Doing the wild west days America had a bunch of what was called wildcat currencies issued by private banks with dubious backing in either non existing gold reserves or over inflated property holdings.

look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking it's kind of an interesting period in finance that got kind of forgotten as it did not exactly end well.

I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly.

We don't have written accounts of the tulip craze but I would imagine there were a lot of nefarious activities underway then. This is more global and the movement of money is transparent but anonymous in some ways. I think a hard part for a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel is the cash to crypto laundering that needs to happen in the amounts that it needs to. My guess is it was easier for shady banks and other crypto products to do shady things since its all just bits and bytes.

Whenever you have a space where boundaries are not imposed and actions merely have externalities rather than consequences for the actor, malicious actors that find it difficult to act how they want elsewhere flock to this space; this makes being in that space more and more painful, and so if the space remains lawless, people who can exist elsewhere abandon it, until the space is inhabited mostly or only by malicious actors.

We see this in online communities. We see it in the real physical world. And, yes, we are seeing it play out in crypto.

An online community without restrictions or boundaries doesn't look like one's fond memories of university dorm chats over a glass of wine; it looks like 4chan or the dark web.

A country without effective governance doesn't look like the romanticised media depictions of the wild west or your favourite science fictional post-scarcity anarchy utopia; it looks like Somalia.

A financial system without regulations doesn't look like your family kitty; it looks like, well, the crypto ecosystem.

Humans can't do better unless we all start to consistently choose cooperate/cooperate in prisoner's dilemma, and one quick look at, well, any community anywhere today shows we are a long way away from that.

This is not a technical problem, and cannot be solved with a technical solution. Humans do not know how to solve it. I wish we did. Historically, the most aspirational attempts to solve this problem have been the ones with the most gruesome outcomes.

The western United States was pretty wild for a while until it was "tamed"

Years back when TOR was new I stumbled on a site selling "family videos with kids" for ethereum. Soured me on crypto enough never to fall for it.