Stories like these are full of anecdote and short on facts, it's hard for me to know what to make of them.
I don’t think people losing tens of thousands are the norm but absolutely there is a never ending list of people who’ve lost most of what they put in, whether that was hundreds or low thousands.
In January they were saying to me "it's not a loss if you don't sell, right?" Literally 0 financial education.
and the more amazing thing to me was that they also didn't even want to know
the markets were moving too fast to learn anything, too fast to learn about the history, too fast to put any asset under scrutiny because there is another shiny new thing to trade with a cool name and interesting founding team
or as the ZCash employees and fans are programmed to say "the math is interesting and the cryptographers are highly regarded so--" THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CRYPTOCURRENCY TRADERS
But it's not that big of a mental jump to make, isn't college education also a kind of long-term gamble with debt? You take on huge debt to get an education that will maybe allow you to make a high enough income to pay back your debt in a reasonable time.
For some that gamble pays off, for others, not so much.
As a personal anecdote: I'm far from being wealthy, but I've always made sure to never have debt. A very good friend of mine, only a few years older, is right now going through personal bankruptcy due to some rather adventurous choices in his younger years.
But he still doesn't seem like he's learned anything. When talking about potential financial investments he always treats me like I'm some kind of millionaire as my good credit history, and meager savings, could easily get me very high loans.
It's like some people see their total credit limit, across several institutions, as their actual own capital in a very naive "As long as somebody is gonna give it to me, it's mine!" way.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/17/this-family-bet-it-all-on-bi...