I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.
I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
The U.S. is quite far behind the rest of the world on sports betting, which means you don’t even need to imagine, we know from other countries that it doesn’t end well. The most worrying aspect is, the current U.S. government has no interest in the regulations that have helped minimise the problems in other countries.
The U.K’s highest earner for a few years running was the founder of a U.K. betting site, she had something like a 500 million salary and there is an entire town’s economy supported by her business.
This was my experience trying out "traditional betting" for the first time with Betfair last Worldcup, and some other platform I tried out before as well. Not sure what Kalshi/others are doing that is so different?
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.
I read a book this year about sports gambling in the US [1], and it points out how nasty and predatory it is. I think "prediction markets" have even less regulation? I would talk to my sports fan buddies at work and they would say "oh, just how sportsbooks in Vegas operate already", but this is on-demand, in your face, constantly nudging you to bet with dark patterns and "comps". I used to want sports gambling legal in the US, but the way it has gone is incredibly disgusting and is starting to make watching sports almost annoying. The crawl on the bottom is no longer scores, but moneylines...
[1] "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling" (2026) by Danny Funt
I think you missed the point entirely.
All of these "prediction market" gambling platforms are actively predatory to their users, with very little (if any) regulatory oversight.
Based on the ad they are running during World Cup of the guy in the dentist office, they just don't care how/where money is spent as they just print money.
I have news for you. That burger is the McDonald's commercial? It's most likely made out of plastic. That happy lottery winner? Probably a stock photo from one of the major visuals providers. And I am ready to bet my bankers don't have this hollywood white teeth looking of banks commercials. Since when is advertising real?
All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
We should just make gambling illegal online again, things were fine back when you couldn’t gamble online then, at least in the USA, the fucking supreme corpo guzzlers (formerly the Supreme Court) interpreted the laws according to their owners will and now we have gambling online.
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.
Usually I agree with your calls on things being unsubstantive, but this one kinda seems fine? I don't think it's flame bait, just emotive language? And the substantive point being made is that online gambling should be illegal.
(apologies if arguing about mod decisions is frowned upon, I didn't see anything in the rules about it)
This comment was unnecessary and very distracting from a far more interesting discussion in the replies to the commenter you are attempting to condescend.
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. 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.
There wasn't some mass movement of people doing online gambling that led to the dam bursting and it getting legalized, though. Courts just made a different decision and opened it up one day and as far as I know there wasn't even mass lobbying about it?
>The Court announced a 7–2 judgment in favor of Murphy on May 14, 2018, reversing the Third Circuit.[25] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch and in part by Justice Stephen Breyer.[26][27][28] The majority opinion agreed that §§ 3701(1) of PASPA commandeered power from the states to regulate their own gambling industries and thus was unconstitutional. It followed New York v. United States and reversed the Third Circuit decision.
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
Most of their practice are illegal already. The problem is lack of enforcement.
We are not suing polymarket.
We are not suing the marketing company.
And we don't want online censorship.
IMO, the marketing company / media company should be sued. -- They are (relatively) easier target to sue. Many are US based and not going anywhere. With enough luck, this might give us a better internet with less SEO bullshit.
Just another hearty dividend thanks to corporate personhood and Citizen's United. Rarely has a single decision so thoroughly broken our system, but the regulatory capture is plain to see these days.
Would it matter if the bets were real and they picked the 0.00001% big winners to feature in the ad? Would that be less fraudulent in any meaningful sense, would it have a different impact on the world?
Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?
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.
I question your definitions. In what sense is it legally or morally useful to discriminate between lying with statistics and lying without them? It's an academically useful distinction, but why does it matter in practice? People are misled, the misleading is intentional, but if you hire a statistician to do it for you instead of an actor then you're A-Okay?
It's useful because honesty and dishonesty are strongly self-correlated. Someone who works hard to ensure their advertising is technically true will likely work hard towards technically satisfying other goals and rules we set for them; someone who's comfortable outright lying in their ads will likely also lie about other things.
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.
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.
I agree with your point in general, but doesn't that disclaimer apply to any kind of supplement? As far as I know that sort of thing has been allowed for quite some time. For whatever reason the FDA allows for an almost completely unregulated vitamin/supplement industry.
They used to be vague and not make specific claims because that wasn't allowed. They'd say "Vitamin K helps promote healthy eyes." They can't say "our chewable will cure your glaucoma. (claimhasnotbeenreviewedbytheFDA)"
But apparently they can do that now, or at least they are doing it.
It's not up to the FDA, their hands are tied thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah on behalf of the supplement lobby.
I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.
This is like a food commercial where someone shows an extreme reaction to food that isn't the product they're selling, or acting like they're eating something that isn't food at all. There are laws regarding food advertising that require it to present the real food (though the presentation of it is usually way better).
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
This industry is wild.
The U.K’s highest earner for a few years running was the founder of a U.K. betting site, she had something like a 500 million salary and there is an entire town’s economy supported by her business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet365
[1] "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling" (2026) by Danny Funt
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
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.)
(apologies if arguing about mod decisions is frowned upon, I didn't see anything in the rules about it)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
Note that it was not a close decision:
> Opinion of the Court
>The Court announced a 7–2 judgment in favor of Murphy on May 14, 2018, reversing the Third Circuit.[25] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch and in part by Justice Stephen Breyer.[26][27][28] The majority opinion agreed that §§ 3701(1) of PASPA commandeered power from the states to regulate their own gambling industries and thus was unconstitutional. It followed New York v. United States and reversed the Third Circuit decision.
Frankly, being able to buy drugs and alcohol online is probably a mistake, too.
It was almost certainly easier for most people to buy drugs than gamble illegally when both were illegal.
It was regulated.
We are not suing polymarket. We are not suing the marketing company. And we don't want online censorship.
IMO, the marketing company / media company should be sued. -- They are (relatively) easier target to sue. Many are US based and not going anywhere. With enough luck, this might give us a better internet with less SEO bullshit.
Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?
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.
Is this even a question? Yes, it would be less fraudulent.
"Celebrity X won" was not.
I am not a fan of gambling, nor gambling advertisements, but this was outright fraud, and a violation of FTC rules (https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...) on disclosure.
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.
But apparently they can do that now, or at least they are doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Supplement_Health_and_...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/31/6738513...
God I cant believe I wrote that
Do you think in a food commercial the people eating the product are showing their genuine emotion? It's all acting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html