I have taken money out of Polymarket and it is quick and easy.

Off-ramp does exist. Stop lying.

on-ramp and off-ramp were the problems of the past. Thanks to Trump, both worlds have merged together now.

The off-ramp of nearly all of my crypto endeavors has been very easy in my experience. Not always simple, because a lot of parts of moving money on various crypto chains is unintuitive and well in-need of improvement, but definitely easy once you know what to do.

The most annoying part, somewhat surprisingly, is always with regards to United States KYC restrictions. I've had a fair bit of annoyance trying to move crypto off of services that were once accessible to US customers and no longer are.

It is, and I know someone who found that out the hard way during the Super Bowl.

They pretend they are "market" and not gambling to avoid regulations.

If you're going to gamble, it's probably for the best that your counterparty doesn't also control the platform. I'm not saying that justifies being able to gamble frictionlessly, but it is marginally less exploitative. Eg, back in the day bucket shops (which sold binary options, like prediction markets do) would increase the spread in proportion to their assessment of your skill such that you would lose even if you were more skilled. In a proper market the platform makes the same amount of money whoever wins.

So, not all that different, but marginally less exploitative. I've never looked at Polymarket but Kalshi and PredictIt slid steadily from things of at least plausible real economic value (a market where it was conceivable [if unlikely] someone would be hedging their insurance contract or something) into total nonsense with no non-gambling function like whether someone would tweet a certain word.

I think prediction markets could serve a similar to a futures markets and have a functional purpose in the economy. It could be useful to generate real time estimates of the probability of some events that no one can control and have real economic consequences, like a hurricane. But evidently that's not where the money is.

A bit of a tangent, but many like the moneylines isn't because of gambling but because it tells you who's the favorite/underdog and by what margin. It's like in the equivalent of a chess game of knowing the player's ratings, which itself can directly lead to a nominal moneyline, but in most sports there's no formal predictive rating system.

Predictions markets are more regulated than sports betting, because the events being predicted are wider, so they will naturally touch on a whole lot more regulation.

For example, can someone place a bet on an event that X person will be shot? That question now touches on a whole range of laws regarding murder, life insurance, incitation to violence, free speech? That you just don't touch at all in sports betting.

I personally never met her but Bet365 is one of the most protected sites on the internet when it comes to antibot protections. When I started my company in 2025, I had two customers from UK, they were very much interested in odds for horse races from bet365, mostly realtime. Bet365 knew I was coming for them.

They call it 'onramping'. Moonpay is a big one, coinbase has one, onramper is another. Basically Applepay / credit card -> ETH or SOL or USDC, etc, then lose away!

Back in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.

There are really only two businesses in the modern economy, fraud and gambling. Some are both.

A lot of it is straight up sponsored by card makers too

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(p.s. Just to pre-empt the usual: no, this is not a defense of Big Gambling, just an attempted defense of HN thread quality.)

Exactly. Gambling in the real world involved friction. That plus a certain social stigma if you gambled outside of “mainstream” casinos.

And this helped weed out all but the most addicted gamblers. Now there is no friction, the platforms are free to create dark patterns to encourage problem gambling, and the vice has zero social cost.

The court ruling was a good one, and anticipated. The federal government can either allow all gambling, or ban it all. They can’t pick and choose states where it may be allowed.

Exactly. The corruption and rot is beyond the pale.

Probation was a thing, too. How did that turn out?

> and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform

We have that in the Netherlands and we do it massively for every World Cup and Euro. The app my friend groups are on, Scorito, has 1.5 million competitors for the current WC, in the country of 18 million, and that's not the only app.

Normally a group would make a small buy in, like €5, where the winner takes all, but this year the legal department at work forbade that, se that sort of gambling Is actual illegal.

I'd do something fairly similarly, but in a sort of emotional hedge. If in a fight I was really rooting for one guy, I'd put a relatively small amount of money on the other. Ok 'my guy' lost, but hey - dinner's free tonight! It's also quite remarkable how often arbitrage opportunities come up where you can put bets on both sides with a guaranteed win. You'd think they'd all get eaten up by bots, but that's not at all the case.

make this severely illegal with minimum two decades behind bars and what how they disappear… this is a very solvable problem which no one wants to solve

we prevent people from gambling on early stage startups and risky investments by limiting investment to "accredited investors". same thing should apply to gambling.

Citizens United gets a lot of flak, and it wasn't good, but it's far from the only factor here. We can at least go back to Buckley v. Valeo which gave us the idea that "money is speech". Corporations are a problem, but money is a bigger problem.

No. There are still people and companies being proud of their work and not doing it only for the money side. I know, shocking..

Yeah. It's so demoralizing, seeing all these people make fortunes while honest people scrape by. It feels like getting in on the grift is the only way to make it.

you may be confusing it with deregulation.

In the US, the FTC is very clear that faking or purchasing testimonials is illegal. Fabricating, purchasing, or misrepresenting customer experience is deceptive advertising and is a form of fraud. On the other hand, selecting and advertising specific real testimonials is fine. A customer described their actual experience that way, and presumably the consumers understand that advertisers will select especially positive individual testimonials for their advertisements. I can't believe I'm actually trying to explain this, but fake testimonials are illegal because the consumer has no way to know that they are made up. Real testimonials are not "lying with statistics", they're not statistics at all, and are legal because consumers can understand that it's not the median customer experience.

If picking real winners and real winnings to feature in the ad was just as good, they could do that. If not, then yes, it makes an impact on the world to mislead people with that marketing.

Somehow there's a difference between things that happened and didn't happen, and that's a good place to draw a line in the sand of what you're allowed to advertise and not.

> Would that be less fraudulent…

Is this even a question? Yes, it would be less fraudulent.

Is fraud "more fraudulent" than non-fraud? Yes. Wtf man?

I was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad.

There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging."

Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA.

So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.

You are promoting gambling to young people, easily manipulated.

That's why you see so many college boy on their marketing video.

It's completely fine when you're old enough to be responsible, and to know that gambling is a degenerate behavior that you can allow yourself sometimes to release the steam, but these companies don't make money from us.

They make money from the kids overspending because they are convinced they are going to get rich doing that. That's manipulation.

It would be like showing McDonald ads to starving African kids, of course they are going to make the wrong choice when offered food. They can't think rationally in that state.

Personal responsibility is an excuse for lazy regulation. These things are designed to be harmful, for the express purpose of squeezing money out of people, as efficiently as possible. We know that some people are psychologically and genetically more prone to addiction than others, and that people like that will be extremely likely to form addictions with gambling or drugs when we make those things easy to access.

What would you rather have? More regulated gambling and less addicts, or unregulated gambling and more addicts? Personally, I prefer the former.

> Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?

Honestly, calling it "personal responsibility" when a powerful group is actively working to exploit that flaw seems a little weird. But even accepting that, we outlaw plenty of things because we think society isn't currently responsible enough to handle them.