I feel played by the Bitcoin ecosphere.

[WhyFhy]

I've had a weird relationship with Bitcoin lately.
I think about community developments on things such as LN , Vanity search projects, tools, tickers scrapers ECT.....
How they where developed by altruistic members for the chance of creativity, freedom and decentralized banking.

Bitcoin is now a store of value ,a commodity of fiat held by institutional parties.

Major altruistic contributors , sidelined. Some got tips. Most got nothing. 

If fees stay at 1 Satoshi , will LN/Layer 2 really be necessary?  What happens when we are all mined up, no one sells and only holds, and the mining fees don't cover the electric bill. Bitcoins showing signs of fatigue and stagnation overall. Will it die ,I don't think so, but Bitcoin doesn't appear to be designed for and by cypherpunks.
If it was , wall street weaponized it.

I've dedicated a lot of my life to this particular branch of cryptography, I've learned a lot! But it kinda feels like it was for nothing at this point. I've publicly released all my crypto projects source codes and walking away from developing in this sector.

I'll still be around speculating but that's about it.

[tinus42]

Maybe you need to step away for a while. Or read up some more.

[Cryptohygenic]

I've dedicated a lot of my life to this particular branch of cryptography, I've learned a lot! But it kinda feels like it was for nothing at this point. I've publicly released all my crypto projects source codes and walking away from developing in this sector.

I'll still be around speculating but that's about it.

Can for now say you should be courageous to defeat any affliction but don't get yourself forced in to keep riding on the cryptography space. Locate what works better for you and hope you don't turn a critic out of your unimpressed experiences.
The rewards of miners has become belittled due to miners scalability so, the intrinsic means single miners can make good earnings from mining rewards as the pool becomes competitive is you merging your hashing power to others so at time of rewards, your earning points of rewards would be increase.
Left alone not being affiliating with others, you will earn very minimal such as the situations you are in that  reward values can't even pay your bills.
In cordial response, there is no playing as cheat about it. The system changes is basically due to higher numbers of miners now.

[Reynaldo]

I understand your frustration with how Bitcoin has evolved. But  a lot of manipulation happens in traditional markets too, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing to see the crypto space follow similar patterns. So keep investing and don't leave when stocks go down. ngmitif you do that.

[Ucy]

That's basically how it's in exceptional community-run tech . First of all a revolutionary tech movement is started by a community of idealists who are not too keen on making too much money off it. They contribute ideas and resources to build a system that's free/affordable and fair. But it eventually gets hijacked and the hijackers replace them with betrayers, their own workers, praise singers, deviants, who get incentivized  to deviate from original goal and support the hijackers.
But Bitcoin is not going to be so. They want it so badly, but will need to pass through layers of security (which is partly a program or principles that have been strongly cemented in the consciousness of the community) to hijack it. Ofcourse they will try to starve the hardened ones off money and resources to break them in pieces and get them to surrender. But this was anticipate and the Bitcoin market was made to take care of such people, otherwise its price would've been stagnant or behaving like fiat currency.

[Reynaldo]

Yeah... i mean institutions grabbed their bags, but that was inevitable for anything valuable. The real ones are still building in the shadows while normies chase pumps. Maybe your contributions didn't make you rich, but they helped build something that can't be stopped