I think the same conditions also product a lot of _accidental_ scammers; people who aren't intentionally selling something impossible, but are merely too incompetent to realise that what they are promising is impossible (I think someone linked an LLM tool that claimed to _do your taxes for you_ here recently...).

That's not to say there's nothing to it, but it is a near-perfect playground for grifters.

The answer is obvious: because there are still enough chumps to be tricked. There will always be people willing to believe anything, and there will always be others ready to exploit that.

Plus, you’re conflating things. Cryptocurrencies as technology aren’t inherently scams, it just so happens their features make them an extremely well suited tool to run scams with (which can take various forms), so much so that’s by far their most common use case.

Cryptocurrencies increase in value as more people use them, but they don't fall to zero as a result of becoming widespread, because their sole value isn't for speculation. They can also be used as a currency.

Now, some of these valuations have built into them the assumption that their use as a currency will ultimately become widespread, because otherwise they would be worth a lot less than they are. But less isn't the same as zero, and volatility doesn't matter if you are using it as a currency because then you're not holding enough of it for a long enough period of time to be exposed to a major change in value.

With a MLM scam the value doesn't just have volatility, when you run out of suckers the value crashes to zero forever. With cryptocurrency the speculators can lose their shirts and at the end of the day you can still buy Bitcoin with cash and then use it to pay for a VPN.

But I wouldn't characterize all, or even most of crypto as scams. Gambling, maybe. Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. Which you might argue is a bad thing, and certainly is dubious from a social standpoint. But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.

Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

Now you might argue that all of these things are stupid and pointless and wastes of money, but that's a separate debate. Of the large projects in these categories almost none are outright scams. They're teams experimenting with new ways to run financial markets or move payments or train models or hedge inflation. Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

One person might experience something as a young age and others later.

My assumption is now that crypto is in such a good place (money, rich, tech) that it finds so many people.

Yes crypto is good in scamming

(Nothing personal, but it had to be said.)

Unless governments step in and ban them, there will always be new crypto scams.

Of course those companies have every right to keep that material up, but it's strange how those scams are tolerated when other stuff is taken down. The pure scale of it all probably makes those scams more effective than they used to be as well. You don't gotta sell your miracle water from town to town anymore, you just make a YouTube video and send it out to a million people. Cryptocurrency scams really take advantage of this.

Not sure why those companies don't care about users getting taken advantage of, but they don't. Sometimes it feels like our economy is based on scams all the way down.