Ahh yeah, for sure. My first opinion was that it's nerd money for drugs. You might enjoy the white paper. True, right now it's insane, especially if you're mostly just reading the headlines. The paper gives a broader, more long term perspective. It describes a peer-to-peer decentralized ledger, with no single point which could fail or be coerced, where no party can cheat and participants are incentivized to make the network more secure (mining).

It can also be thought of as a system which guarantees certain trust functions. If the internet is a communication layer which facilitates sharing ideas, blockchains are a trust layer which facilitate disintermediation of industries which guarantee trust functions (e.g. banking / currency).

The book Cryptonomicon also describes something EERILY similar to bitcoin, and in that book one of the characters describes how, at first, of course a lot of criminals are going to use it for bad stuff, and I think that's what you're seeing right now. Some of that is just because it makes interesting news. I unfortunately don't think mainstream media are thinking they'll get a lot of eyeballs describing the difference between segwit, bitcoin unlimited, and segwit+2mb, but it's, imo, much more interesting than "$50k worth of bitcoins stolen from hospital using hackers-on-steroids-malware".