EASY MONEY

Actor McKenzie continues his long-standing denunciation of cryptocurrency.

Matt Damon hawked crypto in ads during NFL games. Kim Kardashian made such extraordinary claims for it that it drew the attention of British regulators—though, in the U.S., “Kardashian’s promotion was initially met with typical regulatory silence.” Crypto seemed to be just the thing for the rich and powerful, a means of hiding transactions via the secrecy associated with a financial instrument that isn’t really a currency, at least by American law. Writing with financial journalist Silverman, McKenzie charges that since crypto behaves like a security, and an unregulated one at that, its price “jumps up and down like a rabbit on amphetamines.” Furthermore, the technology doesn’t scale well enough, it’s environmentally disastrous because it requires so much electricity to “mine,” and it’s surrounded by “fraudsters” and “con men.” Ethereum, founded in 2015 and the “second largest cryptocurrency as of this writing,” appears to be a smoke-and-mirrors operation, while Tether “was as if a random group of middling ne’er-do-wells had been issued their own money printer,” a bomb waiting to take down the entire system of casino capitalism. The author chronicles how some of the less cautious principals were taken down by international police forces, while others simply disappeared after their businesses evaporated—but not, he adds, before a few of them bought yachts. As for Kardashian, she was “fined $1.26 million by the SEC for her participation in shilling the shitcoin Ethereum Max”—even if she was just a willing tool and not herself a fraudster. “Would anyone in crypto ever see the inside of a jail cell?” asks McKenzie. At least since the author finished the book, it appears that at least one or two—Sam Bankman-Fried most notable among them—are on the way to the slammer.

A well-reasoned, occasionally shrill critique of the crypto universe.