What the “end of bets” would cost the market, and the bettor’s protections along with it

A ban does not make demand disappear; it pushes it somewhere else. The practical problem for high-risk payments is that, once users leave the regulated market, they also lose the controls that regulators spent years building around limits, alerts, self-exclusion, fast withdrawals, and transaction monitoring.

1. Brazil already has a live example of the gap between prohibition and reality: e-cigarettes have been banned by Anvisa since 2009, yet they are still sold on street corners across Brazil. In the digital world, the gap is wider still, because any foreign platform is only a VPN away, regardless of what the government wants.
2. China is used as the clearest case study in the text. According to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, more than 1 trillion yuan leaves the country every year for illegal gambling, which the article says is about US$ 145 billion annually.
3. The article pushes back on the idea that a Provisional Measure (Medida Provisória) could end betting overnight, along with household debt and gambling addiction. Its point is narrower and more practical: discrediting the regulated betting market will not lower revolving credit card rates above 400% a year, nor Brazil’s benchmark interest rate, which rose from 2% in 2020 to around 15%.
4. For the regulated industry, the obvious costs of prohibition are tax revenue, sponsorship money for sport, and the anti-money laundering controls that now apply to every transaction. The article specifically flags sports with fewer alternative sponsors, such as women’s football, as one of the places where the funding loss would be felt first.
5. The more immediate cost, though, is user protection. In the regulated market, bettors can set loss and time limits, receive alerts and blocks when behavior looks risky, self-exclude from all platforms at once, withdraw funds within two hours without restriction, get clear game rules and payout calculations, and access support and ombudsman channels. The article argues that prohibition removes all of that by pushing users into an environment where those rights are not recognized.

The article’s underlying point is simple enough for PSPs and acquirers: from 2023 onward, the Brazilian government built a detailed bettor-protection framework through dozens of regulatory acts. Dismantling that structure would not end demand; it would move volume out of the monitored channel and into the part of the market where payments, compliance, and consumer protection become much harder to control.