[wmf]

To be clear, the speculative lottery that I was talking about is the BTC-USD daytrading on the exchanges. A significant fraction of that speculation is due to press hype that is due to rapid price spikes caused by earlier speculation.

Mining involves some speculation about future difficulty and future exchange rates (since you have to pay for electricity in real money), but at least there are some fundamentals that you can build a model around. With simple calculations (that ignored transaction fees BTW) I was able to correctly predict when mining would and would not be profitable and mine accordingly.