‘I know about lying, I do it for a living’: Ben McKenzie as crypto critic | Hacker News Reader

‘I know about lying, I do it for a living’: Ben McKenzie as crypto critic

theguardian.com

40 pointslisasays75 comments

"Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person." And this guy isn't a scientist.

He has an economics degree, which I certainly trust more than most crypto enthusiast's lack of even basic economic knowledge.

Wait, supply AND price aren't supposed to go up at the same time?

Why not, if demand outstrips supply?

Here [1][2] are a couple decent interviews with him on this topic as well. I have to wonder if it is too-little-too-late for these discussions. Has the damage already been done and are peoples heels already dug in?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA [video][4 mins][bill maher]

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][8 mins][cnn]

I'm confused, what damage? Dug in about what?

The damage to ordinary people. The damage to the crypto ecosystem. The damage inflicted by huge players in the crypto ecosystem, on all parties involved.

I am pretty solidly dug in against crypto now. I have not seen it used for anything besides scamming. I believe, due to the incentives at play, people championing a cryptocurrency future can not be trusted anymore than a degenerate gambler asking you to invest it all in his patented gambling strategy.

Other people, the degenerate gamblers in question, are solidly dug in for the matter of their own profits- necessarily at the expense of others. This is the side championing cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are doomed to forever be damaged by their own wreckless stupidity. They will be damaged every time they receive a hard and necessary lesson about why our financial systems have certain properties and structures. Then they will demand the cost of that lesson be externalized onto the lesser-enfranchised.

Why do you think crypto enthusiasts are net negative on crypto? It is a zero sum game so there are obviously winners, just like the stock market.

So what hard lesson do you think the winners are learning exactly?

The stock market is not zero sum. Liquidity is provided so an enterprise can generate value. Thus a dollar put into the stock market generates value exceeding a dollar, creating more value in the world. Therefore the stock market is positive sum.

Cryptocurrency currently does not have a way to generate value outside of illicit activities. There are very few supply chains you can leverage using cryptocurrency to generate anything new: it's either information products (like Axie Infinity or Earth2 or any scam) or illegal products. Its high-visibility, no-trust nature makes it unsuitable for practical daily use.

I would not use an immutable, permanent, public ledger for any purchase, let alone for stuff I purchase normally and legally. The concept is laughable. It might be pseudoynmous, but such a high-fidelity and lossless record will be used for future entity resolution. (And also, as Ethereum proved with the hack of the DAO, such promises of "permanency" and "immutability" is couched in the concept of network effects and operative ownership, at least as far as any utility is concerned).

And the crypto space keeps learning hard lessons. Like, for example, what "trustless" actually means. Lots of scams based on trust in the space. Those are two different meanings of the word "trust," which I and many technical people can distinguish, but non-specialists can not. They are, inevitably, the crowd that has historically lost the most in the crypto space and will continue to keep losing. Because they have a natural counterparty, the predators and scammers in the space.

Now let's talk about the hard lessons the specialists keep learning. They keep learning what "trustless" means. The collapse of TerraLuna, Celsius, Tether, and SBF proves that nobody in the space has any clue what they're doing nor the ramifications of organizing people at scale. Vitalik Buterin was likewise also revealed as a no-talent hack when he hard-forked Ethereum after getting taken to the fucking washers during The DAO hack.

On top of all the people who learn why laws are built with an understanding that ambiguity is natural and inescapable. Arbitrariness is both a feature and a bug in natural law. Anyone who has ever been taken to the washers by someone exploiting a bug in a smart contract has learned a hard lesson about subjecting assets to algorithmic vicissitudes.

And the scammers in the space are learning hard lessons about what it means for a ledger to be permanent, immutable, and public. As entity resolutions methods get better, the same data remains perfectly amenable to novel methods.

The whole thing is a farce, from the tech to the social aspects.

How does the stock market provide liquidity after the IPO? Companies selling their own shares?

Companies are, in fact, permitted to sell additional tranches of shares after IPO. More to the point the IPO is liquidity, and shareholders are rewarded for the use of that liquidity to grow a business that sells actual goods and services to the public. Shareholders can make money from dividends paid by those profits, not just finding someone else to sell the share to

Many stocks pay no dividends.

Eh, these days in the US they're bought back instead. Money still gets returned to shareholders, it's just more tax efficient and the gains aren't realized until the equity is sold.

Token creators can buy back tokens...

Sure, but the shareholders legally own the R&D centre the company invests in instead or the massive pile of cash they sit on, and the companies can pay dividends, as soon as company management decides this would be the best uses of a company's assets (or the shareholders vote to remove them for someone that does).

Cryptographic tokens can't pay dividends and don't have any other sort of claims attached to them, the only possible way to extract any sort of value whatsoever is by finding someone else that wants to buy or borrow the token itself.

Tether collapsed?

>I am pretty solidly dug in against crypto now.

You got nothing better to do than be against tech. you don't even use? Seems irrational at least and probably a bit more. Honestly there is nothing there for you maybe take a walk? But for others that do believe there is use, maybe leave them be as they leave you.

You have a weird definition of rationality. If I am against Malware, a tech I don’t use, that would make me irrational? It’s completely acceptable to take an ethical stance against something you don’t use.

> It’s completely acceptable to take an ethical stance against something you don’t use.

Indeed, if you decide that something is unethical, it would then be surprising if you then choose to use it. That would be irrational.

Yes it's irrational. And your example doesn't make sense either. You're equating a technology a substantial amount of people find useful with a technology only a subset of the people find useful. Thus drawing an equality between malware and crypto, without any evidence or any substance same as the poster I replied to.

Let me be real simple, just because you don't like or use something doesn't make it useless. Also drawing comparisons between unrelated technologies is just plain bad, not smart not useful but just bad.

Allow me to also be real simple: many millions or billions of dollars have been scammed away from regular people who mistakenly trusted cryptocurrency markets.

I am not saying crypto should be illegal. I am saying it's a stupid idea for a currency and it's stupid for people to trust it.

If people want to go gamble tons of money, then that's fine, but it is not an investment. No real value is being produced. It is a zero-sum gambling ring that shifts money from one pocket to anoth er. It is musical chairs with bearer bonds.

It enshrines institutional power via truly braindead deflationary policies.

Unless you're an early mover, or pump a ton of money into it later, you essentially have no capability of engaging in the space as anything more than a victim.

Just because you like something doesn't make it useful.

>bunch of noise, then >Just because you like something doesn't make it useful.

Again you fail the rationality/logic test. Exactly because I like something makes it useful to me. There is no room for others in this equation. I like something, I use something, therefore it's useful.

What you're trying to do is insert your opinion, stated as a fact, into this equation. There is no room for it, nor does the equation call for it. Easiest is for you to simply stay away.

I will not. I intend to keep warning others away from crypto. I need not be bound by the paisley rules of your flawed rhetoric and worse "methods" of rationality. I will not be engaging with self-reinforcing solipsism. I will continue to present my case for why people should not put their money into the gambling horse of a predatory and wealthy few, thank you.

No argument here, I just didn't understand the comment, I still don't see a clarification from the OP so I remain confused.

It is definitely too late for his $250,000 short position to pay out, but he still might be able to capitalize on his book project.

There has already been a ton of damage done: 9 million jobs lost, 8 million home foreclosures, $20 trillion in household wealth lost[1]. Oh wait that was the 2008 financial crisis. Well at least with our modern and trustworthy financial system we held folks to account. Exactly 1 person went to jail.[2]. Well because our leaders are accountable to the people, we replaced them with new people that will act in our interest going forward. Just kidding they're all still in positions of power - Yellen is the Treasury secretary now. [3].

The real damage is coming from the status quo financial system that protects its own interests long before it cares about the needs of individuals. That is the problem defenders of the status quo need to take on if they really want to invalidate the crypto thesis.

[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/news/10-years-later-lessons-fin...

[2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...

[3] - https://www.investopedia.com/insights/major-players-2008-fin...

Another one has a book to sell you with the Guardian. Let's hope that this one isn't full of errors and mistakes like the previous critic (Stephen Diehl) who could not get a proof reader according to this review. [0]

> McKenzie’s enthusiasm, and the surety of his predictions, ramped up. He essentially bet $250,000 that the crypto market would collapse but got the timing wrong and lost most of it.

I see. That is why. He fell on the wrong side of the prediction. Now has to make it back by selling books.

Oh dear.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R23I5OPZJEC73L

I loved him as Comissioner Gordon in Gotham and was so suprised to see him expand into this.

Ben McKenzie claims the entire sector is a ponzi scheme. This is disingenuous at best.

of course its not just for ponzi schemes. Other traditional financial crimes are possible and common , as well as financing of embargoed countries and criminal groups. So much possibility! Clearly a growth industry.

Or is it for having your money retain value in a country with high inflation and/or bad economic conditions and capital controls?

Put dollars into your mattress then. That's more secure. The value should be denominated in USD anyway, but in many cases isn't. Often the price is listed as BTC/USDT with USDT being yet another shady enterprise where part of the financial backing is from the value of BTC.

Lots of countries have capital controls that make it hard to get access to dollars. Especially countries with high inflation.

Why are you talking about usdt? The price of usdt has always been the same as usd and no one is forced to use usdt. This seems irrelevant.

Well apart from when the 15 or so times in the past few years where the value of usdt wasn't the same as usd... https://protos.com/history-of-tethers-peg-every-time-usdt-tr...

This just isn't super relevant to the discussion. Tether is a scam, ok, I think everyone agrees about that.

So don't use it.

without the illegal use cases to pump up the value of the coin, you're basically converting your currency to digital IOUs that fluctuate in price and there's no reason for them to have any value at all. The thing that gives all of these coins values is speculation due to all the scams and illegal money moving.

The far majority of the value in gold is essentially speculation as well, so I don't see a big difference.

one is a non expiring real world good with uses outside of speculation, and the other is a digital certificate of ownership of a number on a blockchain. If you truly cannot see the difference between the two, no one can help you.

I agree those are differences. I don't agree that the source of the valuation of these goods has anything to do with the differences you listed.

The main utility of Monero is being able to make anonymous transactions. The downside of the crime that this enables far outweighs whatever libertarian ideals I may be sympathetic to. It's just a bad idea for society.

It’s way better than how the cartels do it. Feels like a win.

I don't think there's any evidence that those same cartels aren't also using cryptocurrencies. In fact, there's significant evidence to the contrary.

If you don't think cartels are using it I have to ask why not?

Do you say the same about cash? I am a fan of some molecules the government has erroneously classified as having "no medical use," and I tend to acquire these via cash routes. So cash also enables crime. Do you think we should transition to a fully networked currency that has perfect auditability for all transactions?

I'm sincerely asking. That appears to me the endpoint of the argument you make here. I might be wrong in my interpretation or conclusion, so please do correct any inaccuracies or leaps you find in my post.

I am not a fan of cryptocurrency, because I think it is stupid. But I am a fan of (actually) anonymous and privacy preserving currencies. So I can continue to not harm or victimize others, but acquire the molecules that make me the most functional.

This is certainly an ideal that libertarians hold, though I do not claim myself or my views as being particularly libertarian.

cash is hard but not impossible to track, especially at high volumes. An investigator could find which bank the bills went through, from there finding who may have withdrawn it. It also needs to be physically transported from place to place, meaning that there's some hope of tracking it down if there's enough reason.

This is a baseless claim -- virtually all criminal schemes in crypto have been done via ETH or BTC (most of which are token scams, and a small smattering of ransomware), which have transparent blockchains. Monero simply does not have the record of criminal activity that you claim.

More importantly, the vast majority of anonymous transactions occur via ownership secrecy havens. Quadrillions are held and transferred in offshore havens like Nevis, which has beneficiary and ownership secrecy baked into their constitution. Monero democratizes transaction secrecy, allowing the middle class to have the same level of financial privacy that criminal organizations attain regularly by incorporating in an offshore haven and hiring the appropriate lawyers. If transaction secrecy were a legitimate concern of yours, you would be eliminating it where it actually happens and facilitates crime first.

Comparing an unregulated industry that seems to uncover a major scam in a major player at least several times a year to the highly regulated stock market in which major scams involving major players are uncovered at a much lower frequency also seems purposefully disingenuous.

I dunno. When the scams get revealed in the stock market they tank the global economy. The composite risk assessment for the stock market is thusly somewhat higher imo

Now this is a disingenuous redefinition of scam.

What would you call bundling subprime mortgage backed securities and reselling them, while knowing full well that they're toxic?

Just because everyone is in on the scam, doesn't make it not a scam. It just makes it a systemic scam.

> Someone who believes there isn't a single use case in the entire crypto sector

This is a strawman. There is abundant evidence that crytpo was being treated as a get rich scheme, and the lack of sustainable use cases are why the sector has contracted so much.

It is his stated view as reported in the penultimate graf, so no, it's not a strawman.

By now it has also been proven "crypto" isn't a bubble. It has been more than a decade of, for this sort of experimental asset class, pretty steady growth. The market is still there after central banks abandoned zero interest rates. Crypto has proven more resilient than the Tech startups (their bank went bankrupt and needed a bailout) and Credit Suisse.

This isn't a bubble, by this point it is a market for middleman-resistant bookkeeping. It'll be the same as gold, we've had people claiming gold is worthless for all of recorded history and it keeps on going.

>By now it has also been proven "crypto" isn't a bubble. I

It's not a bubble it's a set of scams whose primary value is in allowing bad actors be they oppressive governments or criminal groups to move money around bypassing embargoes and bans. On top of that we also get a new scam bubble every little bit so that we can point and say "see that one isn't a scam" until it turns out it is, or its being used to send money to north Korea or Iran or whatever.

It's not one scam it's a series of scams. It's not useless it also allows large scale financial crimes. It's amazing!

It’s hard to say what’s a long lasting bubble and what’s not until a lot of time has passed. I think one decade is not enough. I also believe that most of the cryptocurrencies (among the thousands of them) don’t live up to the main claims for cryptocurrencies. Perhaps Bitcoin and Monero (and projects very similar to Monero) will stand the test of time. And maybe Ethereum too. Of course, there will be new ones in the future, but most of the current ones…I wouldn’t bet that they aren’t bubbles.

> He still believes crypto has no real-world use or value

Are most cryptocurrencies a scam? Maybe. All? Probably not but let's assume so. That they have no use? Definitely not the case.

I have a very hard time believing they have a sound argument for why CBDCs aren't a use case.

High-visibility, no-trust decentralized append-only ledgers are not viable for CBDCs for all the reasons we've seen in the past few months. The conmen, the incentives, and the ways they've been caught all come together to paint a picture of cryptocurrency as the stupid choice of currency for the future.

Whatever the hard money crowd say. We as society really don't want to go to that kind of system. It simply removes way too many tools. Be this hard money crypto or gold or silver...

There is really no good reason to use crypto. If there was a true political want an better working international currency or system could be made relatively fast.

Bitcoin is not a scam. Is it worth $30K? That's a totally different question (I'd argue that it isn't in its current state and that a lot of it is speculation). Bitcoin is a set ideas [1].

For all the other cryptocurrencies, given their non-altruistic/non-anonymous nature, it's much harder to make a similar case. I tend to be on the side to not trust it.

[1] The idea is described in the paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

> For all the other cryptocurrencies, given their non-altruistic/non-anonymous nature

Some others are more altruistic than bitcoin (having a pure linear emission which prevents the current generation from hoarding most of the supply). What do you mean by non-anonymous nature?

No one knows who Satoshi is. With other cryptocurrencies that I've looked at it's the opposite.

The cryptocurrency I have in mind features not one, but two anonymous creators; one to author the Mimblewimble protocol that improves both scalability and privacy at the same time, and another to implement the protocol in altruistic manner.

https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/A-Brief-History-of...

CBDC don’t have to be crypto. They can be just any kind of virtual currency. You don’t need to waste all the compute to ensure the chain doesn’t get forked. CBDCs aren’t going to be distributed and anarchistic like bitcoin and Eth.

Facilitating crime is and will always be the main usecase for crypto. Because conventional banks are already pretty good at all the regular stuff. Convenient, reliable, kinda trustworthy. Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.

>Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.

Thank you for enlightening the dirty masses. Maybe you have other insights, for example should one invest into banks or wait for the "crash". In any case I think your opinion is worth nothing and should be prefaced with "IMHO", rather than stating something we all know is logically impossible to have something and it to be useless. Here is a logical exercise, if something exists it is useful by the fact that it has a name for example which groups loose entities into a whole. I got more of this ...

People sure get agitated when I point out -- correctly I might add -- that crypto is uniquely suited for crime. The SEC is busting crypto exchanges left and right, if you haven't noticed.

SEC is about to approve a crypto ETF and we're done discussing usefulness or lack thereof... or should I say blah blah, blah.

> Facilitating crime is and will always be the main usecase for crypto. Because conventional banks are already pretty good at all the regular stuff. Convenient, reliable, kinda trustworthy.

I don't think so. The amount of fraud in crypto is nothing compared to what has been exposed in the FinCEN leaks [0], which the fraud is even worse with the banks allowing the laundering of trillions of dollars for criminals, drug-lords and gangsters. The same is true with the Zelle payments platform also rife with rampant fraud. [1]

> Crypto doesn’t solve any real problems, except for criminals who want to move money, launder it, all out of reach of gov’t.

Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain will be caught as soon as the money hits the exchange or frozen once swapped into stablecoins.

[0] https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/business/payments-fraud-z...

> Criminals that attempt to launder money on a transparent and traceable blockchain

Remember the NFT craze? Use dirty money to pump the price of some flavor of NFT. Then use clean money to speculate on a sure thing and take out the profit. Money got laundered but nothing shows up on any chain that links the dirty money to the clean speculation profits. You have to be a little clever, but blockchains absolutely don't prevent money laundering.

If you had stopped with your first paragraph, I would’ve agreed with you. The second paragraph is hyperbole, and is no better than what the loudest cryptocurrency enthusiasts would say about your banks and your trust systems. To make bold claims that banks are reliable or imply that banks don’t launder money (only cryptocurrency facilitates that) is disingenuous.

I think it's considerably harder to construct an argument for why CBDCs controlled by a central bank should be a use case for database structures designed for decentralisation. Even the standard "it doesn't need to be a cryptoasset but it's a great marketing pitch" doesn't work because central banks don't worry about lack of adoption from the average member of the public, the average member of the public does worry about cryptocurrency, and the average cryptoenthusiast is not a fan of central banking

A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.

It would also still benefit from all of the work done on the usage side, e.g. smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, state/payment channels (Lightning Network), etc. etc.

There is also a very wide spectrum between "single issuer has absolute power" and Bitcoin, e.g. it might still be anonymous, and there might be cryptographic proofs that coins aren't silently minted.

A CBDC by definition isn't "split between multiple institutions": it's emitted by a single central bank, which doesn't need or want a mechanism to obtain "consensus" of third party users of its currency (institutional or otherwise) for its operational decisions.

Similarly, it doesn't have any need to invent Lightning networks to overcome the crippling limitations some blockchains impose on transaction throughput (and it's not like you need blockchains to implement payment layers and eventual consistency of records where that's seen as preferable to instant settlement) and if central banks want people to be able to write 'contracts' to automate interactions with its money to a greater extent than is already possible through third party institutions, it's perfectly capable of providing a permissioned read/write API to its records without implementing itself on the Ethereum blockchain.

> A CBDC split among e.g. several countries, institutions, banks, would still need some (simple) consensus algorithm.

Yes, but one of the core premise of crypto is "trustlessness". Once you drop that requirement far simpler distributed consensus algorithms dominate the field.

What's the use case of casino's except wasting electricity and taking advantage of the most vulnerable?

Entertainment? Okay, Bitcoin is entertaining.

I have had colleagues who enjoyed casinos. On a business trip, they stayed out late on the Friday night, and it involved cards, drinks and losing money. It does nothing at all for me, but they seem to have had a good time.

I have had colleagues who were cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

The casino enthusiasts did not say "we're going to replace the international financial system with casinos! Poker chips are better than dollars!" No-one stumbled wide-eyed up of the casino at dawn, up $1K, insisting that this was the future of the economy for everyone. After I said that I wasn't interested in poker or roulette, none of them tried to preach the value of poker or roulette to me.

Because they knew it was a game. An adult game with real money at stake; but all the same, just for play. The cryptocurrency enthusiasts did not have that same level of awareness.

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