Even taking into account the average losses at the casino, I won an average return of 350% playing roulette. To say that all gambling equates to gambling is just foolish.
Whether something is gambling depends on what odds you're taking. If your odds are consistently better than 50%, then it's not gambling. Whether something is gambling describes your decisions, not their outcomes. An outcome never affects the quality of the decision: if you win a 1%-odds-to-win bet, the decision to take it was irregardless bad.
This is... false. For a number of reasons. Something can be economically rational at scale and still a gamble, because you do not have infinite funds. More importantly, past results are not indicative of future results in valuations. Thinking that a thing must increase in value because it increased in value previously is perhaps the dumbest fallacy in in finance possible.
Option 1: I offer you 99,999/100,000 chance to lose everything you have, And a 1/100,000 chance to get 100,001 times more. Expected value is net positive. And yet, you’d be pretty dumb to do it. Gambling.
Option 2: I offer you 9/10 chance to get 1.01x more. 1/10 chance to get 0x. Expected loss. Better than 50% odds of gain. Gambling.
Option 3:
Coin toss. Triple your lifespan on heads. Die on tails. Definitely gambling.
I'm not sure I follow, but you're probably talking about a scenario where the risk/reward ratio is not 1:1. Sure, it's more complicated then. If you take a 10% chance bet 10 times and it has a risk of -1 and reward of +10, on average you'll get (-1 * 9) + (+10 * 1) = 1.
The point in option 1 and 3 is to illustrate that betting 10 times isn’t an option in many systems. You can’t say you should always do something because the risk reward is favorable. That’s still gambling, and sometimes a stupid decision.
The average outcome of a gamble is not the likely outcome of taking it. And even ignoring that, it’s still a gamble unless you can confidently run it at sufficient scale to hit the theoretical distribution.
I would argue “All on red” with known risks and rewards is more educated than a blind investment into a technology that you don’t even understand, which describes most speculative crypto investments by “laymen” as the op said
It ain’t gambling if you win