You can replace Spain in the article with any other jurisdiction and my comment would be unchanged.

This has nothing to do with US vs EU or any other trope you seek to my comment as being on a particular side of of a particular issue in order to get people of a certain bent to support whatever your side is (isn't team politics great).

Ask yourself this. If the license Spain is trying to enforce here had the exact same requirements but was granted by some 3rd party (industry consortium or whatever) and the government didn't care whether they held it would you still be acting like it's such a big deal for them to have it or not?

Does holding the license or not fundamentally change the nature of the business the license holder is in?

The government is essentially granting legitimacy to a bad thing here in exchange for some money being spent in the right directions and enough of it on "good things" that it's plausibly deniable.

And you can replace Spain with any other country (including authoritarian regimes) and my comment would be unchanged. It is a matter of respecting local jurisdiction, local law.

I didn't expect you to agree either. I wanted to inform the reader and lurker, not convince you. Why you have to resort to 'you are exactly the kind of person' is beyond me.

Since you decided to edit your post, so have I:

Yes, a government can outsource/delegate such, if the quality is good, why not? For example, the audit has to be thorough and the outcome non-discriminatory.

As far as I am concerned it is a very sick platform because (well anything related to cryptocurrency is) some of the bets are about dark things, seemingly allowed. For example, imagine being able to bet when the next murder of the Zodiac is happening, and how it'd occur. Same with the missile example. Should we therefore ban or regulate it? I don't know what is wisdom. But I do know EU and Spain can decide on this for themselves. One thing of note: insider trading is illegal in EU, yet Trump's clan hobby (yes, in past presidency it occurred as well, but not as severe, nor as ridiculous).