I was very excited for Bitcoin in 2012, I mined a few on my gaming rig that was also being used for some Seti@Home and Folding@Home calculations when idle. I imagined that at some point it'd be an useful technology.
We are 10 years in, I've followed the whole scene from the outside, not really engaged in it but always keeping tabs on developments, exciting things popping up, etc. I'm thoroughly convinced the current crop of cryptocurrencies/cryptofinance should die.
I dislike the apologisers bringing up that "scams are not exclusively to cryptocurrency", yes, of course, there are scams everywhere but very few technologies live in this crossroads of lack of control and perverse incentives for greedy people to rob others. The amount of money circulating in it freely available to be scammed is also on a level different than most others. The enabling of scams with this technology is absurd.
10 years in and I still haven't really found a use-case that could come close to compensate for the amount of money that naive people have lost, I've seen complete assholes that I personally know become filthy rich, quickly, just by not having any moral compass and being enabled by this technology to steal from others.
No, I won't focus on the possibilities of the future knowing the amount of damage it creates in the present, I don't live with a Machiavellian moral of "the ends justify the means". The current means suck and there is no big push from the cryptocurrency scene to address those properly because it's been co-opted by the scammers through and through.
Does the technology itself still have some exciting features? Yes. Do I believe that it'll eventually evolve to something that is actually useful and not hostile? No, I don't believe that, not the current crop of people working on it.
> If so many people are excited and dedicating their lives to it, isn't it possible that you missed something important?
Isn't it possible that those people have misguided (or mischievous) motivations? It's not because a lot of people fall into a hype that it makes the hype validated. Even less a hype that is completely and absolutely created by pure greed.