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It has this kind of veil of "high techness" to it that is appealing to smart-but-uninformed people (like me in 2021). I'm embarrassed that I fell for it, but on the bright side it does make me a bit more sympathetic for other people who also fell for it.
I don't think most academics would fall for the "Nigerian Prince" chain emails, or the "Romance Scams" you see on YouTube, which are things I usually associate with extremely gullible people.
Pretend money, at least in my opinion, is not one of those uses.
These things can take time; it might be thirty years or more before someone does anything actually useful with the stuff learned from the crypto world.
I don't know about you, but I barely follow cryptocurrency news, and I've still been hearing about major players getting "hacked" several times a year for over a decade.
Either it's Mt Gox or FTX or The DAO or Bitfinex or QuadrigaCX or Terra/Luna or rug-pull meme coins or dollar-backed coins that actually aren't or any of a dozen other things.
Anyone who isn't being extremely careful to avoid scams, given the constant drumbeat of reports about how you have to be extremely careful to avoid scams when dealing with cryptocurrency, is pretty gullible.
My parents, both smart people but neither of which know much about distributed systems or concurrent computing or cryptocurrency, see the news reports about Mt Gox or BitConnect and think "that sounds like a scam", avoid it, and put money into a Vanguard or something.
On the other hand, you have people like me (and probably a not-insignificant percentage of people on HN), who have learned a fair amount of distributed and concurrent programming, and see the "neatness" factor of cryptocurrency, and since the crypto is laundered through interesting tech, we fall for it.
I haven't touched any cryptocurrency since I fell for the unregistered security calling itself Gemini Earn [1] (so almost three years now), but I did think that stuff like Filecoin was pretty cool. Hell, I'll still acknowledge the coolness factor of stuff like Filecoin and Storj and Sia. I just think that the currency itself is wishful-thinking-at-best, and fraudulent at worst (probably somewhere in between).
I don't think I'm an especially gullible person, but no one thinks that they're gullible, so I'll acknowledge that I probably am, but I think a lot of the educated people who got into crypto got into it because they kind of had horse-blinders on when looking at the interesting tech.
[1] Not my opinion, but the SEC's for what it's worth: https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-7
Crypto is the same thing. You put money in and you may cash out quickly with a big number, but someone who knows can swoop in and steal your money in a way that is much easier than if you used more traditional investment and banking vehicles.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My thought was it will some day either be worth a lot or be worth 0 and I'm OK with both of those possibilities. I don't really think I was gullible about anything and yes I thought about it as a risky investment that turned out to pay off quite well.