Totally disagree with you, there are so many good coins after 2012, not weed coins. Ethereum, Monero, Zcash and many others. Why people are not working in McDonalds and starting their own restaurant? Because they don't want to work for McDOnalds corp, because they want to do it different. Same here, there are a plenty of weed coins but still no weed coin with smart contracts and here we go. You may like it or not but it is a competition and real free market capitalism. I can't call it pyramid, everything is pyramid in that view.
Time will tell.
What problems did these other coins solve?
As if a "smart" contract solved any problem.
Storj - decentralized storage, Ethereum - smart contracts, Zcash, monero and many other - privacy, factom - database registry, synereo - attempts to build decentralized social network and many others

Regarding you statement about "only USD payments". You know all Marijuana is illegal on fed level, right? And still dispenssaries are there

You know most of extracts are illegal on state level, right? And still you can buy it in every dispensary

You know there are other countries other than US, right? And still they are smoking weed there
