I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but the “it’ll just go underground” claim seems silly. The negative effects of driving a gambling market to the economic fringe are already happening in the mainstream market: fixing, extortion, death threats, etc.

What makes you think that driving betting underground (which means far fewer people will participate) would be worse than the status quo?

You don't need to "try to ban it", you ban it.

If your argument is "people are going to bet and influence world events on the dark web", the argument ignores economics.

The whole point is that the wrong financial incentives exist, the dark web does not provide them, it's hard to access and liquidity is small.

E.g. Trump insiders are unlikely to "tor their iran/venezuela predictions in Monero" and try to influence the events at the same time, let alone how complex would such a system be.

Defeatist nonsense, and wrong. The US was regulating this until Trump. A friendly regulatory environment is the only way paying out these bets at scale is possible.

"Pushing it underground" discourages the majority of bettors from using it, and that is a good thing.