>Early gamblers buy first batch of clown bucks, then hype the price, then next group of gambles buy slightly more expensive clown bucks, then hype, then then bu

>Early gamblers buy first batch of clown bucks, then hype the price, then next group of gambles buy slightly more expensive clown bucks, then hype, then then buy, in a loop That is not a ponzi scheme. The selling of the asset to the next sucker, and the price going up, and each person in line getting to shave some profit off the next person is not a ponzi scheme. (It's also exactly how non dividend end paying stocks work. The stock is only worth what the next person is willing to pay.) Youve described a pump and dump. A ponzi scheme has a mechanism to give a fraudulent "RETURN" to investors that HOLD. That is the definition. None of the clow bucks are claiming that the underlying product is producing its own profit, the only value is the holding of the asset itself. Everyone is now using ponzi to mean any sort of scheme including ponzi, pump and dump, etc. But thats not what the word ponzi actually means. And when you say things like "by definition" we need to stick to the actual definition.