All these happened in very early days of bitcoin when one could mine using CPU and join a mining pool and others like litecoin were up and coming.
But then, I lost interest as txn fees were eye watering and I was scammed several times by various steam key selling sites never completing my order and blocking me immediately if I complained. I realized that, this non-reversible form of currency was excellent for scam and fraud and I could not cry on the phone about these scams unlike how I can for my MasterCard/Visa/Amex.
Now I come to think of it, if I held onto my bitcoins, I would be retiring wealthy, but alas, I was young and naïve :’)
If a truly stable cryptocurrency was released that was actually suitable for everyday transactions at scale, the people who buy bitcoin would laugh at it for not offering a return on investment. It seems like such a currency will have to be adopted from the bottom up to succeed, not trickle from the top down.
Here's a question for you: What happens to the value of bitcoin when some other crypto-currency starts doing the things bitcoin has only promised? Does it crash, or does the magic bubble around a completely useless technology persist for as long as people are willing to believe in it?
The issue isn't that crypto currencies can't be used as currency, it's more that they don't get used as currency outside niche use cases because they don't have a good USP. Most countries have decent enough currencies and payment systems
Monero mostly is. What's also important, monero users are also against any kind of speculation. Of course most monero transactions are probably related to illegal activity, but they are in fact used as cash would.
For people who want proof-of-stake there are plenty of coins doing that. Etherium is probably the best known most established option.
But no coin really solves the other big challenge of crypto-currency: barely anyone uses them as currency. Most of those that do do it for illegal purposes: ransomware payments, marketplaces for illegal goods and services (including the malware SaaS providers), illegal money movements etc. But for the vast majority of people it's more like digital gold than like digital cash: an investment vehicle that derives its value from its limited supply.
As an investment it doesn't actually create economic value (unlike investing in real companies), so you need to have a pretty positive view of the other use cases to judge the overall impact as positive