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.
But 99% of projects in 2016-17 ended up being scams or just dropping in value without any change for recovery after that. And those ico projects were just ridiculous. People were pouring money in if they saw a white paper that wasn't a direct copy. It didn't matter if the product made sense, and none of them did. We don't need decentralization for toy factory or dental industry. We don't need it even seem to know what we need it for. Huge portion of all the icos seemed to be either pure money laundering or a scam.
And even though i was very active at the time looking at those icos, i only scratched the surface, so i missed a lot of them.
For me, this was the peak level of maturity of the crypto scene back then
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-programmer-ate-ass-to-save-cryptocurrency-prophecy/