What year you mean by "good old days"? I was in here from the start of 2014, and things have matured so much from that. There were joke coins and scam coins all over. And even the "serious" coins weren't in any way ready for adoption. Everyone was unprofessional at least from my point of view. And if they owned a real company, or were even planning one, they would be considered legit. There weren't no regulations at all, so stealing cryptos and getting away with it was common.
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2016 to 2017 was a good year for me, many crypto projects provide a lot of profits quite easily, even with just bounties and airdrops and some projects that run ICOs that provide profits that are up to thousands of percent when listing.
Also, more waste projects, but some are still generating at the beginning and that's also just a trap, But the profits from other projects are also big for me.
Getting 1BTC and 10 ETH in the past was very easy, but not now because the price is also getting higher and harder.