Bitcoin changed everything. It used to be if you hacked somebody's PC you got.... a hacked PC. Big whoop.

Bitcoin provided both a financial use for stolen compute and a bankless online international payment system for ransoms.

That's what turned the script kiddies into professionals. Malice and lulz were replaced with dollars and cents.

Nonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default.

And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.

Viruses were common on FTP sites and BBSs. They weren't all benign. DOS in particular had zero protections against damaging code. Bot armies hadn't been developed yet so malicious destruction was just as likely an outcome.

Yes, and what did the damaging code and viruses actually do in that era?

Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.

If you got lucky, they just self-replicated onto floppies. Not so lucky, they would corrupt your hard drive.

McAfee wasn't always this shit, and ads on non-porn sites weren't as malicious.