I'm not trying to make the case specifically for DDG. My point is that if these big corporations didn't exist, some new ones would quickly sprout up to take their place and eventually become as good or better than the current ones. These companies added value in the early days but now they're just rent-seeking.

Also, these companies had an unfair advantage since their early days; many received government subsidies (e.g. generous contracts or grants) - Without public money, they would not be in the position that they are in today. This kind of technological rent-seeking is highly unethical. It weaponizes the average citizen's labor against themselves - Monopolies make it impossible for citizens to compete against big corporations (even though these monopolies were funded partially by their own taxpayer money a few decades earlier).

Besides, if you understood how the current startup/Venture Capital industry works and how they funnel money to big corporations and safeguard their monopolies, you would not be so critical of cryptocurrency... At least the cryptocurrency pyramid scheme doesn't lie about it being a first-in-best-dressed, attention-monopolization, rent-seeking scheme.

Cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme, but it's not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme requires an element of deception. Eventually you might realize that the stock market is in fact closer to the definition of a Ponzi scheme than cryptocurrency is. The fact that the stock market attempts to hide its pyramid structure and tries to deceive investors by posing as legitimate, profitable businesses operating in a free market (and so far succeeding at maintaining this illusion) is why it's a closer to a Ponzi scheme and not merely a pyramid scheme.

BTW, I believe that the income and profits reported by corporations are real. I just don't believe that the source of that income is legitimate or ethical. If you dug into it, you would find that most of the income comes from bank loans or government money which has been laundered to the companies via a multitude of complex schemes involving many unwitting participants. Oversized, multi-billion government contracts is one such scheme but I'm sure that there are many others which are not so obvious.

You can be sure that the schemes exist; just look at what happened to big tech stock prices after the Federal Reserve Bank of the US started doing the COVID19 bailouts in 2020 and injecting trillions of dollars of newly created currency into the economy — Guess who got all that new money? The stock price increases were massive and almost immediate. Not to mention that many of us in the crypto space suspected that these bailouts would be coming as soon as we heard the word ‘pandemic’.