After bankruptcy, he was banned from sports betting sites. Then he found Kalshi (npr.org)
41 points by momentmaker 2 hours ago
flerchin an hour ago
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.
talon8635 39 minutes ago
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.
daymanstep 38 minutes ago
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 There's a reason why Prohibition has been repealed in every major country that tried it.
ericyd 31 minutes ago
Strange response, do you believe that society has always had access to online gambling, in the same way that alcohol and drugs have been around forever?
Barrin92 7 minutes ago
alcohol prohibition has always been difficult because it's so tied into food and social culture. Tobacco use has been extremely successfully restricted, harder drugs and gambling also remain prohibited in many countries.
You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)
bryanlarsen 31 minutes ago
There aren't too many places where you can order beer from Amazon.
tygon an hour ago
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.
soraminazuki 16 minutes ago
Even without the addiction problem, a business that allows you to bet on anything happening in society is bound to be the largest vehicle for corruption in the history of mankind. This is a threat to democracy and stability that actually undermines our freedom. Prediction markets should never have been allowed to exist, and if the US is willing to protect this industry, the rest of the free world should sanction it out of existence.
Atreiden a minute ago
pasc1878 21 minutes ago
The problem about more-heavily taxed is that the gambling companies have spotted this and are registered in off shore tax havens.
cdrnsf 2 minutes ago
Kalshi, Polymarket and sports betting are a scourge.
bethekidyouwant 2 minutes ago
He wasn’t banned he banned himself from two websites and then found a third what a non-story.
pimlottc 2 hours ago
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.
gabrielsroka an hour ago
Same.
Using https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html i got "He was banned by betting sites. Then he relapsed on Kalshi."
Schiendelman 24 minutes ago
Websites often rotate titles now to improve their performance.
mapmeld an hour ago
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.
tygon an hour ago
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.
SpicyLemonZest 44 minutes ago
> 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.
bvaldivielso 36 minutes ago
They don't care whether the bets are stupid or informed. They don't make more money out of losers than they do out of winners, unlike traditional gambling platforms. (Though this in no way means that you have to like kalshi)
skybrian 7 minutes ago
Maybe Kalshi doesn’t care about this, but if the goal is accurate predictions, prediction markets need someone to lose money to fund the sharps, or the markets won’t be big enough to be worthwhile.
In some traditional markets, a source of funding is investors who are hedging, essentially buying insurance.