NFTs and (x)coin speculation really made a lot of people sour on cryptocurrency, fairly or unfairly.
There are legitimate uses for crypto, I don’t think Mastercard, Visa, or your bank need to know what size dildos you’re buying online. But people treating it like a high value stock instead of actual currency really hampered it’s wide adoption imo.
I use monero for this reason. It has actual usage as a currency and maintains a fairly stable value. Sure, it fluctuates, but it does so rather slowly compared to others. It doesnt drop 15+% overnight.
When I got a new PC it had (and still has) quite powerfull cpu, so I googled if I could make some money from my PC. The answer was crypto mining. Only nice looking crypto miner for Linux was Cudo miner and it only supported Monero for cpu mining. I was mining for a year and got 50€, because of free electricity (parents). In that time I discovered that Monero is private and anonymous crypto and then I got interested in privacy. I was also a localmonero trader but paypal close both of my accounts without a reason :(.
Nice story. There are a lot more cryptos and blockchains that aim to disrupt the current centralized systems. It is rather easy to distinguish between real cypherpunk rooted projects and other useless shitcoins.