I agree with your post. However, there's another side to this coin.

Scum exists in the free market and I've heard --- some of the wealthiest people in the world --- make the argument of "Well, if I didn't do it, someone else would have."

Plenty of scummy/unethical companies exist are publicly traded stocks. There's even "Pyramid schemes" masquerading as multilevel marketing that are publicly traded in the USA. Traders have certainly made money off these organizations by buying/selling their stocks, even though the core product is 99%+ certain to bring a net financial loss to people who are uninformed about these schemes.

Additionally, I have a problem with poker players conflating the term investment and speculation.

Anytime you stake another poker player, that's speculation.

I wish that distinction were a bit clear. A lot of under-informed would-be poker stakers hear Dan Bilzerian's stories on Instagram about how he staked all of these people and made millions. Those stories only draw more suckers into the staking scheme.

I mean if your point is scum exists in other forms including from major companies you're right. It still doesn't justify poker players being scum and blatantly ripping off naïve people and they should be called out on it.

He offered a bet and people accepted it. Just because using statistics and logic you can figure out that he would have an advantage, it doesn't make it a rip off and it doesn't make him a scammer.

I totally agree.

The free market solution to this would be to some how breakdown the numbers required for you to make back your investment + profit and to make that process as easy and transparent as possible. Maybe put those numbers side by side with graphs and charts to help people understand the short and long term implications of a staking deal. A website or entity brokering a staking deal likely wouldn't want to make those calculations known, because it's almost always -EV for the staker, and hurts the bottom line of the entity brokering the staking deal.

If you have a credit card statement, you get a breakdown of how the APR is calculated, how long it was take to pay off said balance, etc. These deals should have similar levels of transparency just from an ethical standpoint of informing the consumer.

I see the staking market as another mechanism that sharps in the poker community are using to extract value out of people who are bad at math.

If transparency were added to the math involved with making a staking deal, it may turn away a lot of the dumb money.

I personally do not understand the whole staking a stranger thing. If I were to stake anyone, it would be someone I know and it would be done, knowing that it is almost certain to be a money losing proposition. It's the same premise of lending a friend money for me personally.