That's, like, a very specific and applicable definition.
I think we agree on the mechanism at play though, it’s just a semantic distinction.
Pon·zi scheme
/ˈpänzē ˌskēm/
noun
a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.
Is there an expectation that by buying Bitcoins, you are funding the growth of a business which creates profits by using your investment, and those profits are where your investment return is coming from? If that's not the case, then it isn't a Ponzi scheme.
If you think this isn't a common viewpoint, you need to lurk on some bitcoin forums and discord servers.
That some people are making money hand over fist by investing is then used as proof that it is a good investment.
That the fake enterprise is just lazy meta-financial-jargon rather than a more effort-full fake building project or an imaginary hedge fund with fake books and blueprints and a fancy office and whatnot isn't enough to make the definition inaccurate IMO.
Quacks like a duck, etc.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
was kind of similar and has " a plan for making money that involves encouraging people to invest by offering them a high rate of interest and using their money to pay earlier investors. When there are not enough new investors, people who have recently invested lose their money."
which I think is what is usually meant by a ponzi scheme and is different from bitcoin.
Even with your definition bitcoin doesn't really fit:
"form of fraud" - bitcoin was completely open about what you were getting from the start
"nonexistent enterprise" - the first and largest decentralized digital payments system. The more legit complaint is the enterprise is wrecking the environment more than it doesn't exist.
Re: Bitcoin as a digital payments, my complaint there would be that Bitcoin is not structured to return transaction fees to people buying Bitcoin as an investment.
All that considered, you might still call it a Ponzi scheme if you really wanted to, but it certainly isn’t only a Ponzi scheme.
"Started at the bottom, now we a little bit above the bottom"
A trillion dollars a year funneling from business profits to investors is the difference between the S&P 500 and Bitcoin.
The current price is largely a product of the speculation in the market, but at the same time ... a lot of people buy houses just because they want to live in them. So you have people buying houses at two, three times the price they'd be paying without the pure real estate investors speculating up the price, but at the same time, they're just buying them because they want a house and will pay the absurd price.
Likewise, there's a huge amount of speculation in the gold market, and that's probably what defines the price of gold, but at the same time, something like 50% of newly-mined gold goes to make jewelry, and most people buy it because they want it, even though [or because] it is over-priced, and they aren't buying it as an investment, just a pretty thing to have.
That doesn't mean that gold or houses are good investments, or that the markets aren't going to crash to a tenth of their current valuations next month or ten years from now, but it does mean there is a second component to the market -- you have speculators interacting with consumers, and the speculators can extract money from consumers who will buy the underlying good even at a bad price.
(Oddly, I'd say house buyers are more-expecting to get the money they invested back at some time in the future, compared to gold jewelry buyers.)
[But what do I know, I'm just a jerk on the internet saying things.]
In order for it to be a Ponzi scheme, speculators would have to believe they are actually investing in a business which uses their investment to generate profit, and not simply speculating against other investors. The investors must be misled about the actual source of their returns.
If you want to make a customer cash-flow argument, Ethereum has $9B of ARR. Same story.