I guess maybe the argument is you can do something with metals or video games or pokemon cards. But it's hard to believe that a special Charizard has a utility permitting million dollar valuations.
Palladium is a genuinely useful material, and has significant industrial uses. If it gets expensive, that's just markets. If it gets too expensive, alternatives will be researched and hopefully developed. And that is fine.
Crypto fraudsters are trying to tell us that their coin is legitimately useful for ... something, while it is actually an entertainment product. In my view, Doge is one of the few legit crypto coins because it was initially marketed as entertainment. People would donate Doge to each other for fun. Some of the file storage coins may also be legitimate, because you spend those on distributed storage, which is an actually useful service.
But the majority of crypto coins and NFTs are marketed as something useful or a legitimate investment, when they are not.
This isn't a scam. If I give everyone in the comments $100k, by "next year" some will have $1m and some $0 -- and, in general, we'll all be a little better off.
Its the nature of any advantage that it compounds, and compounding advantages of any kind produce dramatic inequalities (of sex, money, creative achievement, etc.).
Bitcoin isnt a scam because it produces an unequal outcome -- any system which works to increase the general welfare will necessarily operate on and compound inequalities.
It's a scam because as time passes the general welfare *does not increase*, indeed, it plummets!
People holding coins arent opening factories, building houses, teaching people, etc. Nothing is happening. They're litterally just twiddling their thumbs.
What's actually happening is that poorer fools are joining late in the game, whose money comes from actual labour... and supply the initial parasitical early-stakes with exit-cash. Ie., they wait for 10yr do nothing; you work for 1mo and do lots. Your productive labour becomes their exit. It's welfare for the rich.
Inequality isnt the issue here. It's the particular type of "theft" taking place. It is, in a very real sense, an actual scam.