But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too.

The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

They're not saying it's different, but that people are more desperate to latch onto get rich quick schemes now than they would've been pre-2008. Which is why crypto was huge. If this movement happened in 2005, maybe there wouldn't have been enough desperation for it to hit critical mass and blow up in popularity.

Well, the thing is that bitcoin happened as a reaction to 2008...

The crypto thing has always been about front running regulation and overall awareness of the grift. Whereas most people understood that traditional ponzis and gambling often end with criminal charges and/or financial losses, in 2021 crypto could still tout "line go up" since the other shoe hadn't dropped yet. The layers of obfuscation involved in crypto schemes meant that normal users had essentially no way to comprehend the real risks, other than to rely on a more general truism (like "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch").

GP post is suggesting that demand for this kind of speculation was up, and if that's the case, many of these people in the "market" for scams and gambling might have been more attracted to crypto because it still had some veneer of safety/legitimacy about it.

Nobody could plausibly claim that now that the failures are finally coming to light, of course.

Edit: I would suggest this is largely a failure of the media, which had long treated crypto as legitimate by default despite having the resources to pay real experts to actually cover it critically. Of course, even had traditional media outlets been sounding the alarm, who knows if it would have mattered much - faith in media is very low right now (exactly because they so often get this sort of thing wrong).

There is also, particularly post 2008, an exaggerated sense of criminality in our financial system that made people who otherwise would have moral qualms about what they’re doing embrace or even work in crypto/web3 because, in their minds, everyone else is scamming anyway.

That would still have been appropriate for... I think the previous bubble was in 2017 ?

This time, as the FTX mess shows, the blame is on """regulators""" and """sophisticated""" investors completely failing to do their job.

> in favor of an upper middle class of professionals who enjoy stability, and an enlarged sub-middle class

I cannot remember where I read it but the gist essentially was that you are either mastering the software or the software is mastering you. It jives with what you are saying.