I hate to get caught up in any kind of argument that is devolving into semantics rather than meaningful attempts to assess differences in the kinds of risks that any of us might take in the way that we allocate value, whether we are choosing long term investing versus shorter term plays that might be trading and/or gambling (depending on how they might be played).

Just because everything can be assessed in terms of risk, that does not mean that everything is gambling, but yeah there are gradients, so that one persons assessment of probabilities of upside and/or downside may well end up being different, and one of the things that can come with investing and/or trading is a kind of lopsided investment that might ONLY measure the upside possibilities, and then that may well end up skewing behaviors into more risk taking than might otherwise be realized if a more thorough assessment had been made.

Don't get me wrong, I am not even against gambling, trading and/or taking some risks - even in terms of the employment of some investment strategies, yet some of the risk taking would likely be moderated by position size, if there had been some assessment that certain kinds of allocations might be on the risky side.

Maybe just to reiterate part of the reason this area of inquiry came up is within a context of comparing bitcoin and shitcoins, and so maybe some of us (including yours truly) becomes further triggered when there seems to be attempts to equate bitcoin and shitcoins, even though there are aspects of commonality between them, yet at the same time in this thread, over the years, we have had to express a lot less tolerance to bitcoin denigration that relates to shitcoin pumpening because such tolerances leads to just a ongoing slippery slope of never ending attempts to suggest which shitcoin might happen to be less shitty and potentially worthy of investment... which even if there might potentially be some good arguments, we are still devolving into off-topicness and opening too many cans of worms when even attempting to entertain those lines of reasons... so in that regards we are frequently better off with quips to "just say no" to shitcoins rather than potentially engaging in any arguments of subtle distinctions between shitcoins and bitcoin in the event that such at thing theoretically were to exist.




For sure one of the things that we know about the dollar is that (so far) it has tended to lose value at a fairly steady rate, so it is not as volatile, yet at the same time we know the trend is down based on the way the whole system is designed around it.

So yeah, you are right, investing in the dollar is not a gamble, since the rate of loss is pretty steadily known.. even though there might be some short periods of greater or lesser loss.

Of course, we should realize by now that bitcoin is the opposite of the dollar, even though it remains quite volatile based on both how new it is and also some of the battles around its adoption... but yeah, not everyone knows about the price direction of bitcoin that many of us have figured out and some of the ETF oriented folks are starting to catch on, even though some of them might not realize the value of holding your own keys, yet.. .. but at the same time, a large part of the whole underlying value of bitcoin is the ability to hold your own keys - and so more and more folks will learn about that with the passage of time, even though the ETF still do not have a clear and direct path to transition from their custodial holding of the BTC versus being able to "in kind" transfer over the BTC to any person who might want to convert from third-party custody and into self-custody.