Ben McKenzie

If we're being intellectually honest, we can't just hand wave away something.

I mean, to give you a sense of the amount of crime in crypto, last year, a crypto company estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto.

$154 billion is a lot of money, right?

It's a GDP of a lot of countries.

Yeah, and it says it's a trillions of dollar market, but I really don't think that's true in terms of the actual liquidity backing these speculative assets.

You know, it's an immense amount of crime.

And to give you a sense of the kinds of crime, it's like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese

in exchange for drones that they sent to Ukraine.

Right.

It's like global criminal cartels.

There's a Southeast Asian system of credit called Hawala, I think is what it's called.

And basically it's like,

If people don't have banks, how do they get something of value to someone else?

They go to this local community leader and that person has a ledger.

They call their buddy in the neighboring village and like, hey, mark this down.

We have sent this to you.

And it's basically the system of trust, which is what money is.

Money is this made up thing that is essentially trust.

You don't have to trust the individual if it's scaled.

Like I could give you, Dax, a dollar.