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Like most things in life, in moderation it can be fun. Adding some stakes to an activity can make it more exciting.
It becomes a problem when people don't have the self-control to self-regulate, and when it's designed to prey upon those people specifically, or to prey on desperate people who feel like it's the only chance they have to get ahead, or who don't have a good understanding of the risks or chances of winning.
Humans as a whole are bad at understanding probability, and our brains are wired such that the happy chemicals we get from winning are more impactful than the unhappy chemicals we get from losing. As such, someone can be losing money overall, but still feel like they're winning, or at least, still get the rush from winning even though they're way down overall. That's dangerous, and gambling companies are designed to specifically target those people and exploit those destructive behaviors. It's like the experiment with the rat that was given a button to give itself happy drugs, and it just sat there pressing the button constantly. Basically, the regulations are necessary because of capitalism, and because without them, those people would very quickly ruin their lives given the chance while the companies running the operation give zero fucks about it.
Then there's the fraud. Look at prediction markets. They're rife with fraud and bet fixing and it's not only politicians and policymakers doing it. John Oliver had a piece on this recently where he goes into some detail, but there've also been articles about journalists getting harassed and threatened because they report on something that would cause a Polymarket loss.
In conclusion, some humans are shitty and we need regulations to keep shitty people from doing shitty things.
Yeah polymarket is such a strange thing conceptually.