I share much of your sentiment, I really do feel for the people who don't deeply understand crypto being fleeced via crypto by people who may or may not understand it but are absolutely misusing it.

I don't want to put readers asleep, but I see cryptocurrency as a very complex technology that requires a bordering-on-academic understanding of privacy, autonomy, sovereignty, macroeconomics, the shortcomings of FIAT currency, centralized banking, the federal reserve, fractional reserve banking, asymmetric cryptography, computer security, and a litany of other topics to fully appreciate and realize the benefits offered by Bitcoin, Monero, etc.

I think it's an utterly fascinating real-world study into the crossroads of monetary economics, market economics, politics, computer science & cybersecurity, human psychology that has some very real utilities, but...

I suspect (many? most? majority? plurality?) of the people involved in crypto really don't even care about any of that, let alone understand it, they're just speculating purely on the basis of greater fool theory, and many of them do get hurt.

I tend to be against government regulation, but as a pro-crypto person for the right reasons, even I don't think it would be a bad idea to kill the FIAT<->USD exchanges that let people who are dangerously uninformed participate (and get burned) in this wild west ecosystem. The sad reality that these exchanges have widespread KYC but no accredited investor requirements shows that the regulators are really only concerned about Uncle Sam's bottom line, not about protecting people.

The whole thing really ought to go back to where it was circa ~2012, even it comes at the cost of BTC going back to 2012 market cap and prices.

Cryptocurrency is rightfully many things: a cutting edge payment network, an enormous boon to financial privacy, a way to enable entirely new types of organizations and funding models in the business world, a source of rapid developments to and applications of fascinating and obscure cryptographic concepts (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs), a hedge against systemic FIAT and some geopolitical risks, a driver of needed improvements in FIAT financial infrastructure (just like Google Fi was a driver of needed improvements in consumer internet infrastructure), I could go on and on...

But one thing it should absolutely NOT be treated as is an "investment". It generates no cashflow and investing based on greater fool theory only ever causes speculative bubbles where the nominal price spectacularly diverges from the true economic value, just like in the tulip mania. Any decent financial advisor will tell you to avoid that like the plague!