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Nah, I think bitcoin deserves credit for being a new type of scam. It's not a pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme or multi-level-marketting scheme. It's most similar to a series of pump and dump scams, but it's more different from those than pyramid schemes are from MLMs, which get separate names.
I'd definitely call any cryptocurrency a pyramid scheme. A few whales at the top hold the majority of the value. They trade between themselves to simulate market activity, but their value only comes from others buying in. The currency doesn't achieve any actual promises, so the only way those early adopters see any value is if more buy in. At each stage the pool becomes larger for a smaller share of the asset and profit.
They all have the exact same culture and rhetoric of any mid-level marketing company. That's the model driving it to attract the same kind of person with the same promise.
I’m pretty sure the history of money and bank notes is full of people doing similar things with bitcoin. We’re just used to a relatively mature banking industry that only operates scams through dozens of layers of indirection.
The modern credit system began with failsons in numerous feudalistic countries wandering around without money in their pockets but still demanding food, drink, and lodging because they were born special.
Niall Ferguson wrote a good book about money in modern (post-Reformation) history. He sets out to prove that financialization is the foundation of human progress, gets caught in currents that seem to prove something quite the opposite, and then ends by restating the hypothesis with none of the rest of the book backing it up.
