To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.
Meanwhile PoW needs real work. Real resources. Real effort. PoS is a Ponzi
Close enough. Premined scam. (Edit for 60%)
In fact the presale was so open that it was drawing substantial criticism at the time. People were worried about the legal ramifications of them selling to literally any member of the public, without any KYC or vetting process. It was the polar opposite of selling to insiders.
That's aside from your metrics for the sale being wrong as well.
I guess technically if you had traded Bitcoin for ETH at launch and then back to Bitcoin before merge you could have made more sats than holding the sats alone. It’s true of many low cap tokens. But for anyone touching ETH since the merge, they have been burned.
We can marvel at the innovations introduced by the tech, yeah, contracts are interesting (yet still don’t seem to have a use case beyond accounting and tokens.. [primarily fiat stables]).
It sounds like you're basically describing the software market, and more broadly, intellectual property in general. When you write software, it creates something using near-zero physical resources and physical effort, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme.
Your description could also apply to all fiat money, too. You're born with zero of it, and you have to buy it from someone who ultimately got it from someone who printed it out of thin air. That doesn't mean all money everywhere is a Ponzi scheme.
Expenditure of real resources isn't an indicator of a product's worth. If it was, Microsoft would be burning coal to power Microsoft Word.
Wake me up when you can manufacture a Bitcoin mining ASIC by yourself starting with sticks and rocks.