Hearing people talk about cryptocurrency as a digital asset, made me think how was this asset manufactured?
Cryptocurrency is a broad term for an industry, and it has many cryptocurrencies in this branch industry. It's not too rightly by generalizing that cryptocurrency is a digital asset.
It turned out David Chaum's effort to enable anonymous transactions led to the introduction of ecash, in 1990. This is an easy find, it doesn't take much look to get information.
You can read some documents about Bitcoin prehistory and some projects created before Bitcoin in 2009.
Bitcoin Preshitory (Saylor.org Academy).Bitcoin prehistory.Bitcoin prehistory tree.Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology (Princeton Universtiy Press). It's a draft and if you want to get a complete book, download it
there. You've said well, instead of using the general word Crypto they should just call out the particular coin or token they got scammed with than generalizing, Crypto is the general word for all including Bitcoin and as we all know Bitcoin is not and never a scam, except people allow themselves to scam activities by exposing their passphrase or saving Bitcoin in exchanges that are not easily secured.
It thnk it's good for everyone to acknowledge the right crypto and venture into it so they won't end up calling crypto in general a scam when they've lost heavily to it, I've come to understand that most people who think Crypto is a scam are those who invest on newly introduced shitcoins to gain quick profits, they end up pumping and dumping thereby making those who invest on them call Cryptocurrency a scam.