In comparison, crypto looks like a rational product relative to that.
Dividing up the credit risk on a pool of loans so that some people lose money only if all the loans go bad is a very good idea. You just need to make sure they are good loans.
People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.
People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.
You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.
I recently heard of a real estate person that wound up buying an entire neighborhood around one of the stadiums for next year's World Cup. The impetus for this decision was to jack up the rates during the tournament, and then sell them off after. Another person thinks renting a bunch of Teslas and then placing them Touro will be another get rich idea during the World Cup. There are all sorts of people that think they are smarter than everyone else and are so confident they just cannot think of any ways their idea will fail.
> Who's going to give you anything for your bozo bucks? At this rate, it's not going to take long.
It's already here. Scan your eye-balls for some Worldcoins ($WLD) to prove you are not a LLM bot.
Part of the problem is that this seems to describe most of the economy now. Maybe not specifically money laundering, but it’s all a grift whether we are talking about Binance, OpenAI, or Skydance-Paramount. There are grifts everywhere which just encourages more grifts as people see the resulting success and lack of consequences.