[mumblemumble]

It's neither. A defining feature of both pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes is centralized control of the ledger and who is allowed to participate. And a defining feature of cryptocurrencies is, at least theoretically, the lack of such centralized control.

I understand that people feel like there's something fraudulent going on with crypto. Given the sheer density of fraud and scamming surrounding crypto, it's hard to argue with that. But trying to make one's argument seem more concrete by picking the name of some well-known class of fraud and blithely using it to describe crypto in general is counterproductive. It muddies the waters, and makes it more difficult to have an organized discussion by removing clarity from the language we have to discuss these things.

The urge to do so should be resisted for the same reason that we should resist the urge to try and make arguments involving statistics seem more authoritative by just guessing at numbers when we're not sure of them. False precision is, well, false.