Ben McKenzie

They're just messing around with a little bit of money.

And I never go off of financial advice, but if you're messing around with money you can afford to lose, that is a different story in terms of how I feel about you.

I'm not worried about you if you can afford to lose.

The thing I ask is like, just imagine you lost whatever you put in, like all of it, instantaneously.

Would it affect your life?

Right.

I think it's worth considering the arguments about the criminal activity because even though you aren't financing it, the real money you're putting into it is giving it value so that it has value for the criminals.

Let's talk about that argument for a minute because the crypto guys are not like...

Oh, I guess you know more than all the big banks.

And it's like, first of all, that's deeply ironic.

If you were set up in reaction to the banks and the subprime crisis, and now you're crowing about how the banks are on your side.

But it's also wrong because the banks aren't in it taking a directional bet on whether crypto is going up or down.

They're just facilitating the game.

They're just the house in Vegas, letting you gamble with your money and taking the rake, taking a tiny piece of the volume.

There's a thing called ETS, exchange traded funds.

They're sort of like mutual funds where like put money into it and whatever money you put in represents a fractional share of the Bitcoin.

And so BlackRock, which has the biggest Bitcoin ETF, you put money into BlackRock ETF.

They just go to like Coinbase, this crypto exchange.

And they're like, hey, hold this amount of Bitcoin for this customer.

BlackRock never even touches the Bitcoin.