KalshiEX and has no independent online presence, makes money from losers in the same way as traditional gambling platforms. Kalshi's claims that this is an independent company are obviously absurd. (It's fair, I think, to say that the structure of the market limits their ability to make windfalls from severe mispricing.)
In no way is it better now that we have online gambling. The entire industry should be illegal and barred from participation in the traditional banking system.
Nowhere near solving cancer, but hey we got TikTok and Facebook and crypto and AI swarms and endless porn and gambling, and an increasingly radical, divided, depressed, and anxious humanity.
What does solving cancer mean? Stopping any and all mutations from happening? Seems like a pretty tall order.
I guess being able to scan each and every cell for the cancerous mutation is also a possible solution, but also a tall order.
It means being able to stop any uncontrolled cell replication.
I'll assume you're asking in good faith. You don't have to prevent mutations or scan every cell in the human body to "solve" cancer. You can:
- make detection easier and cheaper (e.g. with less invasive biopsies)
- make treatment easier and cheaper (e.g. more precise targeted treatments, making chemo a last resort instead of the only option)
Among other things. There's even emerging research that certain types of cancers could be "vaccinated" against: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02612-3
While I in no way support habitual gambling, the second you push for something like that, you will have a sizable group of "freedom activists" up in arms. More likely, I see it being more-heavily taxed to make it less appealing.
Even without the addiction problem, a business that allows you to bet on anything happening in society is bound to be the largest vehicle for corruption in the history of mankind. This is a threat to democracy and stability that actually undermines our freedom. Prediction markets should never have been allowed to exist, and if the US is willing to protect this industry, the rest of the free world should sanction it out of existence.
I share this perspective and hate the straw-man from pro-prediction-marketists that those opposed are moralists and puritans who can't accept that people like to bet on sports.
Prediction markets are a way of effectively placing a "bounty" on something you would like to happen. Or capitalizing on one of these existing bounties because you're able to affect the result. It's a way to commodify power (and information of course, which is what these platforms bill themselves for), converting it into money, which can you can build further power with.
Any law or regulation has a freedom activists group against it. That's normal, any government has an oppression mechanism that enforces it's will. The whole "civilization" was born when people started restricting somebody's freedom in order to achieve some goals (e.g. water rationing in the Ancient Nile).
So it's not surprising someone would be against restricting gambling. The hard part is to how the gov should do it. But it's not government's job to please every single person.
Easy for the gov to do it: make hosting a gambling platform in the US illegal, make providing access to online gambling illegal, treat money earned from gambling services like money earned from narcotics trafficking, threaten to punish payment processors if they work with gambling providers, etc.
Online gambling was literally illegal in most of the US a decade ago, even on the modern post-social-media internet. You _could_ still do it by jumping through hoops like using a VPN to access foreign gambling sites, but you couldn't get it in the App Store on your iPhone, and you weren't spammed with ads for it every time you watch football.
It's not hard to imagine going back to that world; it wasn't that long ago.
The problem about more-heavily taxed is that the gambling companies have spotted this and are registered in off shore tax havens.
Same goes for drugs, tobacco, alcohol etc. oh look how that ended up. There's a reason why Prohibition has been repealed in every major country that tried it.
Alcohol is older than recorded civilization, while online gambling has existed for about half of one human lifetime, and has been mainstream for less than a decade. We're watching the negative consequences play out in real time. This isn't prohibiting something innate to humanity; you could still go to a casino and gamble before DraftKings existed.
10 years ago I had some friends who were into online sports betting. It required getting a VPN, accessing offshore servers, signing up for sketchy websites, and linking an online bank account. It was enough hoops to jump through that the average person wouldn't bother. Back then I would have agreed with you: let the people play! But I'm only 33 and I've watched online gambling cripple peoples' lives in just the last few years. It's a huge problem and should be made illegal again. You should not be able to access it in one click from the App Store.
Just like all prohibitions, if you take away access to X, people will just find other (often illegal/dangerous) ways to do X. We can make gambling less convenient and push it back into the backroom poker rooms and illegal bookies who break peoples' legs, but it would be more effective to solve the problems of despair, desperation and hopelessness that are driving people to gambling in the first place. That's a lot harder, so here we are talking about bans.
Strange response, do you believe that society has always had access to online gambling, in the same way that alcohol and drugs have been around forever?
So where was this multi billion dollar industry before? This demand is highly elastic and new, which you cannot say about any of the others you mentioned.
alcohol prohibition has always been difficult because it's so tied into food and social culture. Tobacco use has been extremely successfully restricted, harder drugs and gambling also remain prohibited in many countries.
You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)
There aren't too many places where you can order beer from Amazon.
Even if you set aside the addiction issues, these gambling companies are duplicitous. They sell the illusion you can make money participating, when actually you are going to lose money in all liklihood. The business model is basically to be as fraudulent as they can get away with. Kalshi has its own twist — more of a platform to connect fraudsters with marks — but it’s just a way to provide a step of indirection to make it possible to get away with it.
Some people are comparing banning gambling to banning alcohol or tobacco.
Many of the ideas that later became the United States were discussed in a bar while drinking, the same cannot be said anywhere for solo gambling. Whether you like it or not, alcohol and tobacco are woven into the social order.
You should try looking up betting, coffee houses, and the 18th century, or the founding of the London stock exchange. Gambling plays more of a role than you might want to admit.
"Solo Gambling" vs "Social Gambling"
The elephant in the room that the article nor the comments address is the credit and debt culture in North America and lack of regulation around it.
Gambling is a bad addiction but the long term impact is much lower if you can't possibly spend more money in this addiction. How in hell can someone accumulate 75k$ of debt through credit cards and loans spent in gambling. No financial institution should be allowed to open a second credit card account or loan to someone who hasn't shown ability to timely reimburse its current debt.
What about investing on margin? We should introduce margin calls for credit cards. Owe more on credit cards than you have in the bank and you have to pay it all back at once.
(not being serious)
I misread the title and thought it said he /founded/ Kalshi, which would have been a hell of a story. The actual title says "discovered", but I guess that doesn't quite fit for HN.
Same.
Using https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html i got "He was banned by betting sites. Then he relapsed on Kalshi."
Websites often rotate titles now to improve their performance.
Before legal online gambling there was illegal online poker.
How much did legalization contribute to making it mainstream-casual? What about the ads?
I think it's time for a modern Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act which banned cigarette commercials on TV and radio starting January 1, 1971.
It's my opinion that gambling be reserved for Atlantic City (or your town). But legality aside, we ought to at least stop advertising it.
Kalshi, Polymarket and sports betting are a scourge.
I hadn't heard this was a feature that you could self-exclude / ban yourself from the main apps. Interesting. I think the "he was banned" part is a bit misleading then.
> I hadn't heard this was a feature that you could self-exclude / ban yourself from the main apps.
The other way you can self-exclude or ban yourself from the traditional gambling apps is just win too often.
By definition if you use traditional (non-'market') gambling apps and aren't banned by the owners of them then you're statistically a loser or at best neutral over time.
If you were a winner over time they would ban you to stem their own losses. They are legally allowed to do this and do it all the time.
No, if you won all the time they would use you to set odds. You'd be the single most valuable customer they have.
The loopholes discussed in the article 100% should be closed, making it easier for problem gamblers that want out to get out, but there will always be the convenience factor that will cause at least some damage. Ease of access also means ease of misuse unfortunately.
> She went on: "If you ask our millions of traders, they would emphatically tell you that an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model: our profits aren't tied to trader losses, so we don't have the same predatory incentives."
Really wish the author had pushed back more on this. They have different predatory incentives, benefitting from encouraging people to make a large number of slightly stupid bets rather than a smaller number of very stupid ones. I would love to hear Kalshi explain what non-predatory value the 15 minute crypto markets have.
You are mistaken. For every person making a "slightly stupid bet" there's another person who is making a "slightly smart bet". With Kalshi, they aren't the casino who encourage people to make a bunch of bets with negative EV. They are a marketplace that allows one smart person to make a bet with one dumb person (according to your parlance). As long as the markets are fair with no manipulation, things should balance out.
It's like the stock market, where there's always one buyer and one seller. The marketplace, ie. NYSE or Nasdaq for example, don't bias in any particular direction they just being one side together with the other.
They don't care whether the bets are stupid or informed. They don't make more money out of losers than they do out of winners, unlike traditional gambling platforms. (Though this in no way means that you have to like kalshi)
Maybe Kalshi doesn’t care about this, but if the goal is accurate predictions, prediction markets need someone to lose money to fund the sharps, or the markets won’t be big enough to be worthwhile.
In some traditional markets, a source of funding is investors who are hedging, essentially buying insurance.
KalshiEX, the platform, makes a bit more money from losers because they subsidize sophisticated winners through their market maker program.
Kalshi Trading LLC, the market maker which is fully owned by KalshiEX and has no independent online presence, makes money from losers in the same way as traditional gambling platforms. Kalshi's claims that this is an independent company are obviously absurd. (It's fair, I think, to say that the structure of the market limits their ability to make windfalls from severe mispricing.)
He wasn’t banned he banned himself from two websites and then found a third what a non-story.