Except that is very clearly is, if not a pyrmaid scheme, a scheme which gives certain powerful and wealthy individuals absolutely disproportionate profits through the work of others who receive only a minute fraction of them.I am not talking (only) about the sickest miners with the best rigs. Besides, they used and paid for their electricity. The problem is the control exerted by the pool operators.It is easy to see how enormously the pool operators profit. They claim the fee of 2-3% (which translates to 1-1.5 BTC) is required to maintain the pool. However, a simple calculation reveals a single operator of a major pool makes hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of bitcoins daily by maintaining it. One does not need these kinds of amounts of money to maintain a server or even a dozen.The thing is, I am perfectly fine with this. Everyone is a voluntary participant and is able to track his/her profits (or usually lack thereof) virtually in realtime. Besides, what people are contributing here is some computation time, getting big electricity bills. Compared to the massive Ponzi schemes where people lose their lifetime savings and their houses this is just another nice little game on the Internet for most. One doesn’t really lose anything of substance even though he might not (and most likely will not) profit from mining, be it pooled or solo.We still shouldn’t delude ourselves by thinking that this doesn’t follow the same path as any money for free scheme: the early bird gets the worm? (gets the easiest bitcoins and ends up having the most of them). Additionally, as in any scheme seen so far, the ones early in the game get to use the others to further increase their profits, usually maintaining a faster rate of profit than any of the people who entered the game later. We are already past the point when this starts happening and we can easily observe it happening right now thanks to the extensive market data and statistics. It can’t be stopped. It is just the nature of this beast.