PayCoin is an altcoin which I trade on the exchanges - That's not a ponzi, it's trading.
Altcoins come and go. Devs scam or legitly fail. Some succeed. You get lucky. More often you get f*kd. You do your homework, you get f*ked less. That's how it is.
Paycoin is likely a pump and dump ponzi predicated upon lies and dishonesty. That places it in a special category of alts that should be avoided.
OK, you are mixing up season and fashion.
Pump and dump is a scheme that all altcoins (can) suffer from given their low market cap. People with any considerable amount of money can artifically inflate prices. This is true for 98% of the altcoins out there.
With XPY it's a bit harder as it's market cap is quite in the upper league. (maybe even in the 2% from the line above)
This scheme can be spotted, avoided, or even made advantage of, depending on your trading and technical analysis / research skills.
Ponzi is a scheme where users register for a service and get paid (unrealisticly high) returns - which are paid from the registering fee / investment of new users. The scheme fails when there are more returns to pay up than
new users registering.
This scheme can be exploited if you get in early and make roi before the whole thing falls apart. This requires some... well, absence of ethics, or stomach, which personally I don't really have.
It isn't simply a matter of being mostly premined and highly inflationary that one should be concerned with. It is with the misleading dishonesty associated with this ICO, the fact that coins "mined" during the PoW phase wered actually mined because those ASICs didn't actually exist, and the fact that its price support is heavily dependent upon prime controllers and hashstakers locking in under contract with the centralized issuer for 3 to 6 months at a time to stake at a higher rate(in PoS history this is unprecedented and highly dubious)
Ok, let's take this one by one.
- Mostly premined: yes.
- Highly inflationary: No. Assuming the release today fixes the price at or above US$20. Not long to wait now. And No, see second part of price support.
- Dishonesty about ICO, not mined pow coins - what? I missed this, can you give me source please? (I also mined it in the pow phase, so ... double what?)
- Price support: it's highly dependent on their release of PayBase, and the fixed price of XPY there.
All these stakers / controllers are means to control the, wait for it, .... wait for it.... the SUPPLY of XPY. which is quite unique in crypto if I'm not mistaken.
- Staking at a higher rate is questionable, yes. Could be part ponzi, but more likely covered by their other income. Could be that they do have hashing power that generates income.
Remember, if they actually make profit (which I'm sure they do), and share part of this profit with the people who help securing the supply of their coin.... it's actually a dividend payout -> not a ponzi.
Edit: ah, shoot you edited your post with points, hold on.