Hey there. I'm one of those people who read Schneier's Applied Cryptography in highschool in the 90s, and immediately recognized the groundbreaking potential of using asymmetric cryptography for currency.
I work in information security, and have seen first hand how our existing financial infrastructure is held together with string and scotch tape. For 10 years or so, every time I heard about some big credit card theft, or wire fraud, or SWIFT hack, I would go see if anyone had figured out how to do cryptocurrencies yet. Then 2009 rolled around and I got an email forwarded to me from someone named Satoshi who had apparently figured out a really solid mitigation for the double spend problem, and had actually released some working PoC code in the form of Bitcoin.
Yes, there are a ton of problems with Bitcoin. I've been extremely critical even since that first email, but those problems are nothing compared to the existing systemic problems plaguing traditional finance.
Getting rich was never a draw for me. I'm not quite retired (though this year has been pretty good) but I have spent 10s of thousands of Bitcoins over the years building up various aspects of the economy in order to maximize the utility of the network. I could easily be living on my own private island if I had held onto the coins I CPU mined in the early days, but I have no regrets at all about how I spent those coins. I'm more passionate about this than most, I know, but I 100% believe that legacy finance is a massive hindrance to the sustainability of our species, and crypto-economics will be a key aspect in building healthy incentives for a technologically driven society.