Equally true of most other commodities and currencies, right?
If you have a gold bar, or a stack of 10 Euro notes, the only way you make money off of it is if enough more people want to buy gold/Euros that the price goes up. Neither asset does anything on its own.
A critical ingredient of a Ponzi scheme is fraud.
Taken to the extreme to illustrate: if everyone together today instantly decided each bitcoin was worth $1b, then in that first instant, nobody would sell and no trades would occur, but the price would be very different.
How does simply deciding 1 bitcoin is worth $1b effect the value of bitcoin if no one is willing to buy at that price?
2. 'willing to buy' and trades executed are two different things.
If you are measuring the price of bitcoin by looking at the price of the last trade that occurred, then you are right: trades need to happen for you to get price information.
But there is also the order book. In [1], thousands of 'intents to trade'/outstanding orders are displayed but no trades are listed.
When I looked at the page, the highest anyone was willing to buy (in this specific order book at this time) was $4076, and the lowest anyone would sell was $4086.
This is a good indicator of the current consensus on Bitcoin price but isn't actually trade data.
Now, let's say the market gets just a little more bullish on Bitcoin and someone places an order to buy at $4080. Has the price of Bitcoin changed? One could argue yes if you judge price from the order book: from ~$4081 to ~$4083 or so. But no trades have occurred.
So back to the original question: in the absence of trade data, the price of bitcoin can be seen from what everyone decides it is, via an order book.
No; if I hold a stock I receive a dividend from the company and a vote in their governance; if I hold a bond I receive interest payments; if I hold bauxite I can use it to make whatever you make with bauxite.
That is not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is giving someone payouts on their investment funded solely from people putting the money in, while fraudulently telling them that the money is coming from real investment. You can't have a Ponzi scheme when on average both sides of the transaction are (generally) aware of the situation and aware of how the value is flowing, because you lack the fraudulent aspect. Also, for any given transaction, value is flowing instantaneously; when someone sells their bitcoin, they aren't getting paid in funds being fraudulently kept aside from somebody else's previous purchases. It's an instant commodity exchange.
Again, in a nutshell, the reason why this doesn't fall afoul of laws against Ponzi schemes is that it simply isn't one.
No. A person was using the silver market as a ponzi scheme vehicle, it doesn't mean the silver market itself was a ponzi scheme.
Same as Bitcoin here. A devious actor could use Bitcoin as the product for a ponzi scheme, that doesn't mean bitcoin is a ponzi scheme as much as the tulip bulb market itself is a ponzi scheme.
That's 1/2 a Ponzi scheme, the other 1/2 is an entity promising you a return. I think you'd need to commit some fraud along the way too. If someone said "For every 5 dollars given to me, I will provide a share, and dispense 1/(2*N) dollars to all other shareholders, where N is the number of other shareholders (N=0 for the first donation, 1 for the second, etc)." Would that be a Ponzi scheme? There's no fraud, so I don't think it would be, despite having identical mechanics.
Exchange rate, also known as 'cost,' is a form of value.
Perhaps somewhere someone's even running an actual Ponzi scheme using BitCoin.
Sure, but that's a different question. I'm talking about new investment in a security being the only source of increased value in that security. Which is what a Ponzi scheme is.