Bitcoin scam or easy money?

It's not a scam. The problem is it's like any type of currency in this world. It has as much value as people put in it. The reason it shot up in the recent years is people were looking to dump money or make it unregulated. The peak happened because people we're experiencing FOMO as they saw something go from $200 to 20k in an extremely short period of time. People don't really understand what it is, what problem it solves and why we should be interested in it. Thus, people were taken advantage of by groups performing pump and dump schemes. Groups would rally together and say we're buying on this date, at this time, then sell at this time after it skyrockets for no apparent reason. I have no doubt crypto will be somewhere in our future, the issues like power consumption, 51% attacks on the blockchain and recovering currency are issues that hurt it at the moment. However, for now you are better putting your money elsewhere.