The physical value of it is what gets me. Or rather, lack of physical value.

Cash is real. We can hold it in our hands, see it with our eyes and so on. Similarly with a debit/credit card, you know what that physical card in your wallet represents, and you know what the amount tied to it is/means.

Cryptocurrency is literally just digital code made to be similar to money. But there's no physical value tied to it. It doesn't represent anything other than it's code. If the world's economies and governments were to suddenly fall tomorrow, we'd still have cash and other physically valuable objects to trade and barter with. You most definitely would not be able to walk up to someone with a hard drive of Bitcoin to trade for anything.

however it’s been completely perverted from a legitimate currency into a MAGA-style investment fraud cult

Rather than a currency or a movement that is the sum of everyone who uses it, a more accurate way to think of crypto is as a sort of anarchist technology. It empowers people to take financial action without asking permission, without guardrails, without having to go through a company or a bank that will monitor you and shut you down if they feel like it. Naturally people will use that agency for things like online drug markets, ransomware payments, and pyramid scheme style gambling. But that doesn't mean the technology itself is bad, just that it is powerful. Stablecoins in particular are seeing increasing use all over the world just because there is a lot of dysfunction and oppression in the banking systems of most countries and great difficulty in interfacing with other countries. If you want to buy a VPN or web hosting or anything else anonymously online, crypto is really the only answer to digital cash. It is a real, viable way to cut out middlemen and central authorities and that deserves respect even if it also makes it the de-facto medium for certain criminals.

My hope is that what will be regulated is the type of shit Reddit has done here, and the type of shit FTX did, which is really more traditional investment fraud with a crypto smokescreen than something that is genuinely founded in the technology. With the Reddit tokens, nothing was decentralized except the tokens, they controlled everything the tokens could possibly be used for, and the only thing giving them value was Reddit's implied promise to leave that potential revenue for the tokens instead of just taking it for themselves, which ultimately of course they did. You don't even need crypto for that, they could have done the exact same thing with their own centralized game tokens, and it would have been just as much of a scam. Don't blame crypto for that, blame Reddit and companies like Reddit trying to get away with this type of thing.

There are plenty of crypto projects which are not get rich quick scams. For example Monero is a community project which allows fully anonymous transactions. Ethereum is quite corporate but they are really working hard to improve the technology, like introducing staking. And there are many more, but it can be hard to distinguish them from the scams. Anyway it's not as simple as crypto bad.