As E-bay is to auctions, E-Lottery would be to lotteries. | Hacker News Reader

As E-bay is to auctions, E-Lottery would be to lotteries.

laserlike.com

5 pointsmspeiser6 comments

Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President of Consumer Products at Symantec, shares his E-Lottery idea with Laserlike.

This is clearly illegal in the US, both at the Federal level and probably all 50 states. And if you were going to do an online lottery, you'd be a moron to give away anything but cash. People don't factor in their odds of winning when they decide to buy into a lottery (except the very few people who play lotteries profitably, but that's so rare as to be non-existent).

Also I hate this blog's design. The entries look like block quotes.

its not illegal in many countries, though you may have to pay initial license fee - also you need to have a lawyer who has knowledge of international internet gambling law ...

so you need a VC who can pay your license bill and a lawyer who can find you the legal way of doing this.

i have this old news piece that might help ...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/congress-to-take-te...

Even if the UIGEA is overturned, that's going to be illegal here. The UIGEA does actually provide for legal state lotteries online, but nothing else. Without it, those are even questionable (beyond, of course, intrastate use, like sports betting in Nevada).

I'm appalled that someone with a HBS MBA and so many claimed executive positions held would dismiss something as important as the legality of this business model with something so cavalier as, "I would point out here that I have not looked at the gambling aspects of this."

Perhaps he should have. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 would make paying with credit cards nearly impossible since this would clearly be defined as illegal gambling (a game whose outcome is dictated by chance). Especially because you are dealing with physical goods/services that have to be delivered on US soil, this bill makes this business model nearly impossible to do.

In addition, because you are dealing with physical goods, you are leaving the winner with a tax burden (that can't be paid by a portion of the winnings when dealing with non-cash). So that Ferrari F430 Spider becomes a $30,000 tax bill. So long as the winnings are taxed, a bettor's expected value will always be diminished significantly.

The game need not be dictated by chance - you could make the players answer a _really_ simple question, and only tickets with the right answer could win.

Your tax problem still stands though, but the diminished value just as much a problem with cash winning.

If someone built this, it would be interesting to see where the ticket prices tend to settle. My guess was going to be that people won't get away with selling them for more than pennies over EV, but then I remembered the existence of casinos and state lotteries.

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