1. Bitcoin mining is a service not a lottery. Miners work for a living.
Actually, the "service" that miners "do" is legally considered to be the "consideration" part of the lottery known as Bitcoin.
Bottom line, it is working and continues to grow.
Something that has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars on hundreds of thousands of useless computers only to lose 75% of its value in the past 15 months is not "working" or "growing". It's a burst bubble.
If you don't have to pay to get in then it's not a lottery. I suppose you could call it a contest, but there is nothing wagered like a lottery. I doubt any court would find otherwise.
As far as the "burst bubble", I think this is a common confusion about bitcoin. People often seem to think in terms of stocks and investments when thinking about bitcoin. But it is nothing like that. I have made some good money in bond markets and trading stocks. Each trade is really a bet on the business behind the stock offering. Those companies need my money to launch a plan to make more money. That's my return. If they fail to raise enough the price could drop and the company could become insolvent and POP! the bubble bursts and the stock is worthless.
Bitcoin is not a business, there are no mouths to feed, bitcoin does not need money to work. It worked just fine when the price was $0.06, it worked fine when the price was $1000. There is no minimal threshold that is required to keep bitcoin from becoming insolvent.
In short, price is not an indicator of growth. Price is an indicator of supply and demand, adoption shows growth. There are more businesses now than ever accepting bitcoin and the list grows every day. I'm shocked by how quickly it's all happening. Two years ago I could buy alpaca socks and used computer parts with bitcoin. Now I buy whatever I want and no longer use cards on the internet.
~Cheers
As for the topic at hand. I think that yes, he does have some credit to his argument. However, you could make the claim that Bitcoin DOES operate like stock in a company (that seems to be how many people use it in trade), but that the company is a decentralized network. Thus the concept of the DAC. And as we all know, the stock market in and of itself is very much like a gaming set up. What draws the difference between the two?