its not a pyramid scheme for two reasons
1. by holding X amount of sats on a address you control and thus own, it does not involve you getting subsequent commission from recruiting people who buy coin below you EG you dont get y% of other peoples sales
2. there is no hierarchy of coin owners whom rank different commission depending on rank
as for is bitcoin a asset:
it is an asset as it is not based on debt(liability vs asset), it is an asset because it has limited supply, it is an asset because it has function, and thus demand and desire
the point of having addresses that follow rules of transfer control based on a secret key used to sign the transfer means there is ownership proof that only the secret key owner can sign for. so its not just a unit of measure database, its a ledger of proof of ownership
jamesNZ still does not understand how crypto currencies work as he just thinks its a database of numbers. he does not understand the concepts that the ledger includes the transfer and ownership proofs
There are various pyramid schemes. But what they all have in common is that you give an asset to someone without they giving you any asset in return. And then you wait for other people to join that scheme and give you some asset otherwise you cannot get an asset back. An asset is of course a resource for which you can benefit. You crypto holders own no such a resource. All you own is the ability to update that decentralized log. When you give a car or a hundred thousand dollars, that's giving an asset and getting no asset in return. What you get in return is the ability cause the change on numbers (like +2/-2) via updating that log with your wallet apps.
So it's a modern day pyramid scheme.