New people joining aren't paying for the rewards of the previous people who joined. In fact it is the absolute reverse situation.
In order for the people who have "powered up" now to be able to pull out more value than they put in, we will need new people to buy Steem tokens. Forgot about the people getting paid for making posts and for voting; they aren't participants in the alleged "Ponzi" situation, only the people expecting to make a profit from "powering up" or from holding Steem Dollars are. Both kinds of investors have been lead to believe they will make a profit from holding SP or SBD, but without any plan for where that profit will come from. It seems pretty clear that their profit will come from new investors buying in.
Ponzi is thrown around as a slur in cryptocurrency and the ironic thing is the anti-bitcoin vested interests use the exact same arguments of a Ponzi that Tone was trying to use against STEEM except they use them against Bitcoin.
It is ironic, but I think it applies much better against Steem than against Bitcoin, for two reasons:
Bitcoin doesn't promise you any kind of a profit. If you are lucky enough to have the price increase while you hold it then you can make a profit by selling for more than you bought in with, whereas Steem offers you very good interest on both SP and SBD.
Bitcoin doesn't require you to lock up your funds at all to benefit from price movements. Steem's best interest rate is only available if you lock up your funds by powering up into Steem Power, which locks up your coins and requires you to wait 2 years to get them all back.
Unrealistic promises of future gains with no visible source for those gains plus the requirement to lock up your funds for a long time combine to make it look pretty much like a Ponzi.
The arguments around how we don't know who owns what accounts and what they are doing with the markets just seemed rather strange to me. You can make the same arguments with Bitcoin and most cryptos. Also the same can be said for the early adopter advantage/founder advantage - there is no bigger example of that than Bitcoin itself. (e.g. Satoshi's stash)
I agree. I think Tone did an OK job at the start of the video but by the end it was pretty embarrassing. Arguing tht there "is no blockchain" while also admitting that he had no way of knowing whether there is a blockchain was pretty bad. Then he went on to confuse transparency of transactions with the lack of on-chain identity. I wish they could have found someone better qualified to argue the "anti" side.
Thanks for the response. You make some good points. I think it would have been better to have the debate with you there rather than Tone lol! I'm not saying there are not things to be concerned about with STEEM I just don't think Tone made a good argument. The ultimate judge for all this will be time I think.