It is difficult to know what level of adoption bitcoin has, and I have my doubts that it has even reached 1% of the world's population, even though we have rich folks and rich institutions currently coming into bitcoin, including some of them entering through the newly approved Spot ETFs. These guys are neither imuned from gambling tendencies or making mistakes of the past, including but not limited to mistakes made that led up to a lot of the 2022 cascading crashes of Terra/Luna, Celsius, Blockfi, 3AC, Voyager, FTX, Alameda Research, Genesis (perhaps involving Grayscale) and probably some others that I am forgetting about...
Alts are launched with so many attractive features. They roam around for sometimes and then lost in the darkness forever. I had a crush on MATIC (POLYGON) last year after reading its features like side chains, low fees and more. The token is still there but wasn't able to take off despite so much marketing about its attractive features and now the team is launching new token with new features to generate more capital. The story may be different for other alts but the aim of all Alts are more or less same. There is no Alt that has survived the length of Bitcoin.
I still remember several tokens I invested in those days that got me entangled in those jargons. First they will launch their token, use that to collect money from people and they list their glorified token in exchange which will die immediately or after some few manipulations by the founders until at least they liquidate their holdings. After this stage, they will then launch worthless NFTs backed by huge marketing to collect more money from unsuspecting victims until the hype will die and the team will move on to the next project.
Wish I knew what I know now, those funds I wasted would have been used to build a decent Bitcoin portfolio that would have made me financially comfortable today. I only find consolation in the fact that I did not abandon this entire concept and I have also found courage to start building my Bitcoin portfolio when I did. Indeed, Bitcoin is the way forward, the earlier anyone avoid the distractions with these numerous coins, the better.