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Literally every investment is a "ponzi" or "pyramid" by your definition. If I invest in a company I can get a hell of a lot more shares for cheap now than when

• 0wing 9y ago
  No. This is specific to crypto currency supply production algorithms. Coin supplies are created by running the software. Bitcoin and many other cryptocoins use a rule that lets the first users take control of the supply very easily by generating the coins for very low CPU/GPU difficulty. After a few weeks, the work required to produce more coins doubles. This just lets a few users control the supply, wait, and attempt to convince new users the coins are rare because the production/mining has become significantly more expensive. tl;dr: early miners generate most of the coins inexpensively, and try to sell to greater fools because the software stops creating coins as easily as the first few days
• Goladus 9y ago
  Shares are fractional ownership of a company that can grow or shrink. The whole point is that their value corresponds with the total value of the company. It becomes a ponzi scheme when the only value from early shares comes from investment in later shares. That's what's happening with bitcoin.
  • 0wing 9y ago
    It's also simply how the supply is produced. Satoshi made a machine that prints money if you do work. He made it so it only required a small amount of work to begin with and as time goes on, someone else with the same machine and the same work gets less. It's made even worse because there were less users battling over the larger easy production near the start, and more and more users fighting over less and less output. tl;dr it's even more malicious than a ponzi