I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider:
My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book limited our maximum wagers to pennies on the dollar, effectively making the system worthless.
So this product exists when the customer loses money, but ceases to exist when the customer makes money. It's sort of an odd product in that regard.
My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book limited our maximum wagers to pennies on the dollar, effectively making the system worthless.
So this product exists when the customer loses money, but ceases to exist when the customer makes money. It's sort of an odd product in that regard.