The statistics here seem more important than the individual cases. Not everyone who talks up penny stocks is long them either, but most of the people sending spam promoting various penny-stock pump-and-dump schemes have a selfish financial angle in doing so.

I'm not saying there's no reason to be interested in Bitcoin other than personal financial motives. The technology is legitimately interesting, but not nearly enough to have gotten the marketing push that it's gotten, particularly here. Only one thing explains that: the selfish incentives that the current implementation of Bitcoin provides. (Well, or extremist ideology.)