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Addiction Markets

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21–30 of 479 posts

Re: Addiction Markets

#21

I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. It might be something we should treat more like smoking. - Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5. - Ad targeting restrictions.

> people will just use some offshore website instead

No they won't, because moving real money to and from these shady offshore websites is a nightmare, and without enforcement there will be too much fraud in the system for the vast majority of regular people to bother.

Gambling is so prevalent today because 1) there is incessant advertising, including being overlaid on the game you are watching and 2) it is convenient, taking like 3 clicks and under a minute to go from scratch to placing bets. You can even use Apple Pay. Take away either of these and participation rates will plummet.

You don't even need to speculate, just look at the numbers. There were countless illegal and gray market gambling options available a decade ago, both online and in-person. How many people were participating back then? I personally didn't know anyone who bet on games outside of maybe the occasional trip to Vegas, and that too was just for the novelty of it. Today >50% of adults in the US are regularly betting online, and the number is growing every year.

Re: Addiction Markets

#22

> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling. No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.

>> addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.

Fuck yeah let's do it.

Re: Addiction Markets

#23

The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion. These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.

Well, sure, but it is unlikely that we can fix the underlying problem: the science of psychology is not advanced enough.

Re: Addiction Markets

#24

Related: Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025

Great video. The convergence between traditional stock market finance and casino gambling is going to seriously scar a generation.

Re: Addiction Markets

#25

I don't think you can kill corporate run gambling - people will just use some offshore website instead. It might be something we should treat more like smoking. - Require a disclosure of the EV of each bet as the user is placing it. E.g.: Expected loss $5. - Ad targeting restrictions.

Even in your comment you can see the challenge with education and gambling. In practice the return on a dollar (just a different formulation of EV) is often legally mandated to be something around 0.9 and for many games is very close to fair.

But variance, not expectation, is where casinos get their edge. The “Gambler’s ruin”[0] demonstrates that even in a fair game the Casino will win due to their effectively infinite bankroll compared to the player.

You can also simulate this yourself in code: have multiple players with small bankrolls play a game with positive EV but very high variance. You’ll find that the majority of players still lose all their money to the casino.

You can also see this intuitively: Imagine a game with a 1 in a million chance to win 2 million dollars, but each player only has a $10 bankroll. You can easily see that a thousand people could play this game and the house would still come out ahead despite the EV being very much in the players favor.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_ruin

Re: Addiction Markets

#26
I don’t have an overly paternalistic view of the government. I’m rather libertarian in that regard. But is it too much to ask that we place some guardrails on things that are know to have trouble with? Smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.

I certainly feel that people should be able to do it if they really want to, but making it super accessible and highly advertised seems like a bad idea.

Re: Addiction Markets

#27

The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion. These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.

Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully?

Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.

Re: Addiction Markets

#28
There has recently been many looks at the epidemic in gambling. Wonder how all of the focus seem to happen at the same time

Off the top of my head:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/great-bri...

https://kyla.substack.com/p/gamblemerica-how-sports-betting-...

https://www.ft.com/content/e80df917-2af7-4a37-b9af-55d23f941...

https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/the-lottery-fication-of-ev...

https://www.investors.com/news/investing-gambling-robinhood-...

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-premier-league-footb...

https://www.ft.com/content/a39d0a2e-950c-4a54-b339-4784f7892...

Re: Addiction Markets

#29

The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion. These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.

Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully? Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.

I'm an optimist at heart, but this subject is dear to me, and my opinion may seem pessimistic: the short answer is, no, it cannot be fixed at any large scale, at least not in a lifetime.

Re: Addiction Markets

#30
People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.

All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.

The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.

And before anyone asks, yes, my username is based after this $2 card. https://edhrec.com/commanders/nekusar-the-mindrazer

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