I wasted years of my life in crypto

It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.

Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

What's the incentive for keeping these "robust" databases online, if not for making a lot of money by running scams?

No one is going to run a database for you unless you pay them. If you want to write data to an existing public ledger, then you are going to have to get some of the token that allows you to write to that ledger. Paying for a token to use the ledger is not speculative, it's pragmatic. Holding the token and not using it to write to the ledger is speculative, and encouraging people to do that in order to make money yourself is a scam.

If you pay AWS to host Postgres for you, are you being scammed? You might be if someone convinces you to invest in Postgres credits that you never use. But if you actually use Postgres, and it's cheap, and you are glad to pay for it, then it's not really a scam.

I think more of the promise of these technologies is in private ledgers, where the traffic is confined and the system could even be run altruistically. For example, a university club or a town could coordinate elections using this technology. They don't have to pay to use a public ledger if enough people in the group can run nodes themselves. Everyone who cares about the result of the election is incentivized to participate in the network just to know the result and ensure its authenticity. They aren't processing transactions for random users, they are coordinating using the latest technology with people who they want to coordinate with.

Or the university could pay 3$ per year to host a DB that all clubs can use.

I’m sure you can imagine a make believe world where no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time, and in this world somehow blockchains are useful.

But that’s not the world we live in.