I’ll bite.
My friends and I were into bitcoin in mid-2009. We mined some coins on our 8800 GT.
At the time, I read the papers and the wiki and understood that the technology will not scale so greatly, in a way it wasn’t even designed to; it felt like an interesting proof of concept, the ability to actually buy things with bitcoins felt largely like a novelty, I remember buying a coffee in Prague a few years later for like 16 bitcoins or something.
I was ambivalent on the technology, but understood that fundamentally it was quite wasteful (computationally).
But something changed, suddenly people were using it to launder money, then once it started earning value (due to it being finite and so many people having already mined the majority of coins and probably losing the wallets) scammers crept in.
Now I see reels on Instagram glorifying “trader” life, so many of the old tired schemes from 100 years ago that used to plague the markets are new again.
Just like how our bodies have no tolerance to thousand year old virus’ that have long since gone extinct; our brains are not easily capable of understanding these schemes anymore: because they’ve been illegal and regulated for more than our lifetimes, we have no “natural immunity” to them.
When alls said and done, the initial promise isn’t even kept, there’s very few “super miners” who if they worked together would be able to control the entire bitcoin economy, which is the situation with central banks.
So what were left with is a scam ridden, fundamentally wasteful technology that doesn’t scale properly and does not solve the problem it was meant to; and the main reason that this is the case is because scammers adopted it so readily.
You can see exactly what I mean when you look at Monero. Objectively Monero solves the problems with bitcoin, but because it’s very difficult to trade with (due to it being privacy focused and no exchange willing to trade it) the price is very stable, since it can’t easily be used for money laundering or scams due to it’s higher barrier to entry.
That said, I’m still fairly ambivalent but leaning towards negative.
I will not work for a “crypto” company or with “NFTs” for example.