How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
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.
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 the long term impact is much lower if you can't possibly spend more money in this addiction. How in hell can someone accumulate 75k$ of debt through credit cards and loans spent in gambling. No financial institution should be allowed to open a second credit card account or loan to someone who hasn't shown ability to timely reimburse its current debt.
> 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.
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.
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.
Even if you set aside the addiction issues, these gambling companies are duplicitous. They sell the illusion you can make money participating, when actually you are going to lose money in all liklihood. The business model is basically to be as fraudulent as they can get away with. Kalshi has its own twist — more of a platform to connect fraudsters with marks — but it’s just a way to provide a step of indirection to make it possible to get away with it.
US bankruptcy laws are not punitive enough. After bankruptcy, he should not have been allowed to gamble, anywhere. The US needs something like China's
"high level consumption restriction", which can be imposed on people in financial trouble.[1] Companies, too, in which case it applies to executives as individuals.
Prohibited:
- Travel: No air travel; limited high-speed rail. Can still take the slow green trains, but only in the lower-class coaches.
- Lodging & leisure: No stays in star-rated hotels, nightclubs, golf courses, or other luxury venues. Yes, no golf. No gambling visits to Macau, either. Within China, gambling is already prohibited.
- Property & business: No purchase of real estate; no leasing high-end offices/hotels; no luxury vehicle purchases.
- Education & insurance: No enrollment of children in high-cost private schools.
China can make this work because everything runs on the official government ID card, and the database of who's on consumption restriction is tied to that.
with respect, fuck no. Bankruptcy should be less consequential. A lender or creditor should rely on their own measure of creditworthiness to determine who to lend to, not rely on a borrower’s fear of the state. The punitive nature of bankruptcy served a purpose decades ago but nowadays it is not needed. A lot of creditors nowadays don’t even bother pursuing debts, instead focusing on better checks upfront, hence so much debt being sold for pennies on the dollar. Making bankruptcy catastrophic would give creditors the wrong incentives.
Agreed on the credit side. Lenders already price risk, that's their whole job. But a gambling ban enforced by who, exactly? Every book has a different signup flow. It'll leak on day one, and nobody finds out until the person's already in the hole again.
The article's whole point is that the ban list didn't work. He was blocked from the sportsbooks, but Kalshi is a CFTC-registered exchange, so state self-exclusion programs don't touch it. Even a total ban would need someone to decide what counts as gambling, and these platforms have spent years arguing they're not.
It is not a crime to be unable to pay your debts, therefore your rights cannot be infringed for ending up in such a state. Debts, especially those to private entities, are a civil matter.
Restricting air travel would be an attack on an American's freedom of movement, a right enshrined in our Constitution.
Restriction on doing business with whomever is willing to do business with them would be an attack on an American's freedom of association, which is likewise enshrined in the very first ammendment of our Bill of Rights.
Any US politician who offered up such an outrageous attack on the Constitution would deserve nothing short of death for their utter betrayal of the trust placed in them by the American people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Repeal didn't mean unrestricted, though. Alcohol and tobacco are taxed, age-gated, and limited on advertising and sale hours, and as far as I know the evidence suggests those measures cut consumption. The complaint with apps like Kalshi is mostly that they have none of that, so "regulate it" and "prohibit it" are different arguments.
If you're trying to get out, the self-exclusion lists only cover licensed sportsbooks, so Kalshi sails right past them. What worked for a friend of mine was handing the card controls to someone else. Gambling-merchant blocks at the bank, plus a second person holding the login to the account. It's clunky, but it helped more than willpower did.
