Ben McKenzie

I'm not saying to outlaw it because I don't think that would do any good.

But we do have to regulate it stringently and treat it for what it is, which is good.

both a Ponzi scheme on the speculative side, in terms of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and Melania coin, Trump coin, fart coin, Come Rocket, my favorite meme coin.

There are Ponzi schemes on that side, and then there are black market money on the other side, which is the stable coins, which is really where the game is headed.

The other thing you get, and this is really important for people to understand, the libertarians that love crypto will say, oh, this is great.

This is money that's free from the dead hand of state.

Well, first of all, we live in a democracy, at least theoretically.

So like that seems a little over overwrought.

But if the money doesn't come from the government, where does it come from?

They don't like to talk about it, but the answer in cryptocurrency is corporations.

It's World Liberty Financial, but it's also Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin that's mined today, the vast majority of it, is mined by multi-billion dollar corporations, some of which are publicly traded.

So we're talking about literal corporate money.

And if that seems like a good idea to you, then okay.

But the vast majority of the public already hates corporations for good reason and is skeptical of them having even more power over our daily lives.

And so, you know, this is a terrible idea.

Yeah.

I, over the summer that year, as I was really, you know, fully into this crypto-investigatory stuff and sort of writing articles with my co-author Jacob Silverman and working on this book that we would publish and interviewing people and being very vocal online, I was trying to get the attention of people on Capitol Hill.

So I met with a couple of folks over the summer

And I kept saying, look, the only hearings that are happening are just glorifying crypto and talking about how wonderful it is.