Even by 2017 we'd seen plenty of scams and failures. My intro to crypto watching was the late progress and collapse of the Trendon Shavers Ponzi scheme in 2011/2012, followed by the collapse of MtGox in 2014. Heady days; current crypto collapses lack the same sense of drama. It's all a bit repetitive now.

HackerNews was weirdly credulous about this stuff for a weirdly long time, but it does seem to have shifted in the last few years.