This is a fair point, but as of their most recent financials merchandise (excluding merchandise sold inside the parks) only made up $5bn of the $28bn in the "Parks, Experiences and Product" category. By contrast park admissions was $8bn, resorts was $6bn and food/merchandise sold in the parks was $6bn.

So IMO this is a departure from the classic merchandise based strategy. It seems pretty clear that the theme parks more so than the products are the major profit centers today.

It's interesting that Disney today almost the entire profits of the company come from the parks division (which also includes cruises, resorts and "experiences"). The media division by itself is in a massive war for eyeballs with tons of other streaming competitors, all of whom are probably over-investing in content relative to what consumers can support.

One interesting possibility is that maybe the business model of media companies in the 21st century will become content as a loss leader for the purpose of providing valuable IP to amusement parks. Certainly seems like a similar thing is happening with Comcast with their massive expansion of Universal parks.

> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in.

The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.

Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top of new primitives is hard and long, and there will be a lot of time required just to build out usable infrastructure.

Turing complete smart contracts are only 7 years old. Layer 2 scaling is only two years old. Decentralized exchanges and other on-chain financial contracts about four years old.

I guess what exactly do you define as scamming? In terms of outright fraud, I agree there's a lot. It shouldn't be super surprising that scammers tend to prefer decentralized permissionless financial rails, for the same reason that political extremists and pornographers were some of the biggest earliest users of the decentralized permissionless publishing rails of the early Internet.

But I wouldn't characterize all, or even most of crypto as scams. Gambling, maybe. Are memecoins a scam? I would say they're more like a massively multiplayer form of gambling. Which you might argue is a bad thing, and certainly is dubious from a social standpoint. But if the code is openly public and autonomous, and there's no outright deceit, I don't think gambling is really gambling.

Even beyond that, there's a lot happening in crypto that most certainly isn't scams. You have stablecoins and payment rails like USDC, stores of value like Bitcoin, smart contract chains like Ethereum, decentralized finance applications like permissionless exchanges and lending markets, social applications like farcaster, decentralized AI, and gaming.

Now you might argue that all of these things are stupid and pointless and wastes of money, but that's a separate debate. Of the large projects in these categories almost none are outright scams. They're teams experimenting with new ways to run financial markets or move payments or train models or hedge inflation. Like most technological experiments most will fail. But if that was the criteria for "scam" then the entire startup sector is also wall-to-wall scams.

I think it's easy to be cynical. But one major reason I'm a believer in decentralized consensus is because I think it can make the silo'd financial systems of the world as seamlessly interoperable as the Internet made the silo'd telecommunication systems of the world.

It feels a lot like when AOL first started supporting email in 1993. It's easy to dismiss AOL and Nasdaq as highly centralized systems that don't align with the ethos of decentralization. But the other way to look at it is a previously maximally centralized system is interfacing with a decentralized one in a way that gives the users of the former slightly more freedom and the latter wider user base and legitimacy.