> But those fees go to stakers (who do provide a service, albeit a dumb one).
That service is the point of the whole thing. The fees go to stakers who *execute your computation for you and ensure the integrity of the results*. ETH is analogous to credits on AWS. It's simply an execution environment with different properties from AWS.
Again. I don’t know how to say this enough times or clearly enough.
If people were buying goods and services with crypto then I would agree with you but they are not.
Right now it’s circular and moving in the wrong direction. People buy coins with fiat to pay stakers to buy other currency. That’s the only use case. And a big part of that is because what ETH does is actually one of the theoretically worst ways to buy goods/services imaginable.
That is why it’s a ponzi scheme no matter how similar it seems to non ponzi businesses.
Let’s put it this way, Lu Lu roe (or whatever that mlm scam was called) looks a lot like lululemon, except in one people bought the leggings because they liked them and in the other they bought the leggings to get rich.
Only one of those two was a ponzi, even if they both sold leggings.
Is amazon web services not a service people pay for? People are currently buying computation (a service) with crypto. I spend ETH to deploy and execute code, in the exact same way I pay USD to AWS to deploy and execute my code.
That service is the point of the whole thing. The fees go to stakers who *execute your computation for you and ensure the integrity of the results*. ETH is analogous to credits on AWS. It's simply an execution environment with different properties from AWS.