Juventus player Nicolò Fagioli opened the floodgates and now everyone's trying to swim upstream. And failing.

The young footballer, who's on a $1m salary (per year) at 22 years of age, is in deep s**t 'cause he got caught betting (and apparently losing, go figure) huge sums on football games, potentially including games he starred in.

Fagioli and the other footballers (four, for now) that are implicated are professional athletes. They are not allowed to bet on any form of sport for obvious reasons.

The fact that they did it on illegal betting platforms, in their case, is simply an aggravating factor.

However, the scandal is causing quite the stir in Italy while politicians are indirectly causing one of the biggest "you don't say, no sh+t Sherlock" moments in recent history in Italy.

A few years ago, a political party founded by a comedian who can't get elected because he was convicted of manslaughter (you can't make this stuff up), came up with a new bill to ban betting and gambling related ads.

Betting and gambling, friendly reminder, are both regulated and legal in Italy.

Still, they thought it would be clever to ban ads because, in their mind, this would discourage betting.

Obviously this didn't work, never in the history of the world has anyone NOT done something just because it was illegal or banned or discouraged or frowned upon (remember the US prohibition times?).

As a result, regulated betting firms lost money in revenue, Italy missed out on taxes on said revenue, and the only party that gained from this myopic piece of legislation were illegal websites.

People weren't presented with options to bet legally, so they just used whatever they could find, including illegal websites.

This is a great example of why the government should mind its own business. Because generally speaking, the government is run by useful busybodies who know nothing, do nothing and achieve nothing.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that banning betting ads won't make people stop betting, it'll just divert the betting money elsewhere.

People do what they do, and they want what they want. Banning something may provide results in the short term but in the long run, it never, ever works.

Why can't we learn that?

It's the same with crypto. You can ban it, badmouth it, blacklist it. It will not matter.

If people want crypto, crypto will happen.