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
In any case, my point was that simply making something illegal with the threat of "decades in prison" isn't a very good solution. Gambling, drugs, social media, etc. are all "big business", there's money to be made because there's a demand for it. How to solve that I don't know, but just prohibiting it doesn't seem like a good fix.
What about this: that policy was huge success, because unlike gambling, weed is fairly harmless.
Close to 18 million in 2022, not exactly 20 million.
The world has 22 million of people who are addicted and their lives are negatively impacted. The logical implication here is that these people are not negatively impacted.
Demand for cannabis and alcohol is ubiquitous, strong.
Demand for each individual betting market, diminishingly rare.
Good luck finding the bookie at work or in your college class taking $10k in action on whether the Shah of Iran is still the Shah next week…
Banning the clearnet-based convenience, scale and breadth of market participants these services offer would immediately put a huge dent in most markets - non-sport especially.
Whether the black market and cryptocurrency-based sites outside of the clearnet would start to fill in, remains to be seen.
There has never been anything near the scale of Poly or Kalshi on “darkweb”.
Also the operator is completely legal/compliant with it's jurisdictions laws as they allow us players (many now blacklist the us, but some not )
So they won't accept any foreign judgement . That's why most countries rather target their infrastructure (psps/banking etc ..)
Even Eu countries had/have severe problems with Malta (due e.g Article 56A of the malta gaming act, which shields the operator from foreign judgements)
If you really want to crack down on it, then it could be done.