[temp-dude-87844]

The cryptocurrency boom, like tulip mania, was always reliant on there being an endless supply of greater fools to which you could eventually offload these strange wares. And, if you were genuinely using this for peer-to-peer payments, and wanted to turn your play-money into cash, you always needed a banc-like party willing to take your deposits. Like in most financial systems, that's where most of the money was made: on money service fees.

Similarly, it's not a surprise that this found an audience among people with fewer options to make it big from more traditional investments (mostly because they lack large amounts of capital they could afford to tie up). Risky investments are attractive precisely because the magnitude of the payoff can be extreme. People who play the lottery think the same way. And, shysters, influencers, and companies peddled this to specific disenchanted or newly-climber demographics on purpose. Surely you've seen ads for when every newfangled phone money management app started a 'crypto' section, like Robinhood or Square's Cash App.