Transações com Pix têm queda de 10% após proibição de bets https://valor.globo.com/financas/noticia/2026/09/29/transacoes-com-pix-tem-queda-de-10percent-apos-proibicao-de-bets.ghtml
The tweet above links to an article saying "pix transactions fall 10% after bets ban." If you don't know, Pix is a Brazilian system that allows one to instantly send money to any other citizen by using a key, which can be a phone number, email or CPF. It works for big and small transactions equally with no fee, so everyone uses it. The only way it could be better is if you could use it like a card, without having to pull out your phone, but nothing can be perfect.
Last week, the current president announced a total ban on bets, days before the election, and this is supposedly the result. There are arguments to be made on why this number is not actually true, like there are 10+% swings in usage at different times of each month, but even if they aren't quite true, the level of destruction these gambling apps have unleashed globally is undeniable and visible to everyone.
At this point, it's fairly safe to say that I have become more actively anti-gambling than I was before. In 2022, in Self-expression vs. vesselization, I wrote:
Is gambling bad? Irrelevant. It is a part of human nature, therefore it is the truth.
Now, do I personally care about the morality of making addicting video games? Not really. I don't think 1-2% of the population using my games for their addictions, however helpless they are, will keep me from sleeping soundly at night.
That position assumed that the vast majority of people have a responsible relationship with these things, and the problem was that a small minority couldn't help themselves, this being thus a bounded failure. But the dramatic rise of betting all over pretty concretely destroys that idea, it's clearly not 1-2%, more like 10-20%, perhaps even more, and at that point it's just way too much damage, normal people clearly cannot handle this level of psychological manipulation. As supporting evidence for how strong this pull is, I've also watched the complete failure of the crypto market to manifest anything of true value other than gambling related apps, despite the potential mentioned in my past NFT posts.
I mentioned in Son of a Serpent that SNKRX's reroll shop contributed to the problem to some degree, and proposed frontloaded power distribution as a more righteous alternative. In the recent meaning and commitment posts (#204, #213, #264), I also argued that what games have over short-form content is meaning and commitment, and that due to Deep instinctive changes, what people are actually doing when playing a game matters, and that it's best to handle that carefully. If the actions you're having people practice are analogous to gambling, as per garfieldbot's quote:
Gambling is sinful because it makes a mockery of, in the final calculation, love. It makes a mockery of what we call today "commitment". When you love, you commit to the world, and you are always "risking" something. These ard the wrong words, it's understanding it backwards, but we were all born backwards in this age. When you love, the world comes alive and is filled with meaning, "because you are risking something", to put it in a crude and low way. And gambling simulates this process as a crude mockery, by simulating "meaning" "stakes", through a simulated "risk". Like a video game simulates achievement, gambling simulates risk, and provides a poor substitute for the real thing. The optimal way to channel this process is love, romantic as well as charitable religious love, as one can be a doorway to the other, and it's a degredation of one's capacity for love to indulge in a mockery of it
Then you are not loving them, in the religious sense of the word. As someone interacting with them, you should want the best for them, in their own terms, and the best for them likely does not involve decreasing their capacity for love. This doesn't mean every game with these mechanics is bad, they can be done tastefully, which is why I never thought Genshin Impact was bad, but other games sharing those mechanics done tastelessly might be. It is impossible to make a game that isn't a simulation of some real drive and a mockery of it in one way or another, but one can strive to focus on having the player practice actions that will enrich instead of degrade their lives at the most fundamental level.