What cryptocurrency has a distribution curve where more coins will be given out in the future, preventing benefit from going to early adopters?

anything where mining is inflationary (or at least disinflationary where the rate of inflation outpaces the rate of "lost" coins).

Monero/XMR kind-of-sort-of falls into the second category, with "fresh" coin minting being a part of the mining process, although probably not at a rate that outpaces regular rot/deflation.

the mindset of securities trade, even when they have some external utility, will always be "getting in before it gets big". this is the idea behind essentially all analytical stock trading, yet the NYSE never seems to get called a ponzi scheme.

Practically speaking they all work the same way. A good way to know is if they have their own bespoke utility token instead of eth or whatever else