Cryptocurrency was a threat to incumbents and governments since its inception. It was never meant to be a "store of value" or to represent cheesy art images on the internet as its primary use case. It was meant to be electronic cash. That's the primary use case.

That use case was knocked down, starting way back in 2012-2014. The death blows to crypto were as follows:

1) the massively unpopular hard cap on the blocksize of Bitcoin at 1MB, which limited it to around 5 transactions per second, and the limitations on OP_RETURN and other fields which allowed programmability.

This destroyed Bitcoin's network effect, and it also forced the emergence of "alt coins", as there was no hope of innovating on Bitcoin, both because of imposed throughput and programmability limitations. This developer coup ossified Bitcoin in an immature state, and was a huge blow to the technology. The coup had 9-figure funding, including AXA, other transnational corporations, and the MIT digital currency group, which was, interestingly, funded by Jeffrey Epstein directly.

A Bitcoin that stayed true to its values and was allowed to evolve would look more like a proof-of-work based Solana. Now we have thousands and thousands of projects competing for the same pie of network effect. This environment is exponentially detrimental to crypto's use case as electronic cash.

2) Unfavorable tax and regulatory regimes.

The IRS treating cryptocurrency as a "property" made it inconvenient to use as money, because every transaction carried a potential "schedule D". That's a huge drag on a technology meant to be used as money.

The KYC standards applied to crypto exchanges were and are vastly more stringent than most other financial services. This ties back to Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Bank regulators are forcing banks to not serve crypto companies, so only the largest ones survive.

Combine with this an ongoing turf war between the SEC, CFTC, and other agencies about who should regulate crypto, combined with no clear rules, and regulation by enforcement, and you've got a climate for zero innovation and investment. Investment in Bitcoin startups fell off a cliff in 2016 based on data coindesk.com used to publish in a downloadable spreadsheet. That trend continues today.

I could go on, but yes, saying "crypto had 15 years" is BS. Crypto had 15 years of attacks on it by incumbents that twisted its original purpose, shattered it, and scattered that purpose to the wind.

AI is going to fare much better than crypto because its risk/reward profile is more favorable from the perspective of existing power structures.