One takeaway I've gotten from cryptocurrency is the sense that money "wants" to misbehave. It "wants" to scam, pump and dump, make bubbles, and especially to ga

One takeaway I've gotten from cryptocurrency is the sense that money "wants" to misbehave. It "wants" to scam, pump and dump, make bubbles, and especially to gamble. It's incredibly difficult to get money to do things that are constructive. Of course money doesn't "want" anything. That's a metaphor. The real driver is human cognitive biases and the dopamine loop. Gambling and scams provide a Skinner box type environment that plugs right into our closed dopamine loop systems. Productive investments often do not. They take too long to mature, are too risky (individually but not necessarily in aggregate), and are too hard. The path of least resistance for economic activity is something like those casino-like loot box games but with markets and pseudo-investments. Without heavy regulation money will just gamble and scam and gamble and scam. The only way to get it to do anything productive is to systematically block off the other avenues, which is an endless game of whack a mole against both the natural organic tendencies of human beings and the large number of hustlers and sociopaths who love to take advantage of them. As the USA has demonstrated, this does not require a fully planned economy with a total loss of freedom. It just requires that there be barriers in place to prevent people from advertising casino chips and pyramid schemes as investments, and requiring that such things be gated at the very least by disclaimers that explain what they actually are. The term investment should be reserved for actual investments. This is actually protecting people from fraud, which is a legitimate function of government in a free society. Our execution of it has of course been flawed and sloppy, but that's real political systems for you. It's better than nothing. Absolute anarchy is not freedom. It's the rule of the nearest thug with the biggest stick... or the best grift in the case of markets. The "big stick" is a deceptive pitch that hooks your dopamine system and drains you.