There are layers to crypto's predominant "discourse" depending on which wave you came in through. The earliest waves were all utopian technologists, libertarian

There are layers to crypto's predominant "discourse" depending on which wave you came in through. The earliest waves were all utopian technologists, libertarians, and Silk Road users. The ICO era brought in more people who had played with penny stocks or forex, and imposed some of those "gamblers and swindlers" attitudes. And as talk of "institutional crypto" started popping up you got a much more Wall-Street influenced crowd that funded conspicuously large endeavors with intentionally obfuscating and centralizing properties. For the most part, none of these people in the later waves perceived the tech as a good that could be deployed for societal coordination(since what distributed ledgers ultimately do is just another method of organizing information), they just saw a zero-sum game they could compete and try to "win" in by ultimately exiting to dollars, or by building a large organization in the "crypto industry"(utter nonsense - it's ruled by protocols, and the downfall of FTX further demonstrates that). People who just held BTC in their own wallets over all of these waves, didn't lose custody of the keys or sell, did marvellously well. Internationally, BTC remains useful to countries with unstable currencies; not because ordinary people are all interested in holding it for its own sake, but because it enables banking and payment services outside of the traditional system, which means that in some parts of the world you can go to "a guy in the market with some phones" and he can set you up with options for exchanging currency, getting remittances, etc. Often USD is used on one side of the trade rather than a native crypto asset; it's crypto being used as a pragmatic tool rather than a manifest ideology. In contrast, people who really try to trade the market actively either have an "angle" for getting an information advantage(e.g. they possess some data or influence, in the way that SBF did), or they are most likely gambling with leveraged bets and getting sliced to pieces by highly optimized trading bots. If you take a position in crypto as a simpleton(which is my standpoint, and shouldn't be taken as gospel investment advice), it's better to move slowly, accept absurdly high volatility and just aim to survive; do not use products that "give you some help with that"; assume the tech is sharp-edged, use official wallets, and keep careful track of the keys. Many people who work on crypto don't actually own a lot of it.