| > scams can block activity which would be highly wealth creating What's this phenomenon called? "Spoiling the market"? "Shitting the bed"? Basically, when inauthentic activity so increases transaction costs that the authentic market is harmed. My aunt once had a pretty good cottage business selling bespoke wall paper stuff on eBay. Over time, inauthentic entries crowded out her real product. SEO, fakes, knockoffs, misnaming stuff. Her customers could no longer find her products thru eBay, even when using exact match search terms. Sound familiar? Using terms like "fraud" and "scam" seems grossly inadequate. I'm provisionally using "authentic" vs "inauthentic", which suck, for lack of better terms. A parting thought: Somehow Amazon managed to become worse than eBay, for both vendors and customers. Amazon boosts their own brands. And has a separate payola lane for "sponsored" entries. |