Bitcoin was designed to make people who got in early incredibly wealthy at the expense of everyone else. So, yeah, it's similar to a pyramid scheme. There's another thread on this forum estimating the guy who can up with bitcoin's wealth. Take a look at that some time.
There's no other way to do it in a natural way. Just look at how Ripple's handling the opposite of how Satoshi did it. Look how well that'll work out.
Bitcoins seem to get pretty well dispersed now, due to the difficulty of creating them and the number of people involved. Creation of new coins should have followed a logistic curve instead of log. Or maybe even in proportion to the number of transactions. That might have been more stable. The whole bitcoin economy is hostage to early adopters periodically removing vast amounts of other people's wealth basically for doing nothing at all.
Still, what's done is done. Not much can be done about it now. But it's something to consider if and when a new currency is designed.