How different is trading from just gambling? I know there seems to be a big difference with technical analysis and whatnot, but in the end aren't you just betting on something completely random?
They are similar, but there is one key difference.
If you throw your money up in the air and hope it lands a certain way, you are gambling.
If you check the wind and the weight of the money before throwing, you are trading.
If after all your calculations or speculations, your prediction has failed, then that's just reality.
The wind can change anytime. In trading, anyone can dump the market. A coin can be dumped and never get recovered. The dev can also destroy their coin. There are other stuffs that can affect the coin like the coin's popularity, random investor, etc. All I can say that everything in trading is purely random. Even if you do your research, you're still gambling your money. There's still no assurance that the future holds something good for you.
Maybe everything in the trading is random but we can still predict a part of that randomness. As you say, predictions may succeed or fail but if we predict by emotion, we are certainly gamblers and do not know anything about trading. However, if we make predictions based on our analysis and our experience, we can be proud because we are a true trader. Trading is not gambling if you focus on learning and researching it, it's just gambling with people who just rely on luck