The victim of crypto crimes are normal clueless people.
I absolutely loved and adored bitcoin as a technology from a technical perspective and all the ways it could change things for better. But what it had become is an abomination.
Also, “engineers hacking on finance” would've been very noble 20 years ago in a world where engineer/hacker was reminiscent of free software, mozilla, gnu, linux, wikipedia, etc.
Yes I also followed BTC from the early days, 2009 or so. Was on the IRC channel, usually lurking but I was very interested in it as a concept. As a college student I thought it was revolutionary, and neat things could be built on top of it. The future and equitable financial system, or so I thought.
Sadly it has fallen far from the tree, as they say, and became another Internet grift.
With its halving block subsidies, the bitcoin emission was never equitable. For that, look for a fixed block subsidy, i.e. pure linear emission, which leaves the majority of supply to later generations.
most DeFi projects are just engineers reading the first paragraph of a finance Wikipedia article and thinking that they can do better.
There's a misplaced belief that all regulations around money just popped out of nowhere.
In reality, all those regulations were built up over time in response to different scams and schemes. And crypto wants to erase all that learned experience and start from scratch.
The goal of a healthy regulatory environment is not to prevent everyone from frittering their money all the time. It's to keep the worst schemes from affecting as many people as possible.
I absolutely loved and adored bitcoin as a technology from a technical perspective and all the ways it could change things for better. But what it had become is an abomination.
Also, “engineers hacking on finance” would've been very noble 20 years ago in a world where engineer/hacker was reminiscent of free software, mozilla, gnu, linux, wikipedia, etc.