Why I have no sympathy for anyone getting rekt on the crypto markets

2017 brought a very inconvenient change in the crypto market. USDT (unbacked fiat IOU) has been adopted on all major fiat-crypto gateways, completely hijacking price discovery. Ever since that year most of the price action was completely fake with the sole intention to pump prices to lure in speculators with real fiat and dumping on them, essentially it became a money extortion racket.

In parallel, mainstream media started to cover crypto more and more, but exclusively focused on price movements and predictions, not the fundamental, and only important value proposition: enabling finance without middlemen.

It was tragic to see that the movement stopped making waves due to usefulness (wikileaks/darknets/overcoming banking blockades and similar events) and if you were around as long as me you probably also noticed that all major crypto forums became unbearable (/r/btc is a rare exception) due to the only topics being the fiat price and cringe memes about market sentiment.

Sadly, we cannot blame some sinister entity like tether or blockstream. We can't say that the bagholders were deceived or manipulated. They are the victims of their own greed and stupidity and deserve what they got and will continue to face. These are the same people who truly believe that they can get rich trading stocks and CFDs and in the end mostly lose all their "investment".

I've been advocating for crypto use and adoption for more than 10 years now and out of several hundreds of people whom I introduced to this revolutionary technology about 2 of them started actually using it. the rest were only interested in ways to generate fiat from mining, price speculation, seeking out dodgy yield schemes. Obviously, if these people saturate the market, it shouldn't surprise anyone to see the whole thing collapse, it's a huge negative feedback loop and the opposite of sustainability, no matter how many shills on youtube and twitter predict and promise price appreciation.

Back then we always dreamed of "mainstream adoption", but in retrospect we were quite wrong, this is the mainstream guys and it is mentally broken and the next wave will be even worse, unless fiat currencies like USD/EUR start to fold.

Personally, I still keep supporting peer to peer money and continue to build stuff, but I scaled back on trying to get normies on board. They'll never see the light before the obsolete fiat systems crumbles in my view.