Consider that for every coin gleaned from a gambling site, someone else lost at least one coin to that gambling site. So sure, play and walk away a winner but remember some poor chump is walking away a loser. That's the nature of gambling. It's the same with mining altcoins; the only winners are the guys that leave in time to walk away with whatever was put in by everyone else.

The only business I've ever invested in, that wasn't just purchasing hardware, is my own. It's not that I don't trust anyone else to not screw me over, it's just I don't like investing because I'd much rather work for a living than sit back and watch someone else pay me to let them work. It's partially for that reason that we don't take in any investment money from anyone else - our only revenue stream is the direct sale of goods (either manufactured or value-added, we will not profit from middlemanning) and services. Another good reason being, when someone owns a share of my work, someone has paid me for the right to influence decisions even if he's not actually doing any work himself and that's both stupid and a recipe for someone getting screwed. Mining bitcoins directly, and selling goods and services within the bitcoin economy, has been my full-time income for a little over a year now.

I take offense to the consideration that there are zero honest businesses in the bitcoin economy. It's close to zero, but not zero yet.