Best wishes for your studies and the rest.

That was my hope, that the US DOJ and the US Treasury does not enforce the anti-Internet Gambling law against TradeSports-InTrade. But, as I wrote, to be sure, we need to have a positive statement from the US Administration. Otherwise, we are just dreaming.

Related:

state prohibitions (from the Press):

Louisiana, Washington, Nevada, Illinois, Indiana, South Dakota, Michigan and Oregon already have state prohibitions against online betting.

From my post:

“Efforts that would be ineffectively small at the federal level could be marshaled and directed at the most favorable states. The markets would only be legally open to those states’ residents, and the operators of the markets should make the good-faith practice of blocking clients from states were gambling is clearly illegal. But there is reason to suspect that if such a law is passed in one state, others will follow, in part from precedent, in part as a tax-dollar rush.”

I then tried to identify those “most favorable” states by a few criteria.

It is a matter of educating them about the damage they are doing. I think pretty much anybody with any clue about the prediction markets field can agree on that one.

And a NYT op-ed would be significant. Regulators build careers off of favorable press from climbing on the carcasses of businessmen (of varying degrees of shadiness). Attacking that behavior in an op-ed would be scary–they might not go back on their previous actions, but it would be a signal to stop this kind of behavior in the future.

Furthermore, it has obviously become a much bigger problem now. Even though it was absurdly heavy-handed, the arrest of the online gambling execs a few months (?) ago was totally within US law. This takes it another step and says that anybody with any connection is in the crosshairs of the US government. It is out of bounds, dangerous, and wrong.

It’s just a matter of making them pay for that behavior. And one of the best ways of making them pay for that behavior is by spotlighting *the individuals at the heart of this behavior* in a major publication and tearing them apart. It’s what they deserve, and it’s the best way to stop them. It would also make me happy that their reputations might suffer commensurately with the damage they have caused others’ lives.

I’d be happy to sign on to and help out with any effort people wanted to start, but I’m a little pessimistic about its prospects.

And I think that the administration is actually the place to start. First of all, prediction markets is a more naturally Republican idea — it involves relying on markets after all. Second, the administration has the discretion to tweak the enforcement of the “Safe Ports” law. In contrast, the Democrats in Congress would have to pass a law overturning the existing law, and even if Justin and I or whoever are successful in persuading them, I can’t imagine this is going to be on their “top 100 things the Republicans did that we need to fix” list. For the next 2 years, they are going to be very strategic about which fights they pick.

NETeller has been a huge broker of all kinds of online transactions, mostly for online gaming sites. It does help with Tradesports, but Tradesports is not, presumably, a significant chunk of NETeller’s transactions in and of itself.

Just goes to show how stupid the government is. They need to be leashed before they start destroying livelihoods (not to mention alpha) *beyond* the online gambling industry.

Sickening.