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This exactly. And Crypto's biggest "innovation" by far was giving us an entirely new unregulated financial market with zero consumer protections that included, as a bonus, the trappings and added complexity of software and let con men the world over dust off every money scheme from the last hundred years and do a fresh round.

Edit: Further, "education" shouldn't even be a factor here. You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Taking advantage of people's trust and stealing their money should be illegal, the offenders should be punished, and the victims made whole. There is no reason in a civilized society to permit financial crimes, which is what this shit is. Stealing is fucking stealing, whether you take something from a store, whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.

> You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed.

Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before.

- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone.

- The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.)

- The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1]

It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...

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Yep. Much of cryptocurrency content is just "Discover Why Financial Regulations Exist" speedruns.