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points by mahboi 5 days ago | 0 comments
Wonder how proxies/VPNs play into this, since Utah was recently in the news about an age verification law that basically said you're liable if anyone physically in Utah accesses a restricted site.
[–] labcomputer 4 days ago
While I do hope courts will strike down the the laws purporting to regulate users in a jurisdiction when users have taken steps to hide their true location (on the grounds that a state does not have the authority to regulate what happens in another state, but enforcing those laws as written means they do in practice), it doesn't seem like such a ruling would help the people who want to offer sports betting.

Given that gambling, almost by definition, requires exchange of money (or something approximating money), it's much harder for the Kalshi's and Polymarket's of the world to credibly claim that they didn't know a user was in Utah (for at least the ones domiciled in Utah).

They could take payment only in crypto, but I suspect that you can't run a federally-regulated commodities futures exchange without a certain amount of KYC (if for nothing other than AML and income reporting) that makes it practically infeasible to pretend you didn't know.

[–] mahboi 4 days ago
Oh, didn't even know Kalshi enforced KYC, but they do. Every time I heard about these two, it was people using basic paid VPNs to access the non-US versions and deposit cryptocurrency without KYC. When everyone was talking about the 2024 presidential election bets, they didn't have a US version at all. But at that point it's about federal law, not state.

The other law was about porn that I guess wasn't always paid for, so yeah.