Nick Szabo  🔑

Dumb money could only reach these epic proportions with massive government intervention. And it’s the root cause of every financial crisis. And #bitcoin will defund it.https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/1153471576374829058 …

Nah. It's just strangers conning strangers, media manipulation which goes on with governments and markets alike. The main difference is the government adds arrest and imprisonment to the defrauding of strangers who think PR people are their friends.

If normal people hadn’t been trained from youth to invest in things they don’t understand this epidemic wouldn’t be massive. My grandmother’s generation wasn’t nearly as easy to part with their savings.

I'm not sure what generation your grandmother was, but to hear my family talk about war bonds in WW2 (when mine would have been nearly 40) I'm not so sure... Quite a few were swindled in bucket shops and per capital income dropped almost 40% in the depression... Nostalgia?

War bonds were not a crazy risk when the alternative is USD. And those small scams taught people not to risk more money- certainly not life savings - on risky investments. Public schools have greatly reduced the sucker acquisition costs.

It takes a lot of indoctrination to move an entire population into investing in things they are utterly clueless about. There are always fools, but when this foolishness becomes universal, you have to look for causation outside human nature.