To be clear, I believe the technology and Bitcoin itself is a wonderful innovation. It allows people to freely exchange money to anyone else in the world, almost instanteously and anonymously. With banks, there are so many limitations. They are closed on weekends and holidays, you have a hard time wire transferring big sums of money, you have to wait it long lines, the banks get nosey and ask you all sorts of questions. There are issues with tax, fraud, conveneince, etc.
Where the scam part, and ponzi scheme comes in is the manipulation of the price by the people at the top. They are making a killing off of hyping Bitcoin up, having people buy it, and then dump, and repeat the process. The people who got in early make a lot of money if they exit on time. Those who buy into it later because of fomo, buy in at the peak excitement, at the top. Then the crash comes, and they're left holding the bag. It happens every time.
The people who own the media companies such as CNBC use the media to manipulate the market and sentiment, so that they can influence when and where the money flows, and make those at the top money. Jim Cramer is NOT out there to make you money. He's a puppet who's being used to feed the narrative that the people at the top want.
The people at the top KNOW this bitcoin cycle. But do you hear Jim Cramer explaining the cycle, and telling them to get in at the lowest point (early January), and then holding and selling next year? No, he does the fucking opposite, and tells you NOT to buy crypto, but to buy gold.
Jim Cramer urged investors not to let bitcoin's recent gains tempt them into buying crypto.
www.cnbc.com
That's where the scam part comes in. The creator of Bitcoin never had the intention to use Bitcoin as a ponzi scheme, Bitcoin in itself is giving people the power over their own money. Right now the government is printing money, and making the money you worked so hard to earn worth less and less. It's not that prices are going up, it's that your money is worth less. That $3 burger is now $5 because the government made your money worth less. They stole the $2 from you. This is the same thing as them robbing you. They are stealing money from you to fund their programs. With Bitcoin, that can never happen, as the supply can't be artifically created out of thin air. That's why Bitcoin has value, and will probably continue to. The same can't be said about fiat currencies such as the dollar. Look at all the currencies around the world that have become worthless because of corruption. They are fucking over the people.
While Bitcoin is not a scam, there are many cryptos out there that are, such as Squid, etc. that are. NFTs are also a scam. The problem is that there is a tendency to lump all of crypto into one basket, but it's not as black and white as it seems.
There is one way that Bitcoin in itself could be a scam. And that is if the creator's intention was for Bitcoin to never have been a decentralized form of currency, but a way to make him billions of dollars. If so, Bitcoin would an extremely sophisticated and elaborate scam by the genius of the century.