for a very long time which is nearly 9 years now, bitcoin had no issues, empty mempool and low fees even as low as 0 satoshis. and you were nowhere to be seen.
Why should I bother when no-one apart from a group of people were playing around in a sandbox. I couldn't care less.
But when I now see that a lot of people with absolutely no financial knowledge stand to be cheated out of their lifesavings because immoral people are convincing them to jump onboard, then I do care.
Perhaps a good illustration is from one of the other discussion threads in here where people were talking about what the main advantages of Bitcoin was. In here there was the following:
"bitcoin is one of the biggest potential to make us become rich in quick time"
Bitcoin is indeed a get-rich-quick-scheme.
If you are involved, look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: Am I the one being cheated, or am I the immoral bastard who is cheating someone else out of his life savings ?
Bitcoin is one of the greatest technological innovations of the last few years. Sure, there are people that are trying to make a quick buck out of it, but that still doesn't change the fact that cryptocurrencies have the potential to change the financial landscape for years to come. No one is forcing anyone to enter this market.
Did you blame the world wide web for the dot-com bubble? Does the current arguably questionable valuation of silicon valley companies reduce the value of the internet?
You can argue about whether current Bitcoin exchange rates are appropriate, but that doesn't change the value proposition that crypto-currencies bring to the table.
That is completely the wrong comparison. During the dot-com bubble a lot of people lost their money because as soon the word "internet" was mentioned, stupid investments were made. That doesn't change the fact that the internet was a great technology with many uses. But in the bubble only very very few actually had a sane business model - and they were the ones who made it (like for example Amazon). Most "normal" people who jumped on the bandwagon were lured in by rapid increases in valuation and lost out big time.
Right now we are in a similar bubble - except it is a blockchain-bubble. As soon as the work "blockchain" is mentioned stupid investments are made, and the vast majority of these will collapse similar to the dot com bubble. This does not mean block chain is wrong - block chain is a technology likely with a lot of good commercial applications, just like the internet. But similar to the dot-com bubble almost all of the current investments in "products" using block chain completely lack a fundamental sound business model, and the cryptocurrencies are foremost amongst those.