Is Coca Cola a Ponzi scheme? After all, they have to run ads to fool "suckers" into buying Coke as well.
No if Coca Cola was running a Pyramid Scheme/Bitcoin Scheme it would look like this:
Coca Cola makes a new invisible drink no one can see
Coca Cola rewards the first people who help create this invisible drink
Coca Cola uses payments made by new invisible drink consumers to pay the people who help created it
Coca Cola gets additional customers when the people who made the invisible drink tell their friends about it
Coca Cola pays customers to keep recruiting their friends
Coca Cola continues to sell these invisible drinks and gets everyone's money
Coca Cola pays customers to keep recruiting their friends.. is this line referring to Bitcoin's payments? Because as far as I know, there are none. I mean hardforks produce extra capital, sure, but that's not what the original intender planned. Nor does that really happen to everybody. People invest into BTC mainly due to speculation right now, but even when that dies down, there still will be more value to it than the traditional payment systems.