What you’re saying here by no means shares any sort direct coordination with Ponzi schemes. What you described here is exactly how the financial markets work and many financial products. This is just basic buy/sell demand which sets pricing.

If bitcoin were a ponzi then Satoshi would have taken off with money long ago. Bitcoin is also established by being open sourced, and designed so that there is no central figure that has any way of stealing or manipulating funds/coins.

I'm commenting base on my opinion and no bias for Bitcoin. There's really a similarity between Bitcoin and Ponzi but that depend on how people perspective. Bitcoin is cryptocurrency so it's normal that it's value will grow when someone bought since it has a limited supply compared to fiat.

Just like Ponzi, Early investors will benefit more from the late investors that entering in crypto. Let's just admit it since it's true but its applicable to tradable assets even on stock market. The only difference is Bitcoin don't promise an insane return for a certain period of time while Ponzi did. You can use this explanation to enlighten your friends.

I hate it with passion when someone brings a Ponzi scheme into bitcoin. There is no single comparison between them both. Bitcoin is a digital currency that can not be controlled or predicted upon via the amount of profit you will make in a given time but a Ponzi scheme can be controlled both in several profits if invested a particular amount. The Ponzi scheme always needs a marketer that will introduce you to it before it will be able to excel.
Bitcoin is globally talked about and welcomed but the Ponzi scheme only exists within a country

From OPs explanation, everything investment sounds like Ponzi. Now let’s take farming for instance.

Stage 1. You need investment for the initial machines/land/crops = Bitcoin invest for miners, etc.
Stage 2. You harvest your crops after maturity = Bitcoin mined
Stage 3. You sell your crops @ price x to the first buyer after harvest = Miners sells Bitcoin
Stage 4. First buyer stores crops for after season and price goes up and sells to new buyer @ price x+100 = Bitcoins Bull market
And the stage can repeat itself over and again with little variations in-between.
 
I am also thinking that the Internet is some sought of a Ponzi, we can use it when we pay to access it. I don’t even understand why people keep using the argument about when new money enters BTC that’s when the price pumps, this is the same for most if not all financial assets does that make them a Ponzi scheme?

The comparison you made, while may seem astonishingly convincing at first glance, especially for those who aren't used to giving much thought to misleading narratives and myths randomly thrown at them and thinking critically in general, is very simplistic and superficial because it doesn't take into consideration a very important factor, namely the fact that the risk taken by early investors in Ponzi scheme is much much lower than that in the case of Bitcoin. Early investors in bitcoin couldn't know bitcoin would be valuable in the future. The "early" couldn't have known there would ever be "later" investors.   Still, they invested their time and effort in developing and learning about bitcoin, they invested their money to mine something that had no market value. Still, they took a risk and continued to mine at loss. Maybe they believed in bitcoin, they believed in the idea of decentralized digital money. If bitcoin had failed, these people would have lost their money, and you would probably have been mocking them for the stupid decision they made. They were rewarded justly for being right.

To the best of my knowledge, bitcoin has value attached to it which ranges from the point of it generation otherwise known as mining, a lot of hurdles are been overcome to get the bitcoin into live and this doesn't come cheaply, and huge finance has been invested in science of mining and securing bitcoin by thousands of people all over the world.

Bitcoin as a digital currency has been able to solve a lot of financial lapses bedeviling the traditional finance and it seeks to give back power to the people rather than the central authority and it growth and adoption in price and popularity has been phenomenal. These are just few points to prove that it's not a ponzi scheme.

Actually you're not completely correct.
It's true Bitcoin is decentralized and anyone can own Bitcoin no matter what his country, ages, religions, etc. But there's a whale who own large amount Bitcoin in a single address, we also don't know how many address he have. If the large amount Bitcoin were moved to another address, it will be posted on whale alert and sometimes it's affect the market.

They (whale) may not controlling Bitcoin, but they've a big impact on the market.

You are getting agitated because you are not able to handle the truth. The truth is that Bitcoin *is* a Ponzi scheme. At-least until now.

People who get in early and HODL will make way more money than those who come in later and HODL and so on and so forth.
Right now Bitcoin is valued at $47k. The only way it will shoot up in price is if more and more people get into crypto and buy more and more of Bitcoin. This includes institutional investors, Billionaires, regular people, people who switch from Alts to BTC etc.

If nobody ever buys another BTC, the price will collapse because most people (99.999%) who "invest" in BTC/Crypto are only doing so to make more money.

This is how BTC started out and how it blew up and grew like a wild fire on a hot summer day.

We have a suicide hotline posted regularly after the bubble crashes after a new batch of retail noobs get slaughtered every cycle. This is almost a meme now to sell when grandma starts talking about crypto.

Let's see the definition of a pyramid scheme as per usa dot gov

"Pyramid schemes need a constant flow of new participants to keep them going. They use new recruits’ "investments" to pay “profits” to those participating longer.

Pyramid schemes collapse when they can't recruit enough new participants to pay earlier investors."

Having said this. I also think that BTC is slowly transitioning away from no longer being a ponzi. BTC was not inherently valuable in the beginning. But now BTC is  *famous* and has a rich history and will simply never ever go away. It is fast becoming a vanity asset and it akin to digital gold. Every Billionaire, Millionaire will eventually want to have some just for sake of vanity. Each BTC will be like a painting of Mona Lisa with it's rich transaction history and being a scarce asset.

A random guy spent 10000 BTC to buy a $10 pizza 10 years back. Now, most of middle class in the world cannot afford to buy even 1 single BTC. Becoming a whole coiner is kind of a big deal now. Even people who do buy 1 BTC get nervous and sell it off if it declines by 10% in a single day.

Eventually, 1 BTC will end up trading around $5 Million per coin or more for a simple reason that big players want to get hold of it and there is simply not enough to go around.

It seems you don't understand what a Ponzi scheme is.

Yet plenty of the people who go in early also sold early and made very little profits, and plenty of people who got in later traded well and made lots more profits.

Not at all. If everyone decided to stop selling at the current prices, then the price would immediately shoot way up, regardless of whether or not any new people or new money got involved.

While true, this has nothing to do with whether or not Bitcoin is a Ponzi. If nobody ever bought another ounce of gold, then the price of gold would collapse. If nobody ever bought another barrel of oil, then the price of oil would collapse. Doesn't make those things Ponzis.