Ben McKenzie

Yes, it was.

And it did operate that way, but as a black market currency, right?

As a currency for drugs.

At the time, it was also like marijuana.

And so, just to be perfectly clear, I love marijuana.

Like, I have a medical card.

I'm not knocking drugs.

You were also buying drugs.

much harder drugs and doing stuff that was much worse than that, including child sexual abuse material and all sorts of really gnarly stuff.

But that was the use case.

It was crime, facilitating transactions for criminal activity.

And then it kind of languished, you know?

Like, it was kind of just sitting there.

Interestingly enough, we only found this out recently, but after...

The Silk Road crashed.

In 2015, Jeffrey Epstein stepped in and secretly funded what's called Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of programmers that maintain Bitcoin's operating system.

Yes, there are people behind this supposedly computerized future.

There's always people.

And he was secretly funding it through a thing called the MIT Media Lab because he was already a registered sex offender and they didn't want that to be public.

So I don't think that anyone who's being intellectually honest can claim that the crime is just only a tiny piece of it.