Former OC actor Ben McKenzie on crusade to take down 'stupid' cryptocurrency
rnz.co.nz
rnz.co.nz
Crime is a pretty broad category. Sure you can use crypto to scam people and dodge taxes, but illegal does not equal immoral. Piracy, leaking evidence of war crimes and police abuse, leaking source code to hurt controversial companies, donations to banned groups, even hosting source code for illegal tools. Not all of them benefit from crypto itself but adjacent technologies that need a blockchain like Arweave and ENS.
Then there are things like drug dealing and prostitution that have real world harms but not everyone agrees they should be criminal. It's great to have a bunch of different payment methods that can be as anonymous as cash (Monero) or fully programmable with smart wallets to protect you from scams, all without any corporate cartel that could block you.
Cyberleek is a great example for both sides of the debate. They used Solana programs and Arweave to make their site uncensorable, but also created a token donation system and market cap goals to make thousands of dollars in the process (a lot for someone probably based in Russia). Is it all morally wrong, or all right, or only wrong for the money side?
The only value is that it does not go through banks.
[1] The moral problem with drug dealing is not the drugs, but the fact the people selling them are using that money to perpuate an incredible circle of violence.
1: https://www.trmlabs.com/fr/reports-and-whitepapers/2026-cryp...
2: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/crypto-drug-sales-darknet-m...
1. excludes proceeds from crime that originate in fiat and later transfer into crypto
2. exclude transfers to blockchain addresses that have not been attributed to illicit activity
3. excludes laundering of illicit crypto proceeds
While this seems reasonable to create a metric to compare YoY, I think it's very flawed to generate an absolute figure of illicit activity (or percentage of transaction volume).
The same could be said about projects like Tor, which we know for certain is used for all sorts of illegal activities, and really just about any use of cryptography use outside of big tech and systems with law enforcement access. It is exactly the same as the argument that all chat and email providers that cannot intercept and store plaintext data should be outlawed.
Private chats and private value transfers are used by criminals, there's no question about it. We should think of the children. But the slope is slippery and the question is where to draw the line and what type of society we want to live in. To someone who valued abolishing export mode ciphers and key escrow schemes, the Overton window has really shifted on this.
I turned off when he said that Bitcoin is issued by corporations. The interviewer calls him out on it and he doubles down. That's blatantly false, and indicates poor research and / or poor understanding.
It may be true for plenty of other cryptocurrencies, but it's definitely not true for some, including Bitcoin. In fact, 99% of cryptocurrencies are scams, but that's because they can now be created in seconds with little knowledge or skill.
Feels like he's pushing an agenda, especially with the use of the term 'corporations'. Which is amusing, since it's the lack of trust of big-finance that (so the story goes) led to the creation of Bitcoin in the first place - the 2007 GFC in particular. Although electronic money was being dabbled with since the mid-late 90s, and that base formed the foundation of what Bitcoin was built on.
This is probably just advertising for his documentary, really.
But the true scam is the complete debasement of the US dollar and people will slowly realize why the dollar will always be worth less than it was 40 years ago as it continues to be printed to zero and number go up with stocks and crypto.
It is also the reason why some people are crying that $1m is not enough to retire on, and they are right. Because $1m is worth less today than it was 40 years ago.
Hence why people here need >$500k and above a year to live, when in reality, it is the fiat currency becoming more worthless over time.
Sounds like a scam in the long term.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jul/15/ben-mck...
By contrast, there was essentially no inflation in England from 1614 to the start of WW1.
If so, that’s definitely the exception rather than the rule.
> Because $1m is worth less today than it was 40 years ago.
And? $1 is also worth less than it was 40 years ago. You also make more than the same person would doing the same thing 40 years ago, so that’s not a useful comparison. If you want to make statements about standards of living, you need to use the same measuring stick. You can use inflation adjusted values to do so.
I live in reality.
> If so, that’s definitely the exception rather than the rule.
Ask anyone in a HCOL area in the US and it is hardly an "exception".
> And? $1 is also worth less than it was 40 years ago. You also make more than the same person would doing the same thing 40 years ago, so that’s not a useful comparison. If you want to make statements about standards of living, you need to use the same measuring stick. You can use inflation adjusted values to do so.
That depends on the occupation. You also didn't make any point and just casually accepted getting scammed on the debasement of your own fiat currency.
By definition this is an exception because there are simultaneously places in the US with a low cost of living. If it had something to do with USD, wouldn’t you see the effect everywhere in the US, without exception? I think we see a lot of _disparity_ in cost of living. Again, not sure what this has to do with the value of USD.
> You also didn't make any point and just casually accepted getting scammed on the debasement of your own fiat currency.
You say this, but you don’t explain the mechanism of how this works. Maybe I’m too dumb, can you spell it out for me? What’s the scam exactly?
Any workable currency needs inflation. If you don't have inflation then holding currency is a free call option on the future - it's always more profitable to hold it instead of real assets as holding real assets is risky (not only that those assets lose value but that other assets gain more value).
As nothing is free in nature someone else is paying for your free call option. Things are even worse with deflationary currency. This is what Bitcoin maximalist imagine: a few kings that hold it and everyone else working for them.
If anything 2% inflation target is too low to offset that cost. I think it should be considerably higher. As it is protecting the call option of currency holders is often more important for central banks than economic development.
He knows how bitcoin works. And what he said wasn't a lie, though you could argue it was a simplification, but he's not addressing the HN crowd with what he's saying and IMO his simplification is perfectly acceptable to the audience he is targeting.
The cost to mine a single BTC in 2026 is > $70k. Random individuals and hobbyists are not spending that kind of money mining bitcoin.
Its not nerds in their garages running gpus, but an entire "corporate" industrial complex designing, and shipping custom chips filling out entire data centers.