Ben McKenzie

You are an actor.

And it is a crisis, so, you know, kind of points for creativity.

Adam, cryptographer, he's the first person that Satoshi emailed.

So this person that doesn't exist, you know, this real person, that's interesting.

And then I guess in the article, apparently, there's a lot of similarities in terms of how Adam writes and Satoshi wrote.

Right, yeah.

But in terms of Adam himself, he started this company called Blockstream and Adam met with Jeffrey Epstein in the sort of mid 2010s.

And apparently there was some sort of financial relationship.

There was some sort of investment of some kind at some point.

I think that's really interesting because of course cryptocurrency, when it started with the white paper in 2008 and then came into existence in reality in 2009, there really wasn't a use case for it.

What could you really do with this stuff?

It's just lines of code on ledgers called blockchains.

And the first use case was crime.

It was the Silk Road, this dark web drug marketplace.

And, you know, that has been just a through line throughout cryptocurrency for forever, far before the retail public got really involved in it.

Because that's what you can use it for.

Crypto's really only good for speculation, gambling, betting the price is going to go up and down, or crime.

It's trying to get outside the regulated system.

It's a tool.

So, like, could you use crypto for good?