A huge portion of cryptocurrency is indeed like gambling. When you invest in unknown altcoins with low market caps hoping that their prices would x50 or x100 soon, that's risky and is indeed gambling. It's even almost pointless to take a look at their fundamentals. At least that's as far as altcoin history is concerned.
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I disagree. Gambling and cryptocurrency investments, while both speculative in nature include very different kinds of risk. In gambling, every casino game or a slot has pre-defined odds, so in theory you can calculate your chance of winning, but the final outcome is unpredictable and is still a matter of luck. With cryptocurrency, the odds are unknown but you can still determine the probability of different outcomes, making it more like speculative investing or educated guessing than gambling. If we have sufficient knowledge about the coin's team members, their partnership status and roadmap details, etc., then over time a pattern or trend might emerge which will give you an idea about their viability as an investment option. True, this will take a lot of research and analysis. But unlike gambling there is no "cosmic force" that determines the outcome - it depends solely on the work you put into it. At the end of the day, it is all about how much research you do and what strategies you use to determine your investment decisions.
Like doesn't mean they're completely similar. Surely, they have differences. But they, too, have similarities.
At this particular point in cryptocurrency's development, it is probably naïve to believe that knowing a project's team members, partnerships, roadmaps, and so on would somehow provide you some foresight as to its future. The short history of altcoin projects would provide us convincing amount of proofs that they don't really matter in the end. A meme coin launched by less popular developers could turn out successful while a serious project with known experts behind its development could not even survive for long.
I think it's not anymore the amount of research that you make. It doesn't even matter if they have a sound whitepaper or if they have fulfilled what they've promised in their roadmaps. It doesn't anymore matter whether they're lying through their teeth when they claim decentralization. Everything seems to be just a matter of luck or sudden yet quick hype now.