Gambling and Prediction Markets: Adult Risk with Hard Limits on Engineered Compulsion

What is broken and why it matters

What we would change

1. 1

   Create portable personal risk controls. Every regulated operator must offer binding deposit, loss, wager, and time limits. A customer can tighten them immediately. Increases take effect after seven days. A national self-exclusion choice applies across licensed casinos, sportsbooks, and entertainment-style event-contract platforms, with a private recovery and appeal process.

2. 2

   Ban gambling on credit and inducements tied to loss. Operators may not extend credit, accept a credit card, offer reload or loss-back bonuses, maintain VIP programs based on betting volume or losses, or compensate staff according to a customer's deposits or net losses.

3. 3

   Make odds and losses legible. Interfaces must display the full stake, maximum loss, payout, implied probability or house advantage where meaningful, cumulative deposits and withdrawals, net loss, and time spent. Every bet requires a visible confirmation free of urgency tricks.

4. 4

   Protect minors and vulnerable users without behavioral blacklists. The minimum age is 21 for commercial online gambling and sports wagering. Advertising cannot target minors, self-excluded people, or profiles inferred from financial distress, mental health, addiction, or disability. Risk data cannot be sold or reused outside safety, compliance, and independent research.

5. 5

   Separate product classes by function and velocity. Casino-style continuous play, sports wagering, and entertainment event contracts receive gambling safeguards. Commercial hedges and research forecasting may use a proportionate market regime when position limits, participant purpose, settlement, and manipulation risk support the distinction.

6. 6

   Enforce market and sports integrity. Athletes, officials, coaches, candidates, event employees, decision makers, and anyone controlling or holding material nonpublic information about an outcome may not trade the related contract. Platforms need surveillance, auditable resolution sources, suspicious-activity reporting, information-sharing agreements, and restitution authority.

7. 7

   Make public revenue answer for harm. A uniform operator assessment funds independently administered treatment, research, financial counseling, and enforcement. Governments must publish gambling revenue, harm spending, and the concentration of operator revenue across loss bands.