A cashflow producing venture is not a Ponzi since that cashflow is supposed to ensure the returns of all investors.
Recommended reading: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
You are right. It is a ponzi.
Monero is closest to achieving the original cryptocurrency dream. Private and anonymous transactions, good speeds, low fees, ASIC and GPU resistance, committed developers that are actually improving the coin over time, open source wallets even on mobile.
> I think dogecoin is the only one in our current crypto eco-system that has even a fraction of a chance in filling that space.
Why do you say that?
Everything is a pyramid scheme these days including the entire stock market (especially big tech).
But the modern monetary system is designed to sustain such pyramid schemes. It can keep them going forever. No matter how much net value they destroy; it will offload the costs to fiat salary earners who accept fiat currencies.
TBH I'm confused how the world economy is able to keep running at all with all these extreme inefficiencies everywhere.
Smart people look at Bitcoin and Ethereum and think "wow that's inefficient, if the banks raise interest rates, they're going to get wiped out" but they don't realize that most corporations are just as capital inefficient and are in the same position. They are both unprofitable, therefore both worthless... Does it matter that one may be slightly less worthless than the other? The intrinsic market cap (if we had a free market) would be less than 0 in both cases.
Before the pandemic, the Fed tried to wipe out the crypto space by raising interest rates... Then when they realized that their policies were threatening to take out the entire stock market instead, they decided to suddenly drop interest rates back to 0.
It seems like the Fed was trying to find a sweet spot of interest rates which would wipe out all speculative investments but would allow non-speculative investments to stay afloat... They simply didn't anticipate that stocks might be more speculative than crypto.
The only crypto community who has shown any genuine effort in creating a "currency" is Dogecoin. And that is mainly because they are more aware that their coin has no value without real adoption. But sadly, even that has been infested with the pyramid scheme HODLers after the recent surge in value.
Another problem with Eth is that regular folk are thrown off when they hear things like "smart contracts", "NFT" etc.. So, in terms of a realistic crypto "currency" having widespread adoption, it seems hard to justify any of them at the moment.
I love using crypto for payments as it can be incredibly simple when done right. I really hope to see a crypto that works toward distributing wealth and opportunity though rather than the toxic crypto culture of HODlers we see today!