What BTC has BECOME however, is no longer about solving technical issues. Its now a money-making device... a financial instrument. With most people pointing out how much money they're making instead of how many issues they've solved.
Ah well. At least I learned GPU compute from this experiment. I thank the BTC community for this. (at least, those who were actual nerds and liked solving problems). The OpenCL code written by the BTC / Eth / Monero / etc. etc. communities was clean, usable, and easily experimented upon.
I got what I wanted out of the cryptocoin community. So its been worthwhile. It also taught me the importance of community values: seeing the nerd paradise corrupt itself into financial interests taught me a lot about human nature, and the evolution of communities.
Its not so much that "the nerds" got corrupted. The community got corrupted as money became more and more the focus. It makes me wonder how VCs keep a "technology culture" at the forefront of the actual financial markets (like YCombinator).