[SilverBirch]

A public ledger only ensures that you can see through this if you can verify ownershp of wallets, because as we've seen repeatedly, you can programmatically create an entire eco-system of fake wallets trading back and forth. What's the cost? I can trivially create a series of bots that just trade their coins back and forth with each other forever. It'll create huge volumes. Now the reason you don't do this on real chains is because the transaction costs will cripple you. But transaction costs aren't real if the currency you're paying them in was entirely fictional to start with.

From the outside there is no way of verifying that any chain has any real activity without verifying ownership of the wallets.

[mgraczyk]

Your counterargument here only applies when exchanges participate in the scam. Of course that does happen, and for a long time you could even pay OKeX to do this for you. But it's much less common than obscure coins faking volume off-exchange or faking node activity.