Referral Rewards Program = decentralized ponzi scheme?

[R]

The referral mechanism doesn't distribute new assets (I don't believe) out of thin air.
I don't think it's a ponzi scheme, you're not being asked to invest money with the promise that you'll earn extremely high interest rates on your investment.
Most businesses have referral/affiliate mechanisms.

"smart mining" is probably the best way to distribte coins during the PoW phase(you mine when your GPU/CPU isn't fully used)

There's no need for POW in DPOS. Besides, the best method of distributing coins is either sharedropping or DPOR (rewarding assets for verified BOINC Computation like in Gridcoin).

[adolf512]

It appears steem has a good system for the distribution of coins, users get paid for blogging and this creates a network effecg, unfortunatily the coin itself is not very impressive.

In order for a coin to be successfull the tech behind it needs to be good and you also need a big enough number of users to be a networ effect.

Referral program has of course worked in the past, it nay mot be a good method to distribute coins but it can be a very effective way to advertise a product, people making money convincing friends to join. A guy contacted me once to sell me some overpriced fruit juice, he did a poor job but that didn't matter, i would not have joined that scam anyway.

This is a real decentralized ponzi: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1415365.0

It's not mulit-level. You only get fees from person you refer. You don't get anything from the people that your referrers refer.

From the website

When an Basic Account pays $100 to become a Lifetime Member, $50 is paid to their Referrer, $30 is paid to the nearest Lifetime Member, and $20 is paid to the Network. After this point the Lifetime Member becomes its own referrer and nearest Lifetime Member and its prior Referrers no longer get any revenue from this user.

[Pheonike]

It's not mulit-level. You only get fees from person you refer. You don't get anything from the people that your referrers refer.

[adolf512]

I like the idea if DPOS but this membership bullshit makes me sick, if you want many users the fees should be as low as possible. I actually think it is a good idea to use via inflation subsidize the network allowing for low fees and yes that can continue forever even with limited supply https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1630098.0

"smart mining" is probably the best way to distribte coins during the PoW phase(you mine when your GPU/CPU isn't fully used). With DPOS new coins can be distributed in other creative ways but i do not have any good suggestion for this.

I would suggest getting a userbase by offering anonynous transactions and messages(better anonynity than cryptonote).

edit: it is not really a ponzi scheme but it is still similar to multi-level-marketing scams, you have to pay an entry fee to get in. With this scheme only one person will profit from you joining so it's not about getting in early, it is about getting a lot of people to join this BS program.