GP said:
> there was a dramatic increase in regulations for banks (of all kinds)
and if I can deposit funds, make "investments" (gambling or not.. to me most stock investments are gambling anyway since they pay out in dividends based on quarterly profits) and withdraw money, that is at it's core a bank.
However, in these and many other cases they are now effectively unregulated ones. Partly because the executive branch responsible for said regulations have their hands in the pie.
>and if I can deposit funds, make "investments", and withdraw money, that is at it's core a bank.
Not according to pretty much all countries. When a depositor is making investments, that is called a brokerage, not a bank. But these gambling websites are not making investments either.
Also, with the transition to digital currency, banks don't really have the same purpose anymore of storing and guaranteeing people's access to their money, now that money is entries in a digital ledger and there is no risk of losing the money (outside of political risks where someone edits the database). They have been obviated, but the system persists.
>most stock investments are gambling anyway since they pay out in dividends based on quarterly profits
This is not true, publicly listed companies' boards regularly choose to vary dividend amounts based on longer term cash flow, and you will be sorely disappointed if you are expecting dividends to land in your account as a function of quarterly profits.
And how do you expect a business to work if it did not vary dividends? No business knows the future, and dividends are the same as owners paying themselves a profit, so if owners do not know how much profit there will be in the future, how can dividends be a "known" quantity? They have to be based on profits, they literally are the owners distributing the profit amongst themselves
Any venture in life is gambling, just like people exploring the oceans and traversing continents without knowing what was ahead of them was gambling. But that is a different type of gambling than risking money with no effect on the outcome such as on the aforementioned gambling websites and casinos.
