I'm in a similar boat. I could see ... something of value coming out of all this, perhaps something unexpected. But I certainly don't want to get involved with all the grifters, scammers, hucksters, confidence men, cryptobros and their various and sundry schemes. Knowing that I don't know much about the details of it... I think of "if you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you" and know that I'd be the sucker, so the winning move is not to play.

As many in the community joke, "don't buy [currency] unless you have a use-case". If your "use-case" includes gambling at the casino and not simple transactions, it is indeed better not to play.

I felt exactly the same, until I did some research and realized it's bullshit all the way.

As someone who is interested in this space, you have a proper way of looking at it. Most tokens are just scams outright, or if not scams, have communities which are totally unwilling to solve the technological problems inherent of their coins (see Bitcoin's high fees, limited block size, lack of privacy). One example of a decent currency which runs counter to this trend is privacy-focused Monero, though the developers/community don't bother to market it in the same manner as many other coins, to a point that on of the main criticisms of it is its comparable lack of volatility, amusingly enough.

tl;dr There are quite a few innovations that have been made by various actors in the cryptographic currency space, most of which are entirely drowned out by a torrent of mind-numbing get-rich-quick scams and stubborn, close-minded speculators.

Exactly the same as dot-com bubble where bs companies with just a domain name were the hot thing, if you just looked at that and wrote off tech, you would have made the wrong decision. Being on HN probably means you're technical enough to sort through the noise and find the actual value for yourself until the market does it for you.