I don’t think people entirely buy lottery tickets expecting to win and doing the rational thing of calculating expectation values and taking calculated risks after weighing opportunity costs. They just want to daydream and paying a few dollars for a ticket makes that more exciting.
We buy raffle tickets, not because we expect to win, but because we support the cause.
Gambling can be entertainment. If I spend all night in a casino, end up $50 down, but had a fun night, how is that different to a ballgame, or show, or whatever. [1]
In the same way people buy lottery tickets not because they _expect_ to win, but because its entertaining to _think about winning_, and the ticket is the price of admission. [2]
[1] clearly there's a difference between losing entertainment money, and rent money. And gambling is not a good hobby for most people.
[2] actually _winning_ the lottery has massive relationship downsides, which one can clearly ignore while daydreaming. Losing all your friends, an almost inevitable consequence, seems like a bad thing...
It's basically being marketed as a get rich quick scheme to most retail.
* options have legit uses but almost no one is retail is using them for things like capping risk.
Of course, they're are always people who spend everything they have on gambling, but most people agree that a lottery is something you expect to lose.
When people invest, they don't expect to lose. Of course course, there is always the risk of losing, but the difference between a lottery and an investment is that there is an expectation of loss in the former case.
There were enough cryptocurrencies that got pumped enough that people who bought into crypto felt that they had a good chance at succeeding. Also, there's been an insane amount of delusional fanboyism surrounding crypto that would be seen as completely insane if we're talking about gambling.
A lottery ticket costs no more than a few dollars. Even if you buy a bunch of tickets to improve your odds, that's still a few hundred dollars tops.
What I mean is to say, it is a more honest/accurate statement that "you have zero chance of winning when you buy a lottery ticket" is more true than claiming they have a chance, (even if it is literally true) due to how our mind biases work.