See, this is the classic bad faith anti-blockchain argument. Article we're talking about is about NFTs, which are based on Ethereum, an extremely sophisticated blockchain with proof-of-stake, smart contract capability, and a huge infrastructure of people who've built economic machinery on top of it and are using it actively. But you want to prove your point, so you cherry-pick Bitcoin, the very first "proof of concept" blockchain which has essentially had active development halt because the creator wanted anonymity, vanished into thin air, and the developers working on it largely refuse to hard-fork it, so which has no real smart contract capability, still uses wasteful proof-of-work, etc.

It's not "obvious" that it's a ponzi scheme, it's the point you want to make so you're just bending the facts and cherry-picking things to try to prove it. I'm not impressed. And tossing "monetary velocity" out there as a term isn't making me think you're some brilliant economist - if anything, monetary velocity is an overstressed concept in modern econ because the government sits around trying to manipulate it via interest rates instead of letting people's actual spending priorities dictate how the economy works, leading to a consumerist frenzy and catastrophic boom/bust cycle.