Bitcoin / Bitcoins / Crypto Currency

From the laymans point of view the bankers and investors or whoever is involved with using money to try and make money. They are gamblers.
Just because they have a few degrees and are 'regulated' by some shady governance doesn't make them any less so.
It can be dressed up however you want but they spunk money up the wall and are therefore gamblers.

I go and play poker in my local pub. Yes I have a better understanding of the odds and statistics than my fellow gamblers and I may play a game that utilises this knowledge better than others but at the end of the day it still comes down to luck. If you cannot predict the outcome of an event with absolute certainty then you are relying on luck and are therefore gambling
In your anaology, the bank plays the role of the house.

The casinos don't gamble - they take their slice from the gamblers, both the winners and the losers.

If you want to torturously stretch the analogy a bit more, they then take the income they make from the games being played in the house, and sell that income stream to other people, de-risking their exposure to the income stream.

What? Taking note of the risks, knowing they were insanely high and still choosing to splunk down a load of 'cash'/whatever to proceed and then losing said cash is exactly gambling.

Bankers were placing bets that their institution could not hope to cover if they failed. They failed.
It all went tits up.
If that's not gambling, the dictionary is wrong.
Taking note of risks and doing something with them is not gambling.

Repackaging risk and flogging it to someone else seems like not-betting to me.

As I said though - Some bets were made.

However, the whole shebang was not down to just those bets.