> The early days of the dotcom space were filled with carnage of a type which makes crypto look pretty normal.

Carnage, yes. I ran "downside.com" back then. (It's still up, but I stopped updating it around 2006.). In the first dot-com boom, everybody went public. So you could track their numbers from SEC filings. I just took their cash flow numbers and computed when the cash would run out as the "death date". That was surprisingly accurate.

But not as many out and out scams as in crypto. Most of the original dot-coms actually did something real. It might not have been profitable, but there was some utility. You could order from Webvan and the stuff would show up.