It's hard to predict how these sorts of systems play out until they start to scale up. I don't know much about these but I can imagine a functioning incentive s

It's hard to predict how these sorts of systems play out until they start to scale up. I don't know much about these but I can imagine a functioning incentive structure that gives hardware owners the freedom to schedule downtime with reasonable notice while penalizing them for going down without notice. A decentralized cloud could have big advantages over centralized data centers; lower costs for highly diffuse "voluntary" maintenance labor, fewer single points of failure, etc. It might not work at all, but it's not necessarily a Ponzi scheme (which isn't even really an accurate way to describe NFTs, which are a mostly worthless asset bubble; ponzi schemes require lying about transactions having taken place, not lying about the future value of an asset)