The same happened during the early days of the internet. Insane amounts of companies were founded, hyped and IPOed. Many many naive people turned into investors, losing trillions of Dollars.
Should we have discarded the whole internet idea because of that?
Scams happened over the internet, but didn't exploit critical problems with the technology itself.
Crypto scams exploit problems with crypto itself. Where else can a tiny mistake allow people to irreversibly drain your account in an instant and vanish?
This comparison was also made a lot in the early days of crypto, but at this point we're 15 years into crypto and real-life use cases remain awfully thin on the ground.
I am so tired of the comparison with the internet because it tries to conclude that crypto will be successful despite the scepticism because people were also sceptic of the internet. You could compare any new thing with the internet and come up with a similar prophecy, but it just isn't given that the success is ever going to come.
By 1989 the Internet's primary applications are email, Usenet news, and the file transfer protocol. Those may not seem like much today, but they're a big deal in 1989.
