>It destroys your body, kills your spirit, and pays less than nothing when you consider the lack of health benefits and high possibility of injury.
I worked out in the woods of the northwest as a logger and would like to disagree. There are certainly jobs that are worse in all the metrics you've listed. Personally, I couldn't wait to get a fast food job after I quit.
Concrete Mathematics by Knuth was designed with your needs in mind, and has essentially become the canonical "math for cs" text. I haven't read more than the preface plus a few pages though, so I can't comment further on whether or not it delivers in my opinion, but the opinions of others seem very positive.
Have you looked into any other DAG tech, besides IOTA? ByteBall and Raiblocks are excellent, functional and mature examples in my opinion that lack IOTA's downsides (likely because they are intended primarily for p2p payments, not IOTA's intended use case as m2m first, p2p second).
In full disclosure, I own a little bit of both. I first stumbled upon them after being disappointed with IOTA, and they deliver on a lot of what my initial expectations of IOTA were. I just want to be able to buy coffee with my crypto and not wait an hour for confirmation times!
What was once friendly enthusiasm has become hard lines and jagged edges with organized shilling campaigns from all sides. It's quite off putting as someone who spends a lot of time in these communities. It's hard to even ask technical questions or address concerns without being named a "FUD'er", and I don't think it's changing anytime soon.
I love ByteBall, but also likely the required crypto intelligence. But AFAIK they are a relatively mature DAG tech, with oracles and smart contracts already working (P2P UFC betting being a relatively popular example). XRB is another promising DAG tech (which I currently own), as mentioned. I suggest you look into both if you're interested.
I'm big on DAG tech as I see it being the only form of crypto currency that I can buy my coffee with, without waiting so long for confirmation that it isn't worth it. Whether it can be a suitable replacement to blockchain though I don't know, it may be an apples to oysters type of comparison and one may have strengths where the other has weaknesses.
Do you feel all crypto projects are included in the bubble you described?
Personally, I think many are extremely overbought (BTC, LTC, ETH, etc) but can't help but feel that those with real utility and industry value are (relatively) undervalued.
I understand your point of the likelihood of it fading away, but the tech's always being taken more and more serious on an industry level and becomes more robust after every crash. Many of these solve unique problems, even if the majority of the market leaves and cashes out, blockchain still needs oracles (ChainLink), and there is still demand for the others I listed (currency agnostic low fee payment platforms, decentralized lending for 3rd worlders, faster transaction times, etc etc).
Maybe I'm biased because I place more of my portfolio on these, but I have witnessed lot of these alts becoming more and more established everyday and predict this trend continue if industry adoption continues at it's current rate (and there is economic incentive for it to do so).
ChainLink, as this project is aiming to incorporate outside data into the blockchain and smart contracts. This has plenty of real world use cases. This could be what the internet is to a computer, but for blockchain. Zen Protocol is also working on a similar idea, but they incorporate smart contracts into their project and have improved upon ETH's model a bit (not charging gas for failed contracts to name one example). I see no reason why this wouldn't be adopted if they can deliver.
Request Network, a project backed by this very website, is working to create a currency agnostic payment platform that may compete directly with PayPal and demands far less fees. There is a pretty incentive to adopt this over vendors listing individual currencies for payment methods, and everyone saves money due to lower fees.
RaiBlocks and ByteBall diverge from the blockchain and instead rely on DAG tech, and have extremely fast confirmation times because of this, and scale upward excellently. There is incentive to use these in the crypto space because transfer times and tx fees are too high, but we'll see how the outside world reacts.
Ripio Credit Network is working on making a decentralized lending platform to allow (currently) South Americans access to reasonable lending solutions, but I see this extending to a much larger global scope if successful. There is pretty clear incentive for adoption here, you can read about their potential customer base.
Just to name a few, I invite you to research a little more as a lot of these products are pretty amazing, and I'd be curious as to why you think the above are "worthless". But yes, adoption is the biggest concern. Personally, I don't see cryptocurrency ever going back to $0, the technology is better than existing models of centralized banking and middle men. Unless something comes along that disrupts the disruptor, I think it's here to stay for the forseeable future.
While I agree that BTC and ETH are likely lowest risk long term, I'm not exactly throwing money at crypto for the low risk portion of my portfolio and don't mind doubling down on a more dangerous gamble since I've researched my holds pretty well, imo.
Further, I'd argue that BTC and ETH are both extremely overbought at the moment, and reflect more of what a bubble is than many of the lowly alt coins that have real use cases (not that BTC and ETH don't). I feel you're underestimating the potential of some of these smaller projects, the problems they aim to solve and the progress they've made towards solving them.
Many here insist it's a speculative bubble. And while I might agree that perhaps BTC is in such a state (this may extend toward LTC, ETH, etc), I'm curious to know your thoughts on the less popular and lower market cap "alt-coins" such as the Y-Combinator backed Request Network and Quantstamp. It's hard to say anything in crypto is truly undervalued at the moment, but I believe if anything is, it's projects with real utility that extends beyond speculation.
For those that believe in the technology that blockchain, DAG and smart contracts offer there is a lot up and coming projects that might contribute a lot to the space (and beyond into the real industry world, potentially).