The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
What I find almost just as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Of course. They didn't treat 45 like a real candidate in 2015 because he deserved to be seen as one, they did it because it's lowest common denominator content and it's what people watch.
There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis.
I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself".
They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening.
Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.
How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
I think some places have the government give every party equal (by what measure? I don't remember. Past votes maybe?) money for campaigning and no donations are allowed.
Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
Society needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones.
The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.
I try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.
Also country. Visited Sweden recently, gambling ads everyone on the internet, on TV and in public spaces, but back home Spain I still see some, but nowhere near the level as it was in Sweden.
Even something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.
I was taking an Uber from Sonoma back to the Bay, and the driver was one of those people. He wouldn't stop talking about how he was spending thousands a month on rare cards, then reselling them, all the while losing money, his wife, etc.
I mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money.
Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.
From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.
Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.
Conflating unavoidable risk in life with games designed to entice you to play while guaranteeing that you will lose is certainly some sort of perverse argument.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises.
You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way.
In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.
An FSA should not be a "bet" it should be set up for expenses you know you are going to need to pay: dependent care, recurring care and prescriptions, planned procedures. Your employer, not you, owns the account and keeps any balance remaining at the end of the year so you should not really guess at how much you contribute. An advantage of the FSA is that the full contribution is available immediately but the payroll deductions are spread over the whole year.
Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.
My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?
I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.
But for a ton of people that amount is extremely variable. Do you plan on getting into a car accident? Do you plan on getting an appendectomy in June when making your elections the November before? Sorry doctor, getting cancer wasn't in the plans for 2026, can we reschedule that to 2027 after my open enrollment?
I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?
Its just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time.
On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.
> > The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.
Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.
If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
>You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen.
This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower.
What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.
> discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices
If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would.
(Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)
It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
Here at least I believe the gambling laws have changed.
Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day.
I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.
Right, but as exploitive as those things are, they're still regulated and taxed as gambling. The regs may be a joke, but they exist. Like in some places they're required to remind the player about addiction concerns and direct them to help for it, and to fund those programs. And part of the reason that states (and provinces here in Canada) were so gung-ho on the liberalization of gambling is that they take a fat cut.
aside: recreational gambling should require a federal ID with losses tracked online, and if you're down more than 10% of last year's after-tax income you're cut off for the rest of the year, but I assume the Canadian and especially US constitutions rules against doing good things federally make that impossible.
While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
Some states are trying to fight against Kalshi. One of the problems is the President's family has a financial interest in these markets and so the Republican party does their best to say "hey, these are clearly "swaps" and not bets!!!1!"
I would also like to take a moment to evangelize against the notion that all politicians are crooks.
Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned.
"Everyone cheats" is something cheaters say to (a) feel better about themselves and (b) try to get other people to ignore their cheating when they get caught. Don't believe their lies. Most people don't cheat.
In studies of cooperative behavior, most people choose to cooperate, and the key predictor of whether someone will cooperate is whether they believe other people will choose to cooperate. Cynicism is permission to defect.
I think it was kind of a chain reaction... gambling liberalization and bitcoin happened around the same time, and then people figured out "Oh this thing we do with buying bitcoin and then talking everybody else into buying bitcoin... we can just do that with regular securities can't we" and then the hyper-valuation of Tesla and Gamestop happened.
Now everything is either gambling or a scam or both.
The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
What I find almost just as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice.
We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
People still watch CNN?
Of course. They didn't treat 45 like a real candidate in 2015 because he deserved to be seen as one, they did it because it's lowest common denominator content and it's what people watch.
It may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again
There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job.
College never guaranteed anything.
A college education may still be (statistically) a good investment:
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/04/is-col...
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis.
I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself".
They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening.
The irony being that gambling is about as far from "guaranteed" or "stable" as you can get.
But it does fit the ultralibertarian mindset best, I guess. The right to the pursuit of happiness, not to actually getting it.
The best way to win at gambling is to be the house.
Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.
Unfortunately, the gambling industry is going to have a much wealthier and more powerful lobby than any effort to displace it.
How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
I think some places have the government give every party equal (by what measure? I don't remember. Past votes maybe?) money for campaigning and no donations are allowed.
Only works with fair elections
Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
Genuinely curious what the golden goose refers to here?
There's a lot of money in gambling. Nobody seems to want do anything that might depress the economy, even if it means the death of democracy.
Society needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones.
The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.
I try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.
Ublock Origin Lite is quite capable.
It probably depends on the algorithm. I never see gambling ads on YouTube.
Also country. Visited Sweden recently, gambling ads everyone on the internet, on TV and in public spaces, but back home Spain I still see some, but nowhere near the level as it was in Sweden.
> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle
Just ban or regulate it? It's only a form gambling after all.
"I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle"
laws, that's how. push it back down to the dark net where most people can't be bothered to get at it.
Even something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.
I was taking an Uber from Sonoma back to the Bay, and the driver was one of those people. He wouldn't stop talking about how he was spending thousands a month on rare cards, then reselling them, all the while losing money, his wife, etc.
This has an outsized impact on young men.
I mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money.
Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.
I’d put working for tips in here as well.
From the worker’s point of view, it’s adding a gambling element to every transaction, complete with the usual gambler’s folk wisdom about which ones are going to pay out and how to maximize your luck, which I think is part of what makes it popular.
Everyone who’s ever worked for tips has stories of unexpected “wins” and the biggest jackpots are reported on like big lottery wins.
Conflating unavoidable risk in life with games designed to entice you to play while guaranteeing that you will lose is certainly some sort of perverse argument.
I'm not conflating anything here.
Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises.
You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way.
In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.
An FSA should not be a "bet" it should be set up for expenses you know you are going to need to pay: dependent care, recurring care and prescriptions, planned procedures. Your employer, not you, owns the account and keeps any balance remaining at the end of the year so you should not really guess at how much you contribute. An advantage of the FSA is that the full contribution is available immediately but the payroll deductions are spread over the whole year.
Those things are less static than you seem to believe. Eg recurring prescriptions; at least once a year my insurance gets mad about my scripts and requires a pre authorization that occasionally contains a stipulation that I try their “preferred” (read: cheaper for them) alternatives.
My planning is now wrong. Likewise I can only do FSA for planned procedures if I know close to a year ahead of time, which isn’t super likely. What portion of procedures are serious enough that insurance won’t call them elective, but also tame enough that you can put it off for a year for your FSA?
I don’t think I’ve ever had my FSA be completely correct. I’m always either over-stocked and losing money, or under-stocked and paying with post-tax dollars when I don’t have to.
But for a ton of people that amount is extremely variable. Do you plan on getting into a car accident? Do you plan on getting an appendectomy in June when making your elections the November before? Sorry doctor, getting cancer wasn't in the plans for 2026, can we reschedule that to 2027 after my open enrollment?
I hate FSAs. Anyone have a good argument on why we should have them instead of just making HSAs open to everyone regardless of healthcare plan?
Its just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time.
On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.
> > The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter.
Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to.
If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming
It's really terrible. Gambling addiction is a serious issue that needs to be educated towards people first before any 'Kalshi' mention.
I suppose that's what those 'Gambling problem?'ads are for.
Well we don't need ads. We need responsible education against the effects of gambling addiction or we need to raise wages, which is it?
Or we could also ban sports betting apps and Kalshi and Polymarket.
Where does raising wages have to deal with this?
Did anyone else think it was strange how fast legitimate news orgs (cnn for example) integrated prediction markets into their businesses?
The "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
>You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen.
This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower.
What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.
> discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices
If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would.
(Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)
Reminds me of news articles that are just Twitter screenshots, except now there's money directly involved.
Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.
This is a really interesting piece. It's weird seeing Kalshi adverts in the World Cup. Not sure how I feel about the whole thing in general.
It seems CNN fails to put their mouth where their money is.
It's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
Here at least I believe the gambling laws have changed.
Most gas stations I go into now have "gaming" machines and there's always some soul sitting at them at any time of day.
I'm mostly on team let-people-do-what-they-want-even-if-it's-bad-for-them but it's disheartening to watch a dad sitting there totally sucked into it and just ignoring their kid in a stroller behind them.
If I ever see that, I swear I'll tell the dad something
Right, but as exploitive as those things are, they're still regulated and taxed as gambling. The regs may be a joke, but they exist. Like in some places they're required to remind the player about addiction concerns and direct them to help for it, and to fund those programs. And part of the reason that states (and provinces here in Canada) were so gung-ho on the liberalization of gambling is that they take a fat cut.
aside: recreational gambling should require a federal ID with losses tracked online, and if you're down more than 10% of last year's after-tax income you're cut off for the rest of the year, but I assume the Canadian and especially US constitutions rules against doing good things federally make that impossible.
Same thing happened in the early days of Uber, with taxi licenses
While your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment.
I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
And DraftKings/FanDuel
Some states are trying to fight against Kalshi. One of the problems is the President's family has a financial interest in these markets and so the Republican party does their best to say "hey, these are clearly "swaps" and not bets!!!1!"
https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2026/06/29/125136...
I would also like to take a moment to evangelize against the notion that all politicians are crooks.
Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned.
"Everyone cheats" is something cheaters say to (a) feel better about themselves and (b) try to get other people to ignore their cheating when they get caught. Don't believe their lies. Most people don't cheat.
In studies of cooperative behavior, most people choose to cooperate, and the key predictor of whether someone will cooperate is whether they believe other people will choose to cooperate. Cynicism is permission to defect.
Defectors must be punished.
Not defending Kalshi but stock market has been gambling lite for a while now. It is pretty wild how blatant it is now though.
I think it was kind of a chain reaction... gambling liberalization and bitcoin happened around the same time, and then people figured out "Oh this thing we do with buying bitcoin and then talking everybody else into buying bitcoin... we can just do that with regular securities can't we" and then the hyper-valuation of Tesla and Gamestop happened.
Now everything is either gambling or a scam or both.