[2color]

That's a bit like saying that every public toilet that charges a fee is a scam. Surely there are scams and hype in this industry.

Fees are for inclusion of a transaction in a block. And some pretty clever game theory was implemented as part of eip1559 in Ethereum to make fees efficient and fair.

[chx]

No, it's not, read Jorge Stolfi on this. While he insists the scam should be called a Ponzi, I am not sure of that , but the name doesn't change anything at all, we could call it a Nakamoto scheme as Preston Byrne did to avoid that particular debate.