Astro Hacker News - After bankruptcy, he was banned from sports betting sites. Then he found Kalshi

prmoustache |next [-]

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 how in hell can someone accumulate 75k$ of debt through credit cards en loans spent in gambling. No financial institution should be allowed to open a credit card account or loan to someone who hasn't shown ability to timely reimburse its current debt.

windows2020 |next |previous [-]

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.

flerchin |next |previous [-]

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.

talon8635 |root |parent |next [-]

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.

lotsofpulp |root |parent [-]

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.

daymanstep |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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 There's a reason why Prohibition has been repealed in every major country that tried it.

ericyd |root |parent |next [-]

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?

max__dev |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

Barrin92 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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...)

bryanlarsen |root |parent |previous [-]

There aren't too many places where you can order beer from Amazon.

tygon |root |parent |previous [-]

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.

soraminazuki |root |parent |next [-]

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.

Atreiden |root |parent [-]

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.

deepsun |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

pasc1878 |root |parent |previous [-]

The problem about more-heavily taxed is that the gambling companies have spotted this and are registered in off shore tax havens.

chris_money202 |next |previous [-]

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.

aardvark179 |root |parent [-]

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.

pimlottc |next |previous [-]

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.

gabrielsroka |root |parent [-]

Same.

Using https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html i got "He was banned by betting sites. Then he relapsed on Kalshi."

Schiendelman |root |parent [-]

Websites often rotate titles now to improve their performance.

cdrnsf |next |previous [-]

Kalshi, Polymarket and sports betting are a scourge.

mapmeld |next |previous [-]

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.

georgemcbay |root |parent [-]

> 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 much.

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. They are legally allowed to do this and do it all the time.

tygon |next |previous [-]

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.

bethekidyouwant |next |previous [-]

He wasn’t banned he banned himself from two websites and then found a third what a non-story.

SpicyLemonZest |previous [-]

> 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.

bvaldivielso |root |parent [-]

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)

SpicyLemonZest |root |parent |next [-]

[delayed]

skybrian |root |parent |previous [-]

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.