I don't know how anyone can still say Crypto was "hype". Sure the vast majority of it is but USDC alone market cap is north of 60 Billion, there is nothing speculative about USDC. You can't make money by someone else losing etc etc. Tether stablecoin is ~150 Billion. Just those two, means the value of Crypto minus rug pulls, scams or anything else is over 200 Billion - more than the value of OpenAI

I for a while was completely into crypto and really hoped it would replace a few mega corporations and enable easy convenient transactions… but that never happened. I can’t buy groceries or pay rent with any crypto. Infact In fact I regret spending the crypto I did have on the very few things or places I could spend it. Crypto(at least imo) went from something new and exciting and limitless to now being only something you buy and then hope the value goes up. It’s useless as anything else. It’s now all snake oil salespeople trying to pump up some shitty crypto that has 0 new features and was created to pump and dump.

Stablecoins can't go up. That's my point

Was crypto really hype? BTC has been around for almost 15 years now, and has been on a bumpy rise up to multiples of its value

The only good investment in crypto has been to buy and hold BTC. So while it has worked well as an asset (like gold or paintings or baseball cards), the crypto industry itself – thousands of startups in the space, all the altcoins, blockchains, smart contracts, web3, NFTs, ICOs, DeFi, "stable" coins – have all either fizzled out or just been outright fraud.

Ever heard that saying about finding the sucker at a poker table?

I did. The first time I heard people describe crypto as such, Bitcoin was at $5000.

The first time I bought bitcoin it was under a dollar a coin. When I realized it actually had zero real value I got out.

What actual value does bitcoin have? As an example, gold can be used to make high fidelity cabling.

If price of gold was according to its "actual value", it wouldn't be $3300/oz right now. Nor would anyone hold it if they expected its price to ever get down to such "actual value". Bitcoin really isn't any different in that regard - it has value because people are willing to trade it. Although it does have practical uses, as well - black markets, for example.

The actual value of bitcoin is that you can use it to buy illegal counter-cultural things like drugs, fake IDs, etc. Except you can't, because more anonymous cryptocurrencies were invented and the markets migrated to those. Now Bitcoin is mostly used for more "serious", "wall-streety" crimes, like bypassing international sanctions. Either one can hold up the value of an investment asset.