Just because some ICOs can be scams is no reason to write off the entire concept as a scam.
Anyone and their dog can start an ICO with nothing but a website filled with fluff and bullcrap.
Unless you're doing some illegal (e.g. money laundering), there's no need and zero add for cryptocurrency for gambling. I don't need a distributed ledger with block consensus and wasting power computation to carry out a merchangt transaction.
Think about a smart contract that has immutable code in it that has a bug regarding shuffling of the deck or misuse/error on financial transfer. There's nothing to think about or do...it's immutable. Once released on ethereum you're out of luck.
Think about running an auction and placing bids, I can place a bid and not have the money which can only be resolved in an alley way or a court with us dollars or we can conduct a more open auction and even a blind auction with cryptography on the blockchain, it is also easier for everyone to participant globally without sacrificing the privacy of giving your card information, I don't have anything to hide but would you consider giving a financial company like Equifax your personal information a safe thing?
Online gambling sites can take card just fine using the same card processors as other companies.
It's still reductive, bogus logic at the end of the day.
As a general rule of thumb, any Ethereum contract that doesn't use an oracle is probably stupid.
2. If "the gift cards of the future" was the pitch for tokens, nobody would pay them any attention.