> I had a net worth of 64k
No you didn’t. You had a potential net worth of 64k, but you didn’t take advantage. You can’t just compare to peak, your wealth loss/gain comes from comparing to the price you bought it.
What's a potential net worth? "Net worth" is already "how much money would you have if you sold all your assets and settled all your debts". Since for most people most of their wealth is in assets, it's totally normal for net worth to swing up and down as the market value of household goods/land/buildings/companies/bitcoins changes.
The catch is that even if your net worth is a certain amount on paper, you can't necessarily realize that as cash.
Take Elon Musk, for example. A lot of his wealth is in Tesla stock. But he can't sell that stock without also affecting its price. If he decided to sell all of it tomorrow, the price would plummet and he would only receive a fraction of what it's worth today.
This is what a lot of these companies are doing. I can create 100 tokens and sell you one for $1. In theory, my "net worth" is now $99, since I have 99 tokens that are worth $1 each. In reality, if I tried to sell all 99 of them, I'd quickly find that people are actually not willing to buy all of them for that amount.
How else would you understand wealth? Are people who have loans against massive stock portfolios but relatively little cash (spent on houses, cars, trips, etc)... poor? Obviously not.
OP was worth at least 64k at some point and now is worth at least 16k. The value and total amount of wealth (in US Dollars) has gone down.
If they're only going to scan photos that will sync to iCloud Photos, why wouldn't they just keep doing it server-side? As far as it's publicly known, no one asked Apple to do this.
Apple is very pro-privacy and probably doesn’t like having access to unencrypted customer photos. But if they just encrypted everything it would be a child abuser’s dream because suddenly they’d be safe on iOS, and when people found out Apple started protecting them it would be a disaster for PR and law enforcement.
After much consultation their solution was to scan for known abuse images on device so they could be kept in the cloud in an encrypted form without providing abusers a safe haven.
> why wouldn't they just keep doing it server-side
Because they want to scan files that will be encrypted on your device and not transferred to the server as plaintext. No doubt they'll continue to scan unencrypted files server side.
> no one asked Apple to do this.
If someone asked them to it would turn it into a warrantless search with Apple acting as the state agents to search your possessions. It would almost certainly result in the evidence being tossed by any US court. This kind of warrantless search only works if Apple does it of their own accord, instead of on the governments behalf.
Note that this doesn't apply to searches done on Apples servers to data you uploaded, there it's their possessions that they're searching, not yours.