It's such a bizarre industry because I think the technical issues are really interesting and the potential for cryptocurrency is huge, but in practice it's 99% about speculators trying to get rich quick. That's really boring!

"The technical issues are really interesting" is how you know it's a scam. It's like working for Facebook; they keep everyone interested by having them write unnecessary but interesting projects like new build systems and new PHP runtimes. Except that every contribution makes the price of ETH go up, and FB pays you.

I...think you just described society

It is, but there's probably more actual interesting development and design activity going on than you realize.

There's simply a real discovery problem, because of the aforementioned gold rush. Participants have too many incentives to bury accurate information that speaks against their investment, spread misinformation that embellishes it, suppress information about projects they want to invest in but didn't yet, ...

That's brilliantly said!

The argumentation of typical crypto fan is like the motte and bailey fallacy mounted on a helicopter rotor, constantly oscillating between some noble goals (decentralisation, freedom, privacy, anti-inflation, anti-fractional banking) and the "have fun staying poor" snark.

that's an ignorant statement. There is a ton of development and deployment happening to make the Lightning Network be a high-throughput, low cost way to move bitcoin around the world. A lot of people are working to make bitcoin more useful to more people.

To be fair, we have given Bitcoin more than enough time to mature into the ideals Nakamoto had envisioned. Can we just call it a failed project and move on to cryptos that actually deliver on the promise.

Even with Lightning, Bitcoin won't ever be good digital cash because it won't have stable value and it isn't as private as, say, ZCash.