One of the fundamental reasons behind financial regulation is the attempt to protect small, non-institutional investors with lesser professional knowledge of the asset markets. Even though people bear the financial risks themselves, regulation in marketplaces and also in crowdfunding try to avoid scams and poor assets that could destroy public trust towards financial markets. In other words, despite capital at risk disclaimers people are not expected to take full responsibility of actually doing their due diligence.
Investing in real projects and assets can be contrasted with traditional gambling. However, in that case we would be dealing with two completely different concepts: calculable risk and unpredictable uncertainty.
Gambling - "the known unknowns"
Casino games are typically pre-defined and not genuinely unpredictable, "uncertain" by nature. Their outcome distribution, probabilities and values of returns and losses have been designed. In other words, there are "known unknowns."
These games could be analyzed by probability calculations. Sometimes they even announce their return rate, which is commercially always below 100% and easily above 90%. By default, on average, the more you play, the more you lose. Occasional positive returns make it happen slowly.
Investing - "the unknown unknowns"
Investing in real life projects, companies or crypto tokens are bets in an uncertain future. The "game" does not have any designed, pre-determined rules which could be analyzed and revealed by probability calculation or statistical analysis. This is why many financial brochures remind you that historical performance is not a guarantee of the future.
There is no actual game design behind real life. People perceive these real life opportunities subjectively and they are also able to put effort on influencing the outcomes and making their investments more profitable. In fact, this is what entrepreneurship is all about. Some projects may be terrible and easily bring back less than 90% of the original capital invested. However, there is no predetermined cap around 100% either.
Many startups and crypto tokens have shown that bearing a risk for losing all of the invested capital, a downside of 100% has enabled to generate an asymmetrical upside of 1000% or more. This is not to say that excessive risk taking would automatically be profitable.
In a nutshell
It is more important to test our own logical and moral views: are we accidentally regarding risky venture investments with potentially positive expected returns as something more shady and suspicious than gambling which is destined to only benefit the house and not the gambler?
This is a difficult thing.
You could say that a produce vendor is betting when they buy produce wholesale to sell for retail.
But, they have been doing it every day.
Most investments are that way. Build a house, sell it for more than it cost to build. Build a widget, sell if form more than it cost to make. Grow some food, sell it and reap the rewards from your labor.
But all of these have a catastrophe component.
The market for your product can move and shift.
The housing market, supposedly stable, is actually built on a layer of quicksand which is the bank's money printing.
So, the end statement would be, there are ways to add value, and those ways always return wins.. except when you roll 00.