this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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With crypto, it was largely MLM scammers who started pumping it (futily, for the most part) until Ross Ulrich and the Silk Road leveraged it for black market sales.
Then Bitcoin, specifically, took off as a means of subverting bank regulations on financial transactions. This encouraged more big-ticket speculators to enter the market, leading to the JP Morgan sponsorship of Etherium (NFTs were a big part of this scam).
There's a whole historical pedigree to each major crypto offering. Solana, for instance, is tied up in Howard Lutnick's play at crypto through Cantor Fitzgerald.
Interesting.
I guess AI isn't so dissimilar, with major 'sects' having major billionaire/corporate backers, sometimes aiming for specific niches.
Anthropic was rather infamously funded by FTX. Deepseek came from a quant trading (and to my memory, crypto mining) firm, and there's loose evidence the Chinese govt is 'helping' all its firms with data (or that they're sharing it with each other under the table, somehow). Many say Zuckerberg open-sourced llama to 'poison the well' over OpenAI going closed.
Silk Road and other black market vendors existed well before the scams started. You could mail order drugs online when bitcoin was under $1, the first bubble pushed the price to $30 before crashing to sub-$1 again. THEN the scams and market manipulation took off.
Later people forked the project to create new chains in order to run rug pulls and other modern crypto scams.
Silk Road was launched in 2011, the same year of the first big Mt. Gox crypto heist (now largely recognized as an inside job).
Crypto scams are as old as Bitcoin itself.
Except no, because Bitcoin started in 2009. What OP said above is 100% accurate. Others that were interested in early crypto and lived through it like me experienced the same. The scams didn't start until crypto had value a couple years in.
Again, look up the history of Mt. Gox.
It was only that largest of the scam sights.
My dude. That's like saying, "look up the history of Wallstreet" implying the MOMENT it was active, it was full of scams.
MT. Gox SLOWLY became a site to trade crypto as if it were a security. Just like Wallstreet. When that started working and became valuable, then the scams started.
The fact it worked for CRYPTO at all was by complete ACCIDENT too. As proven by the REAL FULL name of Mt Gox: "Magic the Gathering Online eXchange."
You wanna believe there were devious plans to scam Bitcoin at MtGox from the beginning despite it originally being a place to trade Magic Cards?
There's also basics economics. Bitcoin was worth less than a dollar at that point. Who is going to create complex technical scams for pennies?
No one. That's why the scams started when the pennies turned into dollars. Crime is only going to Crime when there's profit to be made.
You seriously might want to look up the history of Wall Street.
For what? For when it shut down from fraud like Mt. Gox? Hasn't happened yet.
Almost like it takes TIME before fraud infects a system of trade to the point legal action is needed.
You seriously think someone started "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange" to scam people from Crypto? You must, so explain it to me.
Fraud needs a motive.
What's the motive to start a fraudulent Bitcoin exchange as a Magic the Gathering card trading site first?
Enlighten me.
Don't forget that the development of Ethereum was funded in large part by Peter Thiel
Theil is buying now but he's a late arrival.