If you think crypto is only with STEM you're woefully out of touch. I'd wager the adoption and continued interest in crypto is actually lower among STEM than many other professional circles.

There’s a tremendous market for gambling disguised as something more intellectually and morally palatable.

I'm sure there are a new wave of stealth startups furiously working on schemes to turn real estate investing into something closer to casino gambling. I mean there's already speculation in that asset class but the slow rate of actual transactions makes it less like gambling than stocks / options / currency / commodities. (I'm not saying this will be a good thing, just that it seems like the next logical step in enabling gambling on everything.)

I mean, see the last financial crisis. A lot of that was more or less precisely this; activities relating to real estate lending were made more profitable, but riskier (in a way which was poorly understood at the time, though obvious in hindsight).

As a result of that financial crisis, real estate is somewhat heavily regulated in most countries, and exotic financial instruments based on real estate (which you’d need to make this work) are treated with suspicion. Probably not the most fertile ground for the aspiring scammer.

If a few stories I read were true. The part of the thing was absolutely certainly going to blow up sooner than later. Certain loans were economically impossible.

That was something a little different. Degenerate gamblers don't want to wait months or years to see if their bets hit. If someone is going to turn real estate into outright gambling then they'll have to find a way to accelerate the cycle time.

And there’s a lot of people to prey on who don’t understand the difference between day trading and investing.

STEM people might have been early adopters for crypto as a currency, but are they really the main people speculating, these days?