It's not a scam as long as you stay in crypto-space. Then one token equals one token and there is no concept of value beyond that. It is a scam in the traditio

It's not a scam as long as you stay in crypto-space. Then one token equals one token and there is no concept of value beyond that. It is a scam in the traditional sense of failing to deliver expected value, since we want crypto to carry value and thus people still expect to be able to use crypto to buy things. The rub is that prices of things are still typically tied to fiat currencies, even if expressed as crypto prices. E.g., buying eggs with crypto depends on the price of the eggs, which is almost always controlled by the global economic order which is essentially governed by the (petro-)dollar, because of the economies of scale that have grown around egg production and distribution. The only reason any plausible deniability still exists about this basic feature of the crypto space is that crypto does not concern itself with participation in economies of scale, and the prices set in crypto-space are essentially just in crypto-space (even if all the reporting equates buys of NFTs, etc. to equivalent fiat amounts). One could say this is the ideal, but when the source of that value-as-expressed-in-crypto is value-as-expressed-in-dollars, you are siphoning realizable value from naive folks in a way that is functionally indistinguishable from a scam.