Some would say bitcoin's volatility makes us "gamblers" more than "investors."
I'm pretty sure that, at this stage of the game, that "some" is actually pretty much anybody.
Volatility doesn't define whether you can consider something an "investment" or not. Arguably the only reasonable definition is whether a decent case can be made that the position is positive-expectation, whatever the variance. There are plenty of decent theses for buying/holding bitcoin right now being +EV. Note that some may consider investments with variance beyond some threshold to be "bad investments" due to what they subjectively consider to be unacceptably-high volatility, which is a perfectly rational opinion to hold and definition to make.
By contrast, there was no reasonable thesis for the pirate scam to be long-run profitable for participants. Thus, it was a -EV position for participants, much like roulette is necessarily -EV at a casino, but poker is not (necessarily).
An investments' potential risk is sometimes measured by the volatility. If something has a high volatility then it it should only be purchased if the money used to invest will not be needed for a long time. At a point if the volatility is high enough, an investment will become nothing more then a gamble (regardless of it's EV).