People want money more than ever. But financial education and common sense is at all time lows. But also people have access to applications that allow for rapid investing at the speed of thought. And Crypto provides a vehicle for obfuscating transfers of wealth, from fools to scammers. Barriers to entry in creating a scam are very low. Social media allows for rapid propagation to unwary victims. Governments don’t do anything to protect people.
Every day they see value of housing, stocks and cryptos skyrocketing while their wage remains stagnant. They don’t believe they could ever catch up and they feel obliged take riskier and stupid bets like stable coins.
It also doesn’t help that they don’t trust sensible financial advice because those advocate investing in the old system that had failed them. Hence the “haters gonna hate” attitudes from some crypto dudes.
I only got into taking Bitcoin because UIGEA cut my real-money gaming startup off at the knees right when I'd finished 3 years of coding and beta testing. I spent a lot of time in the gambling world with sharks, but Bitcoin was a whoooole other pit of snakes. And those [early Bitcoin] guys at least understood the technology and believed in the libertarian ethos of it, even if they were also the first to understand how to manipulate the market. What's gross is watching a whole generation of scammers and marks who don't even fundamentally understand what's going on.
IMHO financial education is pretty simple: Don't take on debt. Don't invest in people who take on debt. Don't invest in something that's too good to be true. Save as much as you can. Save something from every paycheck. Buy stocks that pay dividends, reinvest and don't touch them until you're dead. Don't dip into capital. Don't ever sell real estate. It's not hard, it's not complicated, it's just not fast. If it's fast, it's too good to be true; see step 3.
But when the pattern repeats time and time again, you gotta start to realize what it is, even if you can't define or prove it.
In an system centered on printing money and distributing it via the banking industry to whichever group is preferred by the current government? Might be the worst advice I have seen. Mortgages are free money and if you aren't using that you are going to become poor within a generation.
Therefore, people now have insatiable urges to acquire money by all means necessary, even prostituting themselves casually through OnlyFans.