Early in Bitcoin we came across the 1923 "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 -- which described some of the scams we were seeing cropping up.

Much of the altcoin industry seems to have picked it up as an instruction manual.

(Not that there aren't scams in Bitcoin land-- but they've mostly been concentrated into the altcoin ecosystems, which tend to be overweight in the exuberant and gullible even compared to Bitcoin. It's completely unsurprising to see the FTX implosion happening at a scamcoin casino who's CEO had been publicly attacking Bitcoin -- it would have been much more surprising to see it at a Bitcoin only or mostly organization)

Altcoins prey on gullible, ignorant, greedy people - the best people to scam. Those are also the targets of Nigerian princes and all other get rich quick schemes.

Shitcoins represent a technological breakthrough in scamming because they scale so much better than operating a call center and have no physical footprint