I'm not sure if you're defending bitcoin or comparing people buying it to crazed beanie baby collectors. At least, nobody was talking about a beanie baby based financial system at the time - however adorable it may have been.

I don't think bitcoin should be entirely dismissed as a scam (its more complex than that), but if we're going to compare it to a scam (and there are definitely plenty of scammers in the bitcoin ecosystem), i think its important to remember that neither scams nor speculative bubbles are new to human history.

The important innovation of Bitcoin (and the like) was that it democratised the ability to scam. A band of techno-utopians created a technology (ideology?) that made it much easier and cheaper to empty the pockets of the gullible.

That's a pretty good comparison, because, like the energy and custom hardware thrown at bitcoin, beanie babies are also intrinsically useless at the scale they were sold.