No matter how much I read, I still don’t really understand crypto…

I've read a lot over the last few years, and yet I still can't say I understand crypto. I want to understand it and get into it more, but for the time being I'm more heavily into stocks.

For those that knew nothing/had trouble understanding about crypto but found a way to make it click, what or where did you learn?

I've had coinbase since I first tried to get into crypto a few years back. I wasn't using it for at least 2 years since then and I remember having a decent amount worth of different coins in there when I logged off last. Well, when I was finally able to get into my account, I found out it all turned to 0. If I remember correctly, I thought I was holding coins for projects I was for sure would grow. Does this mean those projects failed and then caused the coins to drop to 0? I would imagine you don't just lose your stash for not logging in for a year or so, but am I wrong? How does one become confident that their investments won't disappear? I'm more of a pump, set and forget kind of investor. I would like the ability to buy coins with confidence and have them grow.

I know, I could have just bought Bitcoin and called it a day. But if I remember correctly, this was around the time that Bitcoin was hitting it's all time high, and I wasn't confident it was going to go higher and luckily I didn't, because it didn't go higher so I would have lost money regardless.