| Name any major project and I can tell you why it's a scam. Bitcoin: Uses the electricity of a country to process 2 transactions per second. Layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network have some significant drawbacks which make them unpractical and vulnerable to multiple attacks. They've been trying and talking it up for years - No results. Ethereum: Doesn't scale. The entire ecosystem (including all ERC20 tokens) together cannot process more than 30 transactions per second. New ERC20 tokens have to pay the same HUGE (e.g. $20 per transaction) fees as the mainchain; all tokens slow each other down (compete for resources from each other and drive up each other's transaction fees). They said that sharding was essentially ready years ago but now they've basically canceled it (or 'put it on the backburner' as they like to call it) in favor of extremely complex and vulnerable layer-2 ZK-Rollups solutions which are completely unproven (we don't know what will happen when many projects start adopting rollups; expensive on-chain interactions still need to happen). Polkadot: They claim everywhere to have 'Parachains'. The reality is that this feature doesn't exist yet. The way it's designed is extremely complex and the scalability benefits are limited because there can only be a limited number of parachains. Also, one thing which almost all the projects have in common is that they're mostly targeted at developers... Yet as a developer, there is almost always a MASSIVE amount of friction involved in setting up and integrating the blockchains with other systems. For example, Ethereum requires minimum 300GB of disk space to run a node (you need to run a node to do any serious integration testing). Also, the Ethereum node doesn't even provide a basic search feature; you need to use CENTRALIZED third-party services in order to search the blockchain data (that's because the node writes to a file instead of a proper database)... OMG. I could go on and on and on. There is just so much money behind these projects that the entire community will constantly twist the facts and present a severely distorted view of reality. There is no limit to the amount of deception and self-deception when there is money involved. |
By way of analogy, I remember the ruby on rails really struggled with scalability for a long time, and it was a big problem that lots of people, both proponents and opponents, talked about a lot. Nonetheless it turned out to be quite useful and definitely not a scam. I saw similar dynamics in both AngularJS and React. I'm trying to think of a good example on the other side, something that was hyped but criticized and didn't really succeed due to its criticisms being right ... maybe something like Meteor, it seemed promising but flawed and never really overcame its flaws. But none of these were "scams", just different flawed projects that succeeded or failed despite or because of their flaws.
By my lights, the top two you mentioned (I don't know enough about the third to say) fit very much into this same mould, I think they are flawed projects that will succeed or fail despite or because of widely recognized flaws which are or aren't eventually overcome. But not scams.
I think scams have to have a component of intentionality, that all effort at appearing legitimate and promising is conscientiously only for show. Contra that, I think lots of people are making a good faith effort to make bitcoin and ethereum useful. They may very well fail, but I don't think most people involved are conscientiously doing the work just for show.