I wasted years of my life in crypto

Access and context

• Some readers couldn’t access the tweet-essay due to X/Twitter login gates; others shared Nitter/xcancel mirrors.
• Several note that Twitter/Instagram/Facebook feel “dead” personally yet clearly remain socially and culturally significant for others.

Was time in crypto “wasted”?

• Many argue 8 years in any hard technical field builds transferable skills, even if the domain later feels misguided.
• Others say spending years advancing something you now believe harms society is a real loss, and retrospectively calling it “learning” can be self-exculpatory.
• A recurring thread: you can regret your actions yet still use the money/experience for good; true contrition would arguably include giving up some “ill‑gotten” gains.

Crypto as casino vs technology

• Broad agreement that the dominant behavior is speculation: zero‑sum trading, meme coins, perpetual futures, rugpulls and scams.
• Some frame this as “gamblification of the economy”, grouping crypto with prediction markets and ubiquitous gambling apps.
• A minority defend the underlying tech (distributed ledgers, smart contracts) as important innovations, badly distorted by speculative incentives.

Real-world use cases and beneficiaries

• Skeptics: blockchains are an inefficient database; virtually every non‑currency use case is better served by traditional systems; day‑to‑day payments work fine via SEPA/Faster Payments, cards, or services like Wise.
• Supporters cite edge cases: broken or predatory banking in countries like Venezuela/Argentina/Lebanon; sanctions and capital controls; refugees and dissidents; remittances and gray‑market medicine.
• Stablecoins are seen by some as the only broadly useful crypto primitive (fast USD‑like transfers); others call them unregulated shadow banking vulnerable to opaque reserve practices.

Technical and scalability debates

• Extensive discussion of blockchain limits (throughput, global ordering, storage bloat) and whether L2 systems (Lightning, rollups) truly preserve “trustless” guarantees.
• Privacy coins (Monero, Zcash) and Chaumian e‑cash systems are contrasted with Bitcoin’s pseudonymity and full‑ledger traceability.
• Smart contracts for escrow and voting are debated; multiple commenters note you still need trusted oracles/arbiter, so “trustless” stops at the chain boundary.

Crime, regulation, and ethics

• One camp: crypto is “for crime” (ransomware, scams, laundering), with any legitimate privacy use vastly outweighed.
• Another: traditional finance is already a powerful tool of control (sanctions, deplatforming, asset freezes); censorship‑resistant money is morally important even if criminals also benefit.
• Hiring and reputation: long crypto résumés are seen by some as a red flag, by others as neutral technical experience now being redirected elsewhere.