Gambling seems to have become absolutely rampant in the last 10 years. Between loot boxes in games, (e)sports gambling, crypto, online gambling sites, and an increasing number of unregulated gambling services as well it's crazy how widespread it is now. I don't know what to make of it.<p>As an industry, gambling doesn't really produce anything. It <i>is</i> a form entertainment, but a very expensive one for the consumer relative to something like movies. It can also be extremely exploitative. The information imbalance between the consumer and provider is massive and there's a whole industry around innovating new ways to make gambling more appealing and profitable.
It's utterly incomprehensible to me that networks are allowed to advertise and then insert gambling content into their broadcasts... you think we would have learned our lesson with cigarette ads. And the saddest part, when I see Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time, who can't possibly need the money shilling BetMGM, my heart breaks
Pay enough money to politicians and you can make anything legal or be swept under the rug. The Sacklers pushed opiates on millions of Americans, knowing how addictive and deadly they were. Thousands (millions?) died and the Sacklers just paid some hush money in fines and it was all swept under the rug.
It's amazing that sports betting is legalized almost everywhere in the US, and legitimate skill-based games like BigBrain, PlayVS, and others aren't.<p>Sports betting is the ultimate second-person game; no individual bettor is the one throwing the football. But somehow, I guess on the back of lobbyists, that's more acceptable than first-person games of skill. It's ridiculous.
Most kinds of gambling are praying on the weak and vulnerable. I'm normally not for regulating vices, but I also don't see how you can allow it.
The issue, which is similar to how alcohol is mis regulated, is that the legislatures machines returns either to the states general funds (ny) or to the companies and their lobbyists and politicians (ks)<p>They should have maximized happiness of the users by limiting the pace at which money could be lost, and the odds/ spreads at which it was lost
So I wrote and launched a Bitcoin casino/poker site - started privately in 2008 and launched in BTC back in 2011, long before BTC was considered currency, but I still blocked everyone from my home country (the US) out of a very conservative reading of federal and state laws around the definitions of "game of chance" and "thing of value". I figured it would be legalized one day but only for massive corporations that could buy enough government officials. I thought I could bootstrap my way into it.<p>That wasn't my big eye-opener on this type of corruption, though. I used my little casino as a testbed for dozens of original card games, slot games, and multiplayer games, many of which had adjustable odds that could be set anywhere from pari-mutuel to a specific house rake over time. I spent a lot of time presenting videos and demos to Indian tribes and cruise lines and individual Vegas casinos with the idea of having the online casino work on their premises, i.e. in the hotel rooms. The issues in the way were many, and mostly regulatory. For instance, in Vegas, casino floor square footage is taxed and regulated in a certain way, and off-floor gaming isn't allowed. On the floor, wifi coverage for gaming-connected systems is charted by heat maps and any system connected to the monetized network has to go through extremely expensive ongoing code / hardware testing conducted by the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB). Mostly at the casino's expense. So even though it was a novel concept at the time to let people join satellites of real poker tournaments on their phones while they were at the casino bar, the casinos figured they would hold off until a provider with deep pockets came along.<p>So then I had the idea of just licensing my original slots and card games. I had all the statistical analyses worked out and playable versions that were already in use with tons of real world data. Sure, said the NGCB. That'll be $500,000 per review of each game variant before you can shop it to casinos. The cost of each review is nonrefundable if it doesn't pass, and the review process takes a year, and there's a 2-3 year backlog because Bally puts out tons of games we have to review.<p>Not exactly possible for a lone coder making a modest sum from running a Bitcoin casino that has to lock out one country after another.<p>It was clear to me that sooner or later, once they figured out a way to exclude tech-side competitors with a history of software gaming from the market, (Galewind, Microgaming, et al - not that any of them are very clean) the powers that be in the US would find a way to reward those lucrative contracts to their buddies and/or whoever paid top dollar under the table.<p>I ran [edit] provably fair games and published every result. But I never encountered a gaming regulatory body from Isle of Man to Costa Rica to Nevada that wasn't crooked as all get-out. Then again, show me an economic field of supposedly questionable morality that hasn't developed a parasitic class of bureaucrats to grift off people's desire to access it.
One fun bit of hypocrisy here is Twitch banned all the bitcoin casino sites from being streamed after a scandal, but they have a huge sports betting contract so that's still a ok.
Yes they recently legalised sports betting in the Netherlands. Didn't have much choice though all the money was going to Malta. At least now it can be taxed!
What sickens me is that in New York, sports gambling, lottery and horse racing are all fully legal, advertised and endorsed (and in the case of lottery, directly controlled) by the state, but it is still illegal to play online poker.
<a href="https://archive.ph/5dEFc" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/5dEFc</a><p>Another reminder that the US is not a normal liberal democracy. It is a very corrupt pseudo-democracy whose extreme wealth lets it have a higher level of development than other countries to which that description applies.
It baffles me that a lot of this website is positive of drug legalization, but gambling is suddenly completely morally awful and the government should not allow anyone to do it because they know what's good for you.