I'm pretty perplexed by what crypto has become in practice. All the big selling points for me are that it's a currency (that almost nobody uses as a currency) with mathematically-ensured security (which goes away if, like many people, you're holding a lot of wealth in a centralized exchange that tries to dumb everything down for the entry-level consumer) and controlled inflation (which is defeated somewhat by the massively fluctuating prices all driven by hype and speculation) and the potential privacy (which is really only there in some currencies and / or if you never use any other currency) and lack of government involvement (which goes away if the government can tell you've been using crypto and decides to tax it like a security).

In the end, it's a bunch of crypto bros who want to show how much they don't depend on the government suddenly realizing that FDIC-insured accounts were actually developed for a reason. It's people calling dibs on numbers. And yeah - the blockchain has led to all sorts of interesting ideas, but the money you pump into the currency du jour isn't really worth anything once people move on to a new trend, or once your exchange is hacked, or whatever.

I've been getting told for months that I'm missing the train and making a bad decision by a guy who bought BTC at 60k and told me "everyone" was saying it was going to go past 100k. And apparently I was a fool for investing in property and a diversified stock and bond portfolio. So yeah - I feel somewhat vindicated right now.