This is not a bad strategy for a company in our asymmetric regulatory environment. Fortunes were made in crypto on exactly this one-way bet.

Go on breaking the law until you get a favorable judge/Congress. Nobody is going to jail (we don't really do that anymore), you might pay a fine. Every once in a while you'll have change the app a little to sort of comply with a judicial order. There's practically no downside to this strategy.

Binance, FTX, BitMex, Silk Road founders all went to jail - it’s a huge coin flip.

BitMex didn't go to jail, they all got probation/ankle tag, for not running a clean money org (allegedly no KYC, registering US accounts from offshore, etc.). CZ got caught in the US anti-China panic that also saw the TikTok ban pass Congress with nearly 80(!) votes in the Senate. Silk Road: drug trafficking.

FTX is the closest analog, but by all accounts they did not run a clean operation. What I have read of their operation would have been grounds for charging even if they were trading legal securities.

Seems the through line is if your main business is illegal, you need to run it as if it were going to be legalized tomorrow.

And so the circuit courts coming to very different conclusions from the 9th circuit represents the inherent political corruption involved in the court system.

Circuit splits get resolved at the Supreme Court and I would make a prediction that it isnt a coin flip, probably more of a safe bet.

e.g. make as much money as possible while you have a favorable judge/Congress/President b/c you assume the ability to make money will go away once the next regime is in power.

Existing legislation favors the haves, not the could-haves. And many people go to jail every year for breaking rules that big banks get a slap on the wrist for. Money laundering, terror financing, fraud,... Name a major bank and I'll list you some crimes no one ever spent a day in prison for. But that's fine because they have a license.

When I say "clever" I don't mean"good" I mean "crafty". You acknowledge someone has game without condoning their behavior or extolling it as virtuous.

Congress didn't eliminate the federal prohibition on sports gambling when they created the CFTC. Ergo, it is clear that Congress did not intend for sports gambling transactions to be within the jurisdiction of the CFTC.

The only clever thing they did was putting members of the Trump family on their board.

unfortunately - as you pointed out the outcome of the cases being a coin flip at the supreme court is the tragedy in all of this.

I call $50 on Tails!

Correction: because the federal government doesn't want Kalshi to follow the actual law. CFTC ordered Kalshi to continue operating in NY when NY tried to crack down on it. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor for Kalshi. The US Government's conservative leaders are ignoring states' rights in order to personally profit, using Kalshi as a tool.

> this will end up at SCOTUS, and everything until then just doesn't matter

Unless Congress passes a law so SCOTUS doesn't have to. We can't keep pretending it's normal for SCOTUS to decide everything about our society. If Congress won't do its job, why do we have them?

Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chances to quash legislation. Plus the veto. Plus the Supreme Court (whose job they left almost completely undefined, so they made up a job description).

So we have them because we can't get rid of them. But they are practically useless. They can usually manage the bare minimum of reauthorizing the thing they said last year. Then they can rename a few post offices, have some grandstanding hearings, and then go home to campaign for reelection.

That’s not to say states have lost power, their reach has also grown exponentially far outpacing even the federal in terms of number of workers and written law.

It’s mostly just Congress has become self satisfied on being negotiators for spending the most money in their own states, while ignoring the minimization of their role in the greater power dynamic.

Everyone makes a big deal about president as the signal but IMO if you take a 10,000-foot view of US history Congress neutering itself is the real long term narrative. Including most major current populist issues like immigration, debt, war, abortion, etc. They are hands off unless it involves new spending.

Then when the executive takes more power they have little ability to opposite it. Especially since there is a significant Congressional delegation who believes in the Unitary Executive theory, who will interfere with attempts to rein it in.

I believe it is entirely due to the Founders being intent on pitting Congress against itself, while the President is a single person. They initially tried a half-assed version of that by making the runner up Vice President, but that was quickly seen to be useless.

There is a lot more to be said over a quarter millennium, but that is the fundamental design flaw.

It's not just about executive power. In recent times, Congress failed to adjust the written law when societal consensus shifted, and the discrepancy was resolved the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court. I don't think Congress would pass something like the Civil Rights Act under the current circumstances. This isn't good for a democracy because the political debate that is part of the regular legislative process is lost.

It's because the US is a presidential republic with no concept of a non-confidence vote. This makes the sitting head of the party ~impossible to remove, and when government fails to reach consensus, instead of... Having an election, and let the voters decide, power de-facto ends up in the hands of the executive.

But why are there only two parties?

The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some are more multiparty than others, but none of them have the hard two-party system that the US has, in which third parties have a very marginal role (not completely marginal – e.g. in a close election, the decisions of New York's Conservative and Working Families parties can make a real difference to the outcome – but certainly at a national level third parties have no real power in the US.)

First-past-the-post is a popular explanation, but it can't by itself explain it, since the UK and Canada use it, yet lack a US-style hard two party system (and with the rise of the Reform party in the UK, the British system is becoming less two-party than it has been in a long time.)

If I am not mistaken all disruptions to fpp two party systems eventually settle back into them, maybe not the same parties but two nonetheless.

Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose.

We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.

That is also the core problem for reestablishing trust with the rest of the world: Even if a Democrat or just a sane Republican wins in 28 and tries to revert many of the destructive policies the current administration enacted, there is now solid evidence the much-hailed system of checks and balances doesn’t work as advertised. And that means there is not really a legitimate argument to trust the US as much as countries and businesses did, which calls a lot of things into question—the bond market, the petrodollar, investments in the USA, dependency on American services…

The US Founders also did not have political parties, and the tribal/clan thinking that goes along with them.

Not that the other house isn't also tilted that way, but it seems to be that they, and the appointments approved by them, are functioning exactly as was intended (as shown by the supreme court suddenly caring about executive overreach when it came to money). Who knows whether they would care about the social issues affecting the poors nowadays, but they certainly didn't care to let the people be in charge without a veto from that opulent minority.

As for me, i've never pretended it's either normal or desired for the courts to make policy, whether congress is dysfunctional or not. Among other things. My comment was basically pointing out that the current supreme court seems perfectly willing to throw out decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways.

So your comment there is mistargeted, at least as applied to me.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Supreme Court has always been willing to do that. This court has been overruling decisions of the Warren Court, just as the Warren Court overruled decisions from the Lochner Era.

> decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways

This court is not like the previos one. Things are not the same

That's not what this is. As the 9th Circuit points out, states already have quite extensive laws about gambling. We don't need Congress to step in to either reinforce or displace them. The courts are doing their job by ruling on existing laws.

Congress doesn't need to pass a new law. Federal gambling laws were not removed from the books when Congress created the CFTC because they did not intend for gambling transactions to be regulated by the CFTC. (Federal gambling laws were not struck down until 2018, by SCOTUS, on First Amendment grounds. Yes, the decision was written by one of the justices known to have accepted gifts from companies doing business before the Court.)

we're essentially one year of three into one of the least effective lame duck legislative bodies we'll ever see