Not a pyramid scheme that would be more like Amway but ponzi scheme is very accurate... as there is no product to invest in and profits come from other fools who invest later...

@Lizard_of_Ahaz Amway has fixed prices doesn't it? Pyramid the price just keeps going up to the biggest sucker. Ponzi has a fixed price, capital is redistributed as income. My understanding with bitcoin is that an artifial weslth is "mined" in order to inflate the value. Mug comes along and pays for it. That is then used to pay out others cashing in. No real only pretend income is generated. Similar to the pretend increase in the value of houses.
Classic Cipolla defined stupidity - it's not intelligent as neither the individual nor the general population gain.

@FrayedBear Pyramid schemes depend on more people coming in at the bottom to pay the people at the top. The person or persons who start it are those who profit and everyone else gets fucked in the ass. For example the oldest version is that one person recruits three people to mail him one dollar each month and each of those send them one dollar each month while keeping one for themselves and the original person gets half their profits. Like a pyramid the money flows up and the people at the top get rich but the people who come in later get nothing and pretty soon you run out of people to recruit. By the 12 "level" of the pyramid you need well over 1.77 million suckers to fill that level but the person at the top keeps telling people that the pyramid can reach 25 or 30 levels... Long before then you would need most of the people in the world to be in the scheme and the people at the bottom are still getting nothing...
Ponzi schemes are "investment brokers" like Bernie Madoff who tell people that they can make amazing returns by investing with them and using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle and money from later investors goes towards paying those returns until tey run out of suckers to invest with them like he did... When the investors start asking where the money is they usually run for a non-extradition country but if they stay in business too long the regulators catch them and they go to prison...

In the case of cryptocurrency the value depends on more people buying in driving the price of the "currency" up by demand which is why Bitcoin values dropped by 50% in a day when China blocked cryptocurrency exchanges from their banking systems... If North America and Europe did the same the value would drop to nearly zero...

@Lizard_of_Ahaz I hope we are saying the same thing only differently.

@FrayedBear yeah just defining two different types of scam is all... Crypto currencies without exception ponzi schemes because the investors are buying nothing of value while being told that nothing is worth something. it is complete fiction not a real investment. Problem is people know it isn't real money though it is essentially the same as what governments issue as "real money" which is a series of ones and zeros in the electronic banking systems. It lacks that one essential which is that nobody and no government is backing it. only the buyer sets a value for it.