You aren’t wrong, but people have very different mindsets.

People play the lotto for fun. They think hey maybe I’ll get lucky and win. Sure there are addicts , but I don’t think default behavior is “if I play this I’ll be rich “

Crypto is literally “if I trade this I’ll get rich”.

But, both are roughly 0 sum games in the end as you rightly pointed out.

Then their mindset is the problem, not everyone else or the crypto ecosystem. The risk behind the volatility and instability is your responsibility to understand. No one is deceiving or misleading people about these risks. If there are "get rich quick" schemes around crypto, I agree they should be prosecuted for fraud.

> No one is deceiving or misleading people about these risks

Almost everyone in cryptocurrency has deceiving prospective buyers for years. You can still find people shilling the long-term value of Bitcoin and until the crash you could throw a rock and hit someone claiming NFTs were an investment or saying that it was just like the stock market.

That was the source of so much of the opposition on HN: it’s not that it was new but that it was being sold as something it transparently wasn’t, and perhaps 5% of the people in the field could engage intellectually with people who asked about fundamentals. Had people been selling digital lotto tickets, far fewer people would have objected because the risk and benefit profiles would have been accurate.

Tell me how many articles you can find on the web about how Crypto is the path to get rich.

Now repeat the search with Lotto or Slot Machines.

The information out there is not at all unbiased or fair.