I think I first investigated bitcoin around the same time. My assessment was about what it claimed to do and how it was different to money.

Most of the properties then attributed to Bitcoin simply were not there. It was not untraceable, it was not a libertarian wonderland free from the possibility of regulation.

It also never claimed to be any of those things. It claimed to be a secure distributed process for moving values around on a publicly visible ledger. The distributed nature meant that it is difficult to impossible to deny individuals access to making transactions.

The value attributed to numbers in the ledger comes down to what people feel it is worth. This is no different to money. There is a common refrain from some bitcoin sceptics that money is different because the government will accept it, so you can still pay your taxes with money. This simply is not true. Governments get to make the rules. There may be consequences, but they can make whatever rules they want. I dislike using the word fiat because that has become more of a tribal shibboleth than a meaningful word. Nevertheless if a countries' money became worthless in the eyes of everyone, you can be assured that a government will change the rules rather than collect taxation that it can't spend. Sometimes dictatorships just change the rules arbitrarily, democracies might do so because it is the least worse outcome. The net result is the value comes from the calculation of how likely that the government will change the rules. That likelihood of a change in how a currency will be accepted is the same for both money and bitcoin. The likelihood is different, but the estimation is fundamentally the same.

I don't buy the argument that crypto should be banned because there are many crypto scams any more than I think that medicine should be banned because of the existence of homeopathy, medical magnet bracelets, or
Auriculotherapy. Focus on the bad things in the category, not the category. There is an argument to be made that misleading claims should be regulated. In general, laws do cover those behaviours, it is enforcement of those laws that has been lacking.

I do think the price of bitcoin has risen unexpectedly quickly, causing much of the issue of energy use, being subsidised by the mining reward caused more mining that is needed for the security of the network. A slower rise in value would have mitigated this. The long term future, once all coins are mined, is designed to be supported by transaction fees. The distributed nature enforces healthy competition. In the transaction fee funded era, the competition grants the most efficient block miners the greatest profit.

Bitcoin is not nearly as useful as I thought it would be by now. This is not for a technical reason. Many people who accepted payment in Bitcoin ceased doing so. This has made a backward trend. What I did not expect was this trend is largely driven by opponents of Bitcoin campaigning and placing pressure on places that accepted bitcoin.

I agree with the early assessment in this article "If I were a banker, I'd be afraid." What worries me, is the possibility that this popular opposition is driven from an influence campaign financed by the owners of services that would be challenged by a successful Bitcoin. You may think of this as a conspiracy theory, and in a way, it is. I am not claiming that such at thing definitely exists, just that if I were in their position, with their ethics and their resources, that's what I would have done.