By its very nature, a Ponzi scheme grows exponentially.

Each participant must recruit new participants to sustain returns.
That implies doubling at a roughly constant pace.
Exponentials require fuel.
And anything that grows exponentially eventually collapses when that fuel runs out.
In that sense, most traditional assets—equities like the S&P 500 and NASDAQ, even gold in certain regimes—are tied to exponential dynamics and therefore similar to a Ponzi scheme.
Companies also grow exponentially, saturate, and die.
Most of them within few years, and none of them survive more than 100 years.
Nature does something different.
Natural systems don’t grow exponentially forever.
They follow power laws—scaling relationships that are self-consistent across time and size.
Teeth, nails, horns, shells, star systems, galaxies, these don’t explode in growth.
They scale. They optimize. They sustain.
They all follow power laws.
The same is true for human systems at their most stable.
Cities, some thousands of years old, exhibit power-law behavior:
GDP, wages, innovation, infrastructure, even walking speed—all scale with size in a predictable, non-exponential way.
Now consider Bitcoin.
Adoption follows a power law.
Network growth follows a power law.
Price, over long time scales, follows a power law.
This is not a coincidence. It is the signature of a system governed by scale invariance rather than unsustainable exponential expansion.
Bitcoin strengthens as it scales. It self-creates and sustains.
That makes it fundamentally different.
If exponential systems are inherently unstable, then the real question is not whether Bitcoin is a Ponzi—
but whether everything else is.
And on that point, @PeterSchiff has it exactly backwards.