The OP makes it seems like they lost money by making poor trades, which so far in the history of Ethereum you could do in a very short period, but not if you held onto it for any length of time.
You're right, they could have lost it by scams or hacks. The power to instantly transact with anyone in the world is a feature, but also a risk.
If crypto takes off for actual day to day transactions I imagine there will be an intermediate layer of banks or other institutions that take on some of the risk but also take their cut.
Anarchist types are concerned about government backed crypto coins since you lose the fungibility/anonymity of physical dollars but don't get any of the freedom and separation from centralization that crypto supposedly represents.
I've read into it a little bit - basically every day every participant gets the Universal Dividend. It's the same for everyone. Supposing you had every person on earth participating, they all get the same thing every day.
The next part I feel like we should skip explaining to the casual observer, because it's not so simple:
Everyone gets 1 Universal Dividend per day. The Universal Dividend consists of x number of G1/June coins. That x amount is defined mathematically based on the number of participants. So fewer coins are issued today with let's say 10k users, and more coins are issued in the future with 100k users.
The system is inherently inflationary. If all users, people who have been doing it for 20 years and those doing it 2 days, didn't make any further transactions, after 40 years their wallet balances would effectively be the same.
Of course if the system is a success, people will be making transactions. But the idea is to encourage commercial exchange, rather than people hoarding because they think it will be worth more in the future.
The value isn't in the coin, the value is being able to transact with other people without resorting to barter. If you have to work for someone else or borrow in order to perform transactions, then you will be beholden to those who have already accumulated a lot of wealth.
This system doesn't solve the fact that somebody owns a factory, and somebody owns an apartment building, and someone owns the farm land and so on. But it would help the issue where the federal reserve can generate billions of dollars at a keystroke which are made available to big banks to lend to the public with interest, and which simultaneously devalues the dollars in your wallet.
This system is inflationary, like federal money creation is inflationary, but at least those inflated coins are being put in normal people's wallets instead of a handful of big banks. It helps defend against the accumulation of billionaires.