At the end of the day, we couldn't come up with a system that doesn't somehow feel a little scammy...
Even if you could stumble into a novel technology & incentive structure that achieves harmonious equilibrium and some interesting game-theory powered feature set or utility, then that development still needs to be funded (or justified against prevailing opportunity costs). And then, after it's funded, then comes the challenge of token distribution mechanisms. After that, governance for change management over time along with security both need to be really well done. And it can't take off while still centralized, cause if there is any material volatility due to early hype (call this "Vaporware Volatility Effect") -- with a crash that follows -- then people get litigious and go after the founders, (See Tezos, Sia, Nano).
If the odds of those 6 gates (Novel Utility, Funded, Distribution, Governance, Security, Vaporware-Vol) succeeding are 10% (very generous), then it means there is a 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% x 10% chance of reaching long-run viability.
1 in 1,000,000 chance.
There is only 19,041 entries on CMC as of the time of this writing.
I declare the above, the The Six-Gauntlet Token Proof