Again, the lending wasn't a Ponzi
It was a ponzi. They advertised unrealistic return rates and last bagholders didn't get their money back. Your mental gymnastics can't change that fact.
Again another nutty one. So if you're holding bitcoin and all the whales dump it doesn't it make it the same thing? There is nothing that's going to keep the price of bitcoin up if everyone sells it at the same time.
You're missing the point. Assets go up and down in price. That doesn't make them a Ponzi. It isn't the fact that the price of BCC collapsed 90% in a few hours that made the lending platform a Ponzi. That's a result of it being a Ponzi, not a cause.
What makes it a Ponzi is that it promised to pay anyone who invested more than $10k at least 0.25% per day in USD terms. You keep saying there was no guaranteed daily interest, but there was for all but the smallest loans.
That is what made it a Ponzi. They were paying at least 0.25% per day to their biggest lenders with no way of sustaining those payments in the long term.
You seem to think that it wasn't a Ponzi because they were able to pay the interest due to the fact that their token kept going up in price. Do you not see that that isn't sustainable, that the token would eventually stop going up in price, and that when it did they would eventually be unable to continue paying 0.25% compound interest per day? The only reason their token kept going up in price was because the demand for the token (ie. new people joining the scam) was greater than the supply (ie. people cashing out of the scam). When the supply of new suckers fell below the rate at which people were cashing out, BitConnect's profit reached its peak, and that is exactly the correct time to pull the plug and run off with the profits. "They made a profit while the scam was growing therefore it wasn't a scam" isn't a valid argument, but it seems to be what you are trying to get away with.
You obviously don't understand that the lending system made them less likely to dump any coins (as it would stop the lending being profitable for them - to say the lending was a Ponzi when it was profitable is ludicrous) but nevermind. Bitcoin is obviously more of a Ponzi.
All Ponzis are profitable for their owners. You still didn't provide any evidence for Bitcoin itself being a Ponzi.
Ponzis promise returns to their victims. Bitcoin promises nothing of the kind to anyone.
I'm pretty sure people are holding onto bitcoins because they think it is going to go up in value. It's not as if it can be used for anything else other than some sort of speculative asset with nothing backing it. All tokens don't really have any other backing other than supply and demand. At least bitconnect's model always worked despite all the bad press and made many people very rich. I didn't invest much in it. Most of mine is in DavorCoin as they started by paying 2% a day and that only opened at the end of November (4 times as much as I ever invested in bitconnect but I still got all my investment back from them overall).
By the way, they obviously could always change terms for new loans instead of guaranteeing 0.25% at least for $10k plus forever but do you really think that is excessive? If you work it out it's less than 2.5 times the investment amount a year. I'm pretty sure people who hold bitcoin expect it to go up more than that each year, some speculating it will go up to a millions dollars! As already mentioned, the bitconnect model also gave value by guaranteeing the investment amount in USD so people could invest in cryptos without worrying about their portfolio going down in value (that doesn't even include the extra interest they also paid). Any sane person would prefer the bitconnect model than the bitcoin model. They shut down due to all the idiots saying they were a Ponzi. Look at the housing market and how many idiots also believe it always goes up. Bitconnect's model wouldn't have failed as there was no reason for the price not to go up all the time until something forced them to end it. Coin holders may have lost out in the end when the bubble burst but that's just the same as the current economy which goes in cycles of boom and bust. The difference is bitconnect would have had enough collateral to refund the guaranteed investments if they were allowed to run normally (remember that they wouldn't necessarily need to refund them all at once and the coin would probably rise again slowly after a crash - in the long term the lending could still just carry on after a BCC crash if they didn't face any legal issues). Obviously all coin holders take the risk of a crash but the investments would have been easily guaranteed if it wasn't made to shut down.