But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
There are numerous places and times around the world that you can look at the situation that occurred and see that Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at that time.
Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be the candle that provides light when the power goes out.
The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power doesn't go out during some crisis.
USD and/or EUR depending on the continent would have been used instead in such countries which have failing monetary systems.
Problem is that governments in those countries (like Argentina) often impose capital controls making it hard to acquire foreign currency. Bitcoin is almost always only a solution to that specific problem (i.e. government restrictions not currency instability).