Good for you on getting in early. Crypto, as a concept, is extremely neat. It is a libertarians dream. It is an interesting movement, in this time of centralisation and consolidation of power.
Crypto, as a tool however, is a solution looking for a problem. A problem that most people do not have. The only reason that crypto is currently huge, is because it (currently) is a Make Money Fast scheme. Should crypto ever become a mainstream way of performing transactions, it will still have to abide by the rule of law, or risk becoming illegal.
If Bitcoin could develop and improve, all the while without being a ponzi-scheme, it would be great. And who knows, if POS ever worked out and we manage to transition the whole ecosystem, it may find some usecases in smaller applications. But as it is, POW is generating the CO2 of a large country, providing money to the wrong people (and I'm not talking about you), and preparing financial crash.
If you're sitting on a pile of bitcoins since 2012, I understand your point of view. But I'm not convinced it's a net benefit to us all.
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
If you would remove the dates and the prices, I would not be able to tell the age of most of these headlines.
My opinion is something like:
Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will not die, but long term the current ones will become fringe techs except for some of their aspects which will be merged into the mainstream. It's too early to know which aspects will remain and which will go away. Plus at this point we cannot evaluate the beneficial/negative aspect of cryptocurrencies as a whole, but the general impression leans towards negative (a ton of negative externalities and 99% of the time used for raw speculation and we could have used those resources for things more beneficial to humankind).
Many in here still regurgitate the same talking points I saw published then.