Honestly, this was to be expected. I believe that crypto-currency has some massive potential but at this state in the game, there’s limited things you can use your coins for. Bitcoin, being the biggest and most notable, is still absolutely a pain to a convert in and out of fiat. Especially for newbies just learning about the technology (after hearing about all the guys making a killing and assuming the trend will continue no doubt). Bitcoin’s usefulness is near useless at this point and so it’s only value is as a speculative investment. Initially, there was a variety of reasons why Bitcoin and blockchain was attractive. For me it was the noble idea that Bitcoin could be used to liberate a whole portion of the world economy from oppressive governments or broken financial systems but I’ve noticed that people don’t talk about that anymore. The new marketing speak for bitcoin is that it’s a “store of value” which is bs if you consider the fact that the value you’re trying to store is now worth much much less than it was a few months ago. I cashed out of 90% of my holdings in December before the huge run up because it was like people got hit with a spell and were foaming at the mouth for it. I did feel a bit of FOMO of course as most of my colleagues were buying property and fancy ass cars afterwards but the stress just wasn’t worth it. As soon as I saw a nail salon advertising a “become a bitcoin millionaire today!” ad which sent me to a affiliate link, I realized that we were at peak ridiculousness. The unfortunate thing is that a lot of people got burnt the last few months. Largely innocent bystanders whose naivety and unfamiliarness with the technology used against them in an exploitive way(not really an excuse for bad investment decisions though, most of that still falls on the “investor”). It will make things harder to get people to adopt useful coins or applications of blockchain once the kinks are worked out in the future. But then again, maybe that’s what we need. More caution and less hysteria. I see a future where more than likely you will have no idea whether the application you’re using is on a blockchain or not. A technology layer in which being on a blockchain isn’t hyped up for marketing speech, just as we don’t hype up other layers which keep our modern world functioning and instead just offers users an intuitive UI with as little steps as possible to do what you’re trying to do.