It was also about mortgage fraud ... bond rating fraud ... multinational banks selling fraudulent mortgage backed securities based on the previous two frauds. Almost no one went to jail for any of it, the few who did were little fish. The SEC, Fed, Treasury and DOJ were asleep at the wheel before and during the crash and did almost nothing after other than reward the perpetrators: A. threw $700 billion in tax payer funds at them B. forced mergers that made some of them even bigger C. the Fed printed $4 trillion dollars and handed it to them to plow in to the stock market and juiced an 8 year bull market which enriched all of them.

Cryptocurrencies certainly have their problems but the last 10 years have been a case study in how horrible fiat currencies and the current global financial system really is. Japan's central bank has printed so much money they own something like 65% of all the ETF's on the Nikkei.

China, EU, U.S. and Japan have printed something like $16 trillion dollars since the crash. If banks leverage that at a conservative 12X that's $192 trillion. The world is awash in fantasy money.