Addiction Markets
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The article discusses the rise of 'addiction markets' in the US, particularly in the context of sports betting and online gambling, sparking a heated debate on HN about the ethics and regulation of these industries.
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Coffeezilla: Exposing the Gambling Epidemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45773049 - October 2025
There is no convergence. They have always been the same thing. The difference is that you can provide a venue where harm is reduced or one where harm is maximised.
In the simplest case you might hold a stock and a put to limit your downside for a set period of time.
By contrast, sports gambling is well, gambling. And importantly as we've seen in a lot of reports - the big online sports books essentially freeze out anyone who is good so that they are collecting revenue primarily from the.. innumerate.
Of course you also have some markets like India without legal gambling and oversized derivatives markets that are unfortunately serving as a replacement.
I'd also point out that you don't see the sort of degenerate nonstop advertising for options punting that you see for sports gambling. "Thanks for tuning into the ESPN FanDuel pregame show at the Caesars Superdome / and don't forget to stop by the DraftKings Sportsbook lounge." Followed by a barrage of other gambling ads in between plays.
For commodities, the Futures demand delivery of the underlying. Options are settles in cash.
https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9015/901507.PDF, specifically page 94.
Also, IMO there is a big difference between an open market that allows for price discovery and free trading versus placing bets against the same casino at predetermined prices.
See prostitution.
Professional (and collegiate) athletics has always been corrupt - now it’s just more visible.
The only thing needing abolishing is the advertising of 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.
The exact same argument could be used to make social media illegal.
No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves. Socialise the losses.
You know I'm right here, if you have an actual rebuttal and not just dismissive hand-waving.
> No-one can use social media because some people in our society can't control themselves.
I think a lot of people would be measurably better off if not for social media that algorithmically fucks with their brains.
> Socialise the losses.
I mean that's kind of the point of a society yeah? We pool our efforts to enable greater labor specialization and to achieve things no individual can. Like an electrical grid or a highway system. And when parts of those systems break down, we all contribute a little to sorting them out.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2025/05/430011/yes-social-media-mi...
Limiting social media to be only used for communication, and not algorithms is a good thing.
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.
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 am not sure what you are saying with homelessness...it isn't some massive baffling issue, someone who doesn't have a house, needs a house so build a house? School shootings...I don't understand how anyone can believe this is normal?
The US has fairly obvious social problems, these essentially inhibit the functional resolution of most of these problems you list. However, gambling is not like this, the solution to problem gambling is (obviously) regulating gambling so that it is possible for the government to control people's behaviour. Simple.
Homelessness? Build houses. Drug addiction? Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing. School shootings? No guns. Violent extremism? Jail. These aren't real problems. Most of the world does not have issues with this stuff (I will accept through drug usage in the US appears to be so ingrained in culture, that it would never be possible for anyone to do anything to fix it...the solutions are known however). It is only over the last ten years or so where government has appeared totally unable to do anything because of paralyzing social discord.
> Build houses.
That doesn't solve homelessness, as we build many houses in America but they aren't being filled with the homeless. You need to apply social services in a complex systematic approach to provide housing that people can afford sustainably, and rehabilitate and integrate people into society. You might think that is a bit of a bad faith "gotcha" like, of course you have to make the housing free and ensure homeless people know it's available. But it's not a small detail to elide, even in context, and doing so is exactly why your thinking is off-base. You haven't even begun to unpack it properly, putting aside the falsehoods. Think about it, what do you do if someone doesn't want to accept the housing for complex reasons like pride or embarrassment? What if it's some crust punk kid riding suicide as a rite of passage? You have to deal with a lot of that! You can't just ignore it!
> Get people clean, harsh sentences for dealing.
Punitive measures have proven to be a complete and total failure globally. Even in Asia, where penalties on all sides of the drug trade are high, drug usage is very easy to find and rising. I say this as someone connected to Asia and with a fair amount of "street smarts" that some seem to lack. Japan and Korea don't even try to hide it anymore. Chinese cities are kept clean through a complex system of travel controls and consistent policing to sweep things under the rug. It's easy to score if you pass as Chinese outside of the tier 1 and 2 cities though. Even Saudi Arabia is flooded with black market drugs if you know where to look. Punitive measures empirically do not work.
> Violent extremism? Jail
Where is that not the case? Like what are you talking about? Do you know how common attempted domestic terrorism was against the US power grid and cell towers in 2020/2021? No, you don't. Almost nobody does, and certainly nobody has an exact number. That's because it was kept very quiet and the thousands of incidents were suppressed from the media cycle while the people involved were quietly thrown into the maximum security incarceration hole never to be seen again.
The person you're replying to is right. These issues are solved, and it means looking at why people want to do any of this to begin with and addressing that. You cut it off at the behavioral source. Think of it like this, do you check every pointer before you dereference it? No. You avoid bad pointer dereferences primarily through proper structure of your code.
You almost tap into this with being cognizant of the fact that it's not universal. It depends greatly on the country and culture. Because some countries and cultures have done a much better job at building worthwhile, healthy societies than others.
Where can I read more about this?
[1] - https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/23_Summer-A...
Who said it doesn't? How well do you understand the law of supply and demand when you don't know what a price floor is? Ignoring that, do you think someone on the street can afford even a $1000 home? That's before we set aside that this of course only works if the houses being built are being done in a way that actively encourages prices to go down, rather than feed real estate speculation and continue to float a culture that sees a home as a capital asset.
So no. Building houses alone does not solve homelessness, again as evidenced by the fact that houses are built all the time in America, and homelessness is not getting better. How did you miss that?
A school shooting happens. You don't want to ban guns. So you say "switzerland doesn't have this problem, we need to address the mental health issues that are driving these young men to kill" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing - which is what you wanted to begin with.
There are lots of rough sleepers. You don't want to build more houses. So you say "many homeless people are estranged from their support network by mental health issues and addiction, we need to address this underlying cause" as a distraction. Nobody's got a workable plan to do that, so you do nothing.
Using ideologically charged words like "corporate gambling" and "neoliberal origins" are fun ways to get the moral outrage going of market skeptics but they don't lead to good policy.
The boring answer is you need to look at how the owner of these instruments (since that's what most of these are) are making money. In the same way that a regulated exchange makes sure you're not dumping garbage onto order books, you need to make sure that the bets are fair and that there's generally positive EV. Prediction markets are a good example of this that isn't predatory but sports books are. Unfortunately this article, as is usual for most of the moral outrage genre, doesn't make this distinction.
There's always been gambling in my lifetime. There's been legal ones like Indian Casinos and Vegas. Then there's been the below board ones, the private blackjack games, the mahjong parlors in shady parts of town, lottery players (it's okay if the government profits off the losers I guess lol), etc
If this article were talking about banning sports books and adding in regulation around retail betting then sure that would be a fun discussion. But hyperbole like the article and your copious use of exclamation points doesn't inspire confidence.
If you're just targeting sports books I think other than the folks making money from the industry, you'll find few fans. They offer predatory parlays with often outright negative EV or very high variance returns. They kick sophisticated money out they can find edges. They leave no room for above board players like market makers providing liquidity through efficiency.
I think a better article and discussion could emerge from just tackling the harms of sports books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
In a couple decades, they'll be a massive drag on society and could even collapse countries. France is kind of a good example of how that future will look like.
Problem for you maybe. A life lived in fear is not worth living at all
Do you enable the majority who can manage risk, knowing some will be destroyed by it or deny it to everyone to protect the minority who can’t?
You should address that too, but gambling is frankly a parasitic business meant to exploit such people, and we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good by avoiding the re-abolishment of such a pernicious industry.
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.
The demand will always be there but there should be strong incentives to not incentivize use (e.g., the Purdue Pharma debacle). We're better served by having these markets addressed by legit players rather then criminal cartels.
I'm not sure what the best solution is, but unfettered promotion to consume is not the way.
Surely, like murder, and other negative outcome behaviors, we can reduce the occurrences, right?
Maybe a better law: check id, you are not allowed to take from any gambler more than 10 bets a year and no bet can be over 1k.
For big gamblers, we can have "qualified gamblers" rules like we do for qualified investors.
Funny how we don't let average people invest in some stuff but we let them gamble.
For offshore gambling pursue them aggressively if they serve US clients.
This is actually a take I haven't seen elsewhere. Yes, we do protect investors at least marginally better (lots of people still get fleeced with little recourse, unfortunately) but conceptually, this is a very interesting idea.
The fact that gambling exists on a loophole of being "for entertainment purposes only"[0] isn't a good enough distinction to me.
[0]: This is a brief one sentence summary of it. There's actually a bit of nuance involved depending on a number of factors, but essentially the core presume rests on some version of this.
I would hope that I don't need to explain why this isn't a good idea. But the one you may not have thought of: gambling companies love this because small companies are unable to audit, margins in the sector collapsed when activity moved online, that has stopped AND they are able to target customers who they don't want to deal with, before these rules it was difficult to identify customers who would take their money, now they have your passport, your address, your bank statements, they know where your money comes from (professional gamblers can still use beards but in the UK, students used to be very popular beards...that has stopped, regulators have also brought in rules to prevent beards being used as part of the changes above...the "neoliberal" US doesn't have rules anywhere close to this, it is complete madness).
I agree, giving up that much information to a third party, opens too many risks for me, and I don't want it to be standard.
However, I'm sure there is some middle ground here that isn't so violating to your privacy. Like mentioned before, having a default limit that can only be surpassed if you're willing to go through some form of qualification. The limit can be set in place without any audit required, if its low enough.
You realise that people waste their money on things that are significantly less understandable than gambling. Do you see someone driving a Ferrari and seethe with rage because Ferrari doesn't run a "qualified driver" program?
Either way, Ferrari is selling cars. Not dreams of riches.
Just fucking ban it.
Decriminalize low value bets between average people maybe but there's zero reason we need a gambling industry.
It is impossible for this industry to behave. Just kill it.
Your average Fent dealer isn't this predatory FFS
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.
The rise of gambling in the US does indicate an economic hopelessness that mirrors Argentina, but it’s not quite to the same level yet.
If I give out free dope, I'll get a lot of people hooked. If I give out free sports betting, but you get nothing, then nobody is hooked.
It’s similar to weed legalization 10 years ago. Yes, it’s now much less likely that your weed will be spiked with meth or you will be robbed by your dealer, but also like 1000% more of the population smokes weed now and it has some bad social side effects that people don’t like to think about.
I think in both cases, as with prohibition, making something commonplace illegal again tends to make people do crazy things if they’re addicted, and I’d bet gambling is no different
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
None of these companies should be worth a billion dollars.
My big fear is these companies are all getting rich which means they'll be able to buy political influence.
I'm pretty tolerant of a lot of vices. I also don't really have a problem with low levels of gambling. But the way these companies are setup is just sick. It's abusive the the public and erosive to society in general.
You can block it at payment rails. The reasonable amount of avoidance of controls around gambling laws is not zero [1]. You're making it hard for all but the most determined, who are free to lose it all.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... (Control-F "This extends beyond payments") Broadly speaking, we are not "solving" gambling with these ideas; we are, as a society and sociopolitical economic system, pulling levers to arrive at the intersection of harm reduction and rights impairment. Some gambling, but only so much, for most but not all.
(work in finance, risk management, fintech/payments, etc)
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
> if you need help making responsible choices, call…
Like, the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online. What do they even think we’re supposed to take away from that line of the commercial?
I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.
There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.
It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
Weed isn't just weed anymore, it's fruity pebbles flavored.
Porn isn't just porn anymore, it tries to talk like a person and build a parasocial relationship.
Video games aren't just video games anymore, they start embedding gambling mechanics and spending 2 years designing the "End of Match" screen in a way that funnels you into the next game or lootbox pull.
You need to stop somewhere. Tech + profit motives create an asymmetric war for people's attention and money that results in new forms of old vices that are superficially the same, but realistically much much worse.
Gambling specifically online might just be giving tech companies too many knobs that are too easy to tune under the umbrella of engagement and retention.
I agree, but:
> It feels like a bell curve topic, where the most naive people think you should just ban all vices and have a strictly better world, the middle of the road thinks it's all down to personal fortitude, and then people who know how the sausage is made realize the level of asymmetry that exists.
There's a wide gap in beliefs of the people who "know how the sausage is made" which is why I'm guessing you didn't ascribe a certain view to them.
Realistically, I think it breaks down into three camps:
1. They agree with the other end of the curve, and think the potential harm is too great.
2. They're in on profiting from it.
3. They are open to people being free to make decisions, but think there needs to be regulations on outright predatory behavior and active enforcement of them
I don't have a problem with anybody choosing to safely engage with recreational drugs, pornography, gambling, alcohol, and a number of other vices - humans have sought these activities out for an extremely long time, and outright banning them simply (as we have seen time and time again) leads to unregulated black markets that are more harmful to society as a whole. But it feels like we've done a complete 180 and now we have barely any regulation where it's needed, late-stage capitalism at its finest.
So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
They have different reasons for their disdain, but neither side tends to love it.
In general the more people learn about the process, the more they dislike the current system. There's outliers, but that's why the last decade has mostly been a decline in general sentiment around big tech, and even in the last year AI doomerism is going increasingly mainstream.
Even the people who make these experiences don't do it beliving they're making something enriching. And they're definitely are not clamoring for their own families to grow up on this stuff.
> So many states have put ID verification laws out for accessing pornography, exposing citizens to huge privacy risks in the process, but we've got casino empires draining their savings accounts and can't do anything about it? Please.
That's driven by politicians pandering to the naive side of the bell curve, why are you surprised it's not consistent with what's best for the people?.
Their actions are driven mostly by what looks good at the polls and doesn't hurt their own bottom line too badly.
States are raking in billions of dollars in taxes from gambling, so it's not going to get that treatment.
This is why I have a huge problem with the recent development of online gambling outlets that you can access via your smartphone. In the past you had to go somewhere to gamble, it was a physical act that provided a barrier to entry. Now? You don't even need to think about it, your bank account is already linked, just spend away!
Personally, I'd rather states loosen laws and allow physical casinos be built and properly regulated than be in the current situation we have with these poorly regulated online money-siphons.
https://youtu.be/XZvXWVztJoY?si=to8qYcXuBT2xAaIz
That's the house making sure that the house are always the winner.
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download
I agree there’s a some sort of gray area here, but it feels awfully narrow… especially with the recent sports betting companies.
But chances are that the original commenter was really using language in a more colloquial way, the way someone might say "the only responsible choice is not to use drugs". Someone saying that isn't making a statement that "no person ever, under any circumstance, can ever benefit from consuming any drug".
It's not an absolutist statement, but you are choosing to interpret it that way so that you can construct a response based on semantic pedantry.
Goalposts built around strawmen are almost designed to be shifted.
Sports betting companies structure their odds and order books to disadvantage most bettors. There are plenty of markets where that isn't the case.
The way I resolve this is “What if everyone did what I did?”. The restaurants would obviously have to change. I figure the type of demand I create is more powerful than how they might use the profit.
I think the same thing applies here. If everyone only gambled responsibly, these companies would all be in the responsible gambling business.
At the same time, I think sports gambling has completely gotten out of control and needs to be more regulated. More advertising regulation seems like a good place to start.
The stakes probably aren’t as high in mobile, but it’s otherwise the same dance.
"The proportion of Connecticut gambling revenue from the 1.8% of people with gambling problems ranges from 12.4% for lottery products to 51.0% for sports betting, and is 21.5% for all legalized gambling."
Without going into details, I do have some ability to check if these numbers actually "make sense" against real operator data. Will try to sense-check if the data I have access to, roughly aligns with this or not.
- the "1.8% of people" being problem gamblers does seem roughly correct, per my own experience
- but those same 1.8% being responsible for 51% of sportsbook revenue, does not align with my intuition (which could be wrong! hence why I want to check further...)
- it is absolutely true that sportsbooks have whales/VIPs/whatever-you-call-them, and the general business model is indeed one of those shapes where <10% of the customers account for >50% of the revenue (using very round imprecise numbers), but I still don't think you can attribute 51% to purely the "problem gamblers" (unless you're using a non-standard definition of problem-gambler maybe?)
- Yes, you can find certain slices of 1.8% of customers, that would represent 50%+ of revenue... But this is usually pretty close to simply listing out the top 1.8% of all accounts by spend
- Therefore, to support the original claim, one would essentially have to definitionally accept that nearly all of the top revenue accounts are "problem gamblers" and almost no one else is... But this doesn't pass a basic smell test, because population wise there are more "poor" problem-gamblers than there are "rich" ones, because there are a lot more poor people in general than rich ones, so it's very unlikely that nearly all of the 1.8% of total population problem gamblers also happen to overlap so much with the top 1.8% customer accounts by revenue.
What name do we give “the guy who says it’s fine to tear down Chestertons fence” ?
A person can be generally responsible while still making decisions that are irresponsible. Gambling has a negative expected value, and so is generally considered to be irresponsible. Gamblers will often counter that they expect to lose their money and consider it to be a form of entertainment, but the whole of the entertainment is in believing that you might get lucky; this is indistinguishable from the motivation of a gambling addict. You don’t see these people taking out $500 in 1s and setting them on fire for fun, even though this is the aggregate outcome of habitual gambling.
Some might protest that all forms of entertainment are like this: You take the $500, take it to a movie theater, and 16 hours later your money is gone and you’ve seen 10 movies. So far as I know, the identification of casual gambling with vice dates back to the Victorian Period. I suspect (but cannot confirm) that the reason gambling was identified as a vice where other forms of comparatively frivolous entertainment were not is due to gambling’s (false) promise of providing money for nothing.
Subscribing to Netflix has a negative expected value.
Ban Netflix.
Restaurants are immoral too since think of the negative health consequences they cause exploiting this situation with their addictive substances. They even put more butter than necessary in the food to make it more addictive.
The wait staff treated literally like servants.
"We should ban everything besides things I personally find enjoyable"
Every streaming service you subscribe to has a negative expected value.
It was you who brought "degenerate" into it, as if throwing an insult or not made difference in facts.
Also, yes, gamblers hide their addiction. That is normal for gambler and you wont know it. They can be likable people and calling them "degenerate" just makes seeking help harder.
Not at all. First, yes, people should be free to make their own choices. But that means making free choices. Just as we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes, we shouldn’t allow advertising for gambling.
Second, there’s a world of difference between “hey, let’s go have a crazy weekend in Vegas” and “I have a blackjack dealer live on my phone 24x7.”
It's a net negative for society but we can't simply get rid of it because of the side effect of doing so, particularly since it's so easy to brew alcohol.
(More apt comparison is obviously alcohol commercials saying “please drink responsibly”)
Casinos and gambling institutions absolutely and purposely optimize to attract and capture more problem gamblers.
The evolution of digital slots is a great example of this. An average person could have a little fun with an old fashioned basic slot machine, but the modern ones are so aggressively optimized to trigger addiction and keep addicts going that if you aren't vulnerable, they are massively offputting.
But they don't care, they don't have any desire to serve "Normal" people, and trying to make gambling more fun for people who aren't vulnerable to gambling addiction isn't something they do.
Because nearly all profit comes from addicts.
I've thought of this often, seeing the state of mobile games. Not fun--they barely have strategy, little choice, and so much copy-cat gambling-machine mechanics.
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.
Neither accessibility or advertising impacts rates of addiction. It is a real addiction. Does a lack of advertising stop heroin use? Behave.
Additionally, the curtailment of cigarette advertising wasn't because it was understood to be bad, it was because a bunch of politicians found it to be politically beneficial to "do something" so they threw everything at the wall. Increased taxes, counter advertisement, advertising bans, smoking bans in certain places, required packaging, etc. Who knows what actually worked, if any of it did.
We're seeing a big decline in alcohol consumption right now in younger generations right now and none of those things were done to cause it.
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...
Because this practice was made legal very recently in most places in the US and a concomitant advertising boom has saturated the media. Before the last few years, your average American couldn't bet on sports without visiting a casino sports book in person, or having a bookie (i.e., entering into a risky relationship with organized crime). TV sports coverage now openly refers to how you can use their analysis to make bets.
"The Five Families - the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese - have ruled the city's Italian American mafia since 1931."
"The Five Families are part of the larger American-Sicilian mafia operation known as La Cosa Nostra"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpv1rkxjyyno
It's being said because the Five Families was erroneously conflated with Cosa Nostra in the original press conference by one of the representatives of law enforcement.
Gambling is the chance to have nothing at the end.
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