Yes I also followed BTC from the early days, 2009 or so. Was on the IRC channel, usually lurking but I was very interested in it as a concept. As a college student I thought it was revolutionary, and neat things could be built on top of it. The future and equitable financial system, or so I thought.

Sadly it has fallen far from the tree, as they say, and became another Internet grift.

With its halving block subsidies, the bitcoin emission was never equitable. For that, look for a fixed block subsidy, i.e. pure linear emission, which leaves the majority of supply to later generations.

most DeFi projects are just engineers reading the first paragraph of a finance Wikipedia article and thinking that they can do better.

There's a misplaced belief that all regulations around money just popped out of nowhere.

In reality, all those regulations were built up over time in response to different scams and schemes. And crypto wants to erase all that learned experience and start from scratch.

Novogratz of Galaxy Digital lost billions in the UST collapse as well as having a tattoo of Luna on his arm. He was not a normal clueless person.

There are also clueless people who bought SNAP stock the day before it dropped 45%.

There are also clueless people who paid $200k for degrees from top tier universities and are now in debt up to their eyeballs with no way to repay.

There is simply no way to protect people from cluelessness without banning our freedom.

The goal of a healthy regulatory environment is not to prevent everyone from frittering their money all the time. It's to keep the worst schemes from affecting as many people as possible.

According to this article, Galaxy came out of the whole thing with a pretty nice surplus.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/29/who-got-rich-before-terra-st...

> In its Q1 earnings filing, Galaxy noted that the largest contributor to its net realized gain on digital assets of $355 million was sales of luna.

You can both be rich and clueless. Which is about 99% of the crypto startup universe