alt Hacker News> I am not sure it is worth it for society.
As always, seems to depend on the scale.
Letting anyone in the world place bets on when the next nuke will hit a city? Probably pretty bad overall for society.
Doing raffles for some local tiny organization run by Ada and William so they can continue hosting a ten person event? Probably pretty good overall.
The problem once again comes when you decide to hyper optimize for profit. Ada and William will rely on word of mouth, maybe a few posters to drum up attention to their raffle.
Meanwhile large gambling orgs will run ad spots non stop with celebrities enticing you to join their app with free bonus bets and once you're in they will send you daily notifications to nudge you to place "just one more bet".
Easy to see how one would be relatively harmless while the other could cause widespread addiction.