Ben McKenzie

But other than that, I'm really hesitant to stereotype folks even anymore because the truth of the matter is that crypto, because it's just a story, it's just a projection of the hopes and dreams of...

Of the 40 million Americans who have purchased cryptocurrency.

So it's as unique as those people are.

They have their own reasons for doing it.

But it's usually they want to make a little more money.

And that's not.

Yeah, that's greed on some level.

But it's also failures of our system to provide them with a better way of making money rather than just gambling on this weird stuff.

Right.

And that's a that's a pretty abject failure on on on our parts.

I think there's a lot of overlap.

The subtitle of the book that I wrote with Jacob Silverman is Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.

And casino capitalism is this really interesting term that you could sort of go back to like John Maynard Keynes if you wanted to.

But it's a notion of like...

Just because you have money doesn't mean you use money in a way that's either smart for you or productive for society.

And gambling is fundamentally a zero-sum enterprise.

We sit down at a table in Vegas and I might win a hand, you might win a hand, but at the end of the day,

my wins are coming out of your pocket and vice versa.

And while we play the game, the casino takes the rake.

They take a small piece of money to, that's how they keep the lights on in the casino.