Crypto, Con Men, and the Golden Age of Fraud With Ben McKenzie

As you went down this path, did you have an uh-oh moment where you said, damn, this really is a con.

I'm on the right track here.

From very early on, I couldn't figure out what was going on because they kept calling it a currency.

But If there's one thing anyone knows about money, you don't need an economics degree to know that with money you can buy stuff, right? Like that's just one thing that money does.

It's called medium of exchange.

That's the fancy term economists give it.

But you can buy and sell stuff with money.

And yet people weren't doing that with crypto.

They were buying it on these crypto exchanges and then hoping to sell it later for more money if the price went up.

But I couldn't go to my – neighborhood deli in Brooklyn and buy a bagel with Bitcoin, you know, they were going to look at me like I'm an idiot.

I didn't know why at the time it couldn't work like money.

Now I do.

We could talk about that later.

But but it was very strange to have something marketed as something that it just wasn't, you know.

And then the terminology was just very, very confusing.

And I came to understand sort of almost purposefully so.

But lots of talk of These things called stable coins, a particular kind of cryptocurrency that was not so stable, it turned out, crashed and burned.

A lot of talk about decentralization of finance.

And yet, if you followed the money trail, it was actually just a few players really at the top, very centralized.

So I just... you know, my spidey sense was tingling from pretty much from jump.

And as I went further and further into it, I just felt like whatever was going on, it was not going to end well.

And sure enough, you know, the next year it crashed.

So looking at Bitcoin, Bitcoin obviously has had a great deal of volatility.

But recently it seems to be fairly stagnant.

Is there something going on? that is reducing the level of volatility?