I wasted years of my life in crypto

The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.

When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.

They optimized for the right game: making themselves as much money as possible.

There are builders and there are opportunists. The builder's goal is to build something useful. Often the most useful things that you can build are not going to earn you a single dollar, but a builder will still go ahead and build it.

The opportunist is just trying to make personal wealth, which could come from the pockets of end customers, or investors, or other speculators (the "greater fools").

A lot of people made a lot of money from crypto and blockchain, even if ultimately almost everything built in this ecosystem is inconsequential trash.

I was thinking of how this mirrors the actions of people currently pushing AI. Or the dotcom bubble. Or "big data". The examples just keeps going...

From OP's post;

> you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.

I'm sorry, but that just seems idiotic. Ever heard about anti-money laundering or KYC?

It is not desirable to send a billion dollars internationally "to anyone" within seconds, and certainly not without checks and irreversible. The core idea was fundamentally unrealistic from the very start.