I think that the future is a probability distribution, and there is a non-zero probability that crypto doesn't die but keeps growing. Therefore, I'm not all in, but I'm not all out.
If your goal is "avoid frauds/scams", then the framework you were given works for sure (of course, it trivially works for anything).
If your goal is "make money", then investing in frauds/scams can in fact be quite profitable and then you are a bit stuck.
If your goal is "make money while avoiding anything that appears to be fraud/scam", then, honestly, at this point, i think that brings you back to "avoid crypto projects".
While there are obvious scams/fraud, there is also much higher than normal probability (relative to regulated stock markets, etc) that anything you choose is scam whether it looks okay or not.
Remember that one of the fundamental reasons that regulated markets exist is to be able to tell (with high probability) what is a fraud/scam not due to required disclosures, etc This is because otherwise it can be remarkably hard to tell anything but the obvious scams.
Since crypto is a non-regulated market, finding/identifying scams is, by definition, a crapshoot. The only ones you will identify are the ones that are obvious scams.
Probably the smart money knew that the builders who kept going had a chance to run up when the market came back on the excitement of what they built, but my social circle were not privy to those conversations.
Healthy dividends and massive growth; you should have listened to them!
Personally, I was working with computers back then too, and most people who also didn't work with computers at that point always asked me "When are you gonna get a real job?" and told me "the Internet is just a fad".
But again, your experience could very well have been different.
First. "Web dev" positions evaporated & I actually took a "stable" job at a university vs. staying at the failing internet investment firm I was working for as a developer. For a while tech was definitely "uncool", especially to those who were in it for the get-rich-quick angle. I hope the same will happen to crypto: an exodus of the scamsters.
Second. I remember thinking "so much potential destroyed by those damn suits" ... micropayments, banner ads, Ecommerce, online auctions, peer-to-peer file sharing' encrypted email, shopping bots ... we had all this wonderful tech but none of it came to fruition because of the inflated expectations / greed.
The greed of the dot-com bubble set tech back for about a decade & I expect something similar will happen now with crypto. Maybe we will finally have the breathing room to do something cool with the tech?
In hindsight it might seem so, but it really wasn't. Most people who didn't already see these "wide ranging use cases" thought the internet was mostly about shady stuff.
Sure, there were some old fogies (actual advanced age not required, but common) who thought in ~2000 that the Internet was nothing but a passing fad, but anyone with actual sense—including many, many people who were not at all financially invested in tech companies—could see that there was plenty of real substance there, however overly-inflated some valuations were at the time.
By 2000, we already had, very firmly-established, companies like Amazon and eBay, that were clearly worthwhile Internet marketplaces making it vastly easier to buy & sell things.
In 2022, the most "firmly-established" things we have in the blockchain landscape are the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose sole purpose is to be a different kind of money and/or speculative vehicle. Effectively the only people pushing these things are the ones who stand to lose lots of money when they finish crashing.
Yahoo and Amazon didn't look fundamentally different from Pets.com to me at the time, but they managed to survive.
