> Your analysis disregards the evidence of several decades in which the Internet existed, but gambling was still broadly illegal and getting around those laws was anything but trivial (since blocking financial flows is, or at least used to be, pretty effective).

I'm not sure what the point of this comment is because it basically translates to "getting around gambling restrictions used to be difficult but it no longer is", which is my point. What does it matter how things used to be if crypto in particular makes financial flows trivial so it's not that way anymore?

> This requires trusting the government in the first place. Easy in some places; not so much in others.

Well, here are you options:

1. No ID verification. A lot of people might consider that ideal but I think it's DOA;

2. A private company, which includes the likes of the Peter Thiel-backed company, verifying IDs; or

3. The government, which, again, is the entity that issues the IDs so, by definition, you're not giving them anything they don't already know.

The government is a strictly better option than a private company because, apparently I need to repeat this, they already have the information because they issued the IDs.

My point is that this recent popularity of gambling is largely a result of the explicit decision by legislators in many US states to legalize online gambling. I don’t think crypto factored in that much.