Dash is not even remotely competitive. It is simply and purely a scam to steal money from the foolish and ignorant. The market cap of dash is an illusion created by temporarily removing most of the supply into masternodes which monitor all the transactions and insure that 90% of the network traffic goes through NSA controlled routers. When the scam bubble pops all of those masternodes will get liquidated in a huge rush to the exits, crushing all the innocent holders.
Foolish they may be, but I don't think the holders are so innocent. DASH is best understood as a novel
transparent Ponzi scheme. Duffield used to openly talked about crunching supply for the sake of raising the price so it's hardly a nefarious secret. Even today their marketing consists of creepy infomercial-like presentations designed to reel in new users. But the key is that those users go in consciously hoping to pull off the same on future buyers.
According to your definition also bitcoin can be considered as a ponzi scheme.
Basically anything that is valuable is with limited supply.
Basically Putin's watches can be considered as a ponzi scheme
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/putins-patek-philippe-5208p-grand-complication-for-auctionNo, it's not about limited supply or about selling higher than one bought it for. Ponzis
promise payout (but rely on reeling in new investors because they do not possess a real business generating cash flow). Bitcoin has no payout; it's just a commodity and does not pretend to be more than that. DASH's value proposition is predicated on paying out interest to special nodes.
It is claimed that Satoshi Nakamoto owns around 1 million bitcoins and he mined them when mining bitcoins was easy ("premine").
Well, if you want to call running masternode a ponzi, be my guest but in my opinion it is one way of mining coins. The coins need to be mined in one way or another in crypto.
You can buy many things with Dash as far as I know. I do not know how much it is used for buying goods/services, and that's up to the community what they within themselves want to buy/sell for Dash. Many want to speculate with the price increase and therefore are not too hesitant to use it but chose rather hold it for longer.