I use myself as an example, be for I started to acquire knowledge about Bitcoin, I first bought some amount of Bitcoin and held it in my personal wallet, not an exchange wallet, and I had my wallet keys properly saved, and after that, I became more active innthe forum and reading comments and posts and doing other bitcoin related research, and that made it easy for my to accumulate more bitcoin while studying, and this has helped me in much greater ways and I thought it could help others here, most especially newbies.
To be sincere to you, you started on the wrong note to acquire bitcoin. Just because you didn't fall into a scammer's way of defrauding people of investing in their hands, doesn't make it a good way to start investing in bitcoin without having the knowledge.
Some people started on the path you started(investing in bitcoin without the knowledge) and they lost their investment to bitcoin investment.
I have heard stories of those who fall victim to scams because they thought the knowledge of bitcoin is not necessary, investing in bitcoin comes first. They made the mistake of investing in bitcoin in someone's hand because of the promise of profits in a few months, storing their bitcoin on an exchange, and not keeping their seed phrase safe.
When the above-stated mistakes happen to them in a way they never expected they will call bitcoin a scam without blaming themselves for not having any knowledge of bitcoin first before investing in it