It is kind of a ponzi in the sense that in order to buy any tangible goods for SP interest or author payouts, people need to exchange steem tokens to something merchants actually accept - USD, BTC, whatever. And that exchange only works if there are people willing to invest into steem at that point.
So in a way, later investors are paying earlier rewards - be it content payout or SP/SBD interest. Eventually, more people will be trying to cash out than buy in and the whole thing will collapse in on itself.
I wrote about this in more detail here
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