Crypto bros are self selecting for scams. If your world view has been degraded to see zero trust as a solution rather than a dystopian end state, meaning you’ve lost all trust in society, you’re highly vulnerable to be conned by the authority figures you secretly crave to trust.
It’s much of what Elon,
Trump and other populists actively foster and exploit in their fan base through relentless conspiracy theories and undermining of trust into anyone who isn’t them.
There’s a paradox here - the more people have their trust violated, the more distrustful they get, the easier they get scam as the overhead of approaching every transaction / interact in life with an adversarial mindset exhausts critical capacity and drives people into desperate savior fantasies - technological miracles, charlatans. snakeoil, the twentieths coin or pump and dump.
Zero trust (non security version - the inability to extend trust) is a miserable desperate state to be in as a human being and makes people highly vulnerable to getting taken advantage of and crypto signaling on social media either identifies you as a scammer or as a mark. You still believe technology can solve societies trust dilemma, you are asking for it at this point.
And the longer the scamming goes on, the stronger the signal of this self identifying audience becomes. It’s like responding to Nigerian prince emails at this point.
Go reddit, look at the safemoon subreddit. It’s … wild how many times you can rip off some people and have them get more militant in their belief they are smart.
As a footnote, more and more tech companies explore this to prop up shrinking profit margins. By selling previously valuable trust marks such as the top result on google (there was a time you could trust this) or flat out verification marks that previously were meant to foster Trust and Safety for money, erosion of trust becomes a profitable feature. It’s good for platforms when users cannot tell placed / bought placement and fake news from actual valuable content.
It’s just terminal for society - each time someone is scammed, has their trust betrayed, they slide a little bit closer into that state that is so exploitable by populists.