Have influencers and bad actors already done an irreparable damage to crypto and its perception amongst the average people? Will we ever see mainstream adoption if many people's first associations to crypto are grifters and scammers?

We might be in sort of a small community bubble where we see a lot of potentially great usecases for crypto, we follow some projects whose idea it is to solve actual problems, but a lot of people's perception on crypto has already been etched by all those articles of all of these grifters, influencers and B-list celebrities endorsements of shitty crypto projects and NFT collections during 2021 especially.

It isn't even just about failure of big exchanges like FTX, I don't think Luna failing did even close as type of damage to public's perception of crypto as the arrival of influencers and celebrities who shilled the worst type of projects people paid them to, most of them turned out to be rug pulls or complete scams. A lot of famous celeb backed NFT collections have gone to ears of mainstream people, and then subsequent articles of all of them failing and now being worth like 1% of their original price.

All of these things have done a hugely negative thing to perspection of crypto by an average Joe, and we need average Joe to be bullish on crypto, see its potential positives, if we ever want some actual mainstream crypto adoption to happen, until then it will just be a niche thing inside the niche community of mostly degens.

Can this damage to public perception of crypto ever be fixed because it seems like every bull run brings the worst, loud type of people to represent crypto, and mainstream media writes all about them. If you would ask average people the names of people that first remind them of crypto, I can guarantee that from top 20 answers, comfortably more than half of them would be complete grifters and scammers.