I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the “it’ll just go underground” claim seems silly. The negative effects of driving a gambling market to the economic fringe are already happening in the mainstream market: fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.

What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?

You don't need to "try to ban it", you ban it.

If your argument is "people are going to bet and influence world events on the dark web", the argument ignores economics.

The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to access and liquidity is small.

E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to influence the events at the same time, let alone how complex would such a system be.

Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the only way paying out these bets at scale is possible.

"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.

>"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.

But don't you think that will be the "good" majority? And the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?

With way, way less money involved. Hence limiting the reach and power of this minority.

Yes, makes sense.

But may be there is also an upside. May be it would actually cause the people to take notice of what is going on around them and actually starting to use their brains (to make predictions) instead of simply consuming 24x7 news.

I'd rather them playing chess or hell, Pokémon. Or reading books.

But money is a lot better motivator that is also universal.

Yeah, clearly it makes you FIGHT the news

> the "bad" minority will continue using the underground version?

…which they already did before this market was made mainstream.