As per the design of the Bitcoin software, payouts were made to users running standard home PCs with simple ~3Ghz processors, and as a result, the software minted thousands of BTC tokens to their accounts for the rather trivial processor cycles. As per the design of the bitcoin protocol, running the bitcoin software now on the same computer, would mint a fraction of a coin. Bitcoin was designed to favor the people who created it, and the few early users who ran the software.
The assumption that the bitcoin service is unique, rare, or scarce is just not the case. The historical records of these ponzi payouts are public record. Hundreds of alt coins with active 'networks' are running on the public Internet right now, offering the same service as the BTC network, and often improved upon features like scrypt, ZKP, or the EVM.
The divestment of digital beanie babies as I passed the hot potato of a 2.4-transaction-per-second digital message system with a horrible dev team and censor happy community currently in a civil war, to rubes who exchanged actual universally accepted fiat paper was enough to console me for a years to come.
Maybe we are all destined for the moon, as the legends go. Because a distributed database message system and expansive misinformation campaign has convinced people as much. Or maybe bubbles are temporary?
I agree with you. Bitcoin was a cool prototype with many oversights and inadequacies that got bolted to a runaway hype train. Some later cryptocurrencies have made modest improvements, but I don't think cryptocurrency will really be able to break through until a) the difficulty mechanism is fixed and b) reliable transaction confirmation is practically instantaneous.
I got into bitcoin in early 2010 right before it started to show up in mainstream news. CPU mining was already dead but I could GPU mine on my desktop and generate about 1 BTC/day. I ran this for the novelty for a few days and then turned it off. Not quite enough to get a skeptic's consolation for "years to come", but it was fun anyway. :P
I'll leave you to consoling yourself.