Someone managed to con people by selling them land that doesn't exist. I don't see the relevance? If you buy bitcoins they may be useless in the future. There is no promise whatsoever that they will be worth something in the future and that is the big difference. Nobody gets conned. During the past 12 years it has gone up and it has gone down, a ponzi doesn't tend to revive itself after it gets discovered and they're forbidden by law. Whichever way bitcoin goes in the future nobody knows. There are definitely ponzi schemes within the crypto sphere but bitcoin isn't one of them. BitConnect was such an example and so was OneCoin, there are probably more recent ones as well but it's not something I keep track of.

>There is no promise whatsoever that they will be worth something in the future and that is the big difference. Nobody gets conned

Of course there is, that's what the Brazilian guys in the article we're commenting on were arrested for. Schemes worth 5 billion in total that included false promises of delivering monthly returns of 10% on bitcoin 'investments'.

Pretty much the entire value of countless of coins, nfts or other largely imaginary financial products is a game of bigger fool. People paying tens of thousands for NFTs of pictures or tweets makes no more sense than that old scam of buying an acre of land on the moon or of an imaginary country.

And of course the other big similarity is the shared psychological reaction. Rather than people waking up to the fact that they're entangled in increasingly bizarre financial transactions, the rationalizations for the behavior become weirder and weirder.

I replied to a statement claiming bitcoin is a ponzi scheme. Bitcoin doesn't have such a promise. Sure someone can come and claim this for dollars as well, but that doesn't make the dollar a ponzi scheme either.