Rubes trading excessive amounts of fiat cash for digital tokens are baffling, and a testament to how deranged economics can get simply by assuming an asset is rare or desirable.
It's a ponzi scheme in a loose sense, as early adopters produced and acquired large sums of arbitrary numbers written to a database and by design, as time passes later users running the same software on an equally powerful machine are "rewarded" with smaller numbers written to the database.
The entire service, and minting/production of database token/coins are reproducible simply by forking or running a new genesis block with the same protocol.
Denying the inherent ponzi scheme payouts designed into the early cryptocoin protocols is neglect or delusional at best, and at worst, purely deceptive.
Something being cheap at first, and then becoming more expensive as demand for it increases, doesn't make it a ponzi scheme. By such a definition, any stock that saw its value increase would be a ponzi scheme.
The assertion of it being a ponzi scheme is pure ignorance at best, and at worse, intentional deception and defamation.
June 12, 2010, 08:14:44 PM
This is an open offer by the way.. I will trade 10,000 BTC
for 2 of these pizzas any time as long as I have the funds
(I usually have plenty). If anyone is interested please
let me know. The exchange is favorable for anyone who
does it because the 2 pizzas are only about 25 dollars
total, maybe 30 if you give the guy a nice tip. If you
get me the upgraded extra large ones or something, I can
throw in some more bitcoins, just let me know and we'll
work something out.
My 1 year old daughter really enjoys pizza too! She just
smears it all over her face if you give her a whole slice,
but she does eventually manage to get most of it in her
mouth (minus a few loose toppings of course).
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195#msg1195