Why You Shouldn't Buy Into The Crypto Trend

**Jane Coaston** (0:04)
It's Thursday, May 7th, I'm Jane Coaston, and this is What A Day, the show wondering if National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett knows he's not sharing good news on Fox Business Wednesday.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:15)
I had the head of one of the big five banks in my office yesterday going through the credit card data. And just as Secretary Besson said, credit card spending is through the roof. They're spending more on gasoline, but they're spending more on everything else too.

**Jane Coaston** (0:28)
The GOP's midterm message? Credit card debt is going up and that's awesome.
On today's show, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tries to explain his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And is Stephen Colbert eyeing a 2028 presidential run? Stay tuned to find out.
But let's start with cryptocurrency. Trump came into office claiming that he was going to be the most pro crypto president ever, and the best friend the crypto industry could ever have. Here he is at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville in 2024

**Donald Trump** (1:09)
If crypto is going to define the future, I want to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It's going to be. It's not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it's going to the moon. I want America to be the nation that leads the way. And that's what's going to happen. No, you're going to be very happy with me.
You're going to be so happy.

**Jane Coaston** (1:35)
But currently, they are not. In the second year of a second term in office, the wheels feel like they're coming off for both Trump's cryptocurrency adventures and the promise of the industry itself.
World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm launched by members of the Trump family and their allies, is currently embroiled in lawsuits over allegations of fraud and extortion. The Trump meme coin that launched with much fanfare just before Trump's inauguration is now worth just under $3.
Let's be clear. The crypto industry is still incredibly powerful. But let's say Democrats take Congress in November or the White House in 2028 What will that do to crypto moving forward? Ben McKenzie is an author, actor, and filmmaker who has been investigating cryptocurrency for years. His new documentary, Everyone Is Lying To You For Money, centers on unmasking the cryptocurrency industry.
Ben, welcome to What A Day. Hey Jane. So you have now spent years researching Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. You've made a documentary. You've written a book. So I'm going to ask you something that sounds super simple but isn't. What is cryptocurrency?

**Ben McKenzie** (2:39)
What is cryptocurrency? Yeah. This is a fun question because I can answer it about a million different ways. I would say it's largely a get rich quick scheme wrapped in a sort of technobabble alternative history of money idea that you could have a sort of libertarian-esque and marco-capitalist utopia where everyone had their own money that they could send directly to one another and avoid the horrors of our regulated system. But it's just a fantasy. Crypto, Bitcoin and crypto have never really worked as money except as a sort of a black market form of money, a thing of value that you could exchange in exchange for a criminal activity.
Buying drugs was the first use case for crypto and it's gotten worse since then, but it's never really functioned as a scalable money.

**Jane Coaston** (3:39)
Yeah, one of the funniest parts of your documentary and you do this a couple of times. You do this at a Bitcoin conference, you do this in El Salvador. I said you keep trying to buy things with Bitcoin and no one will take it. So if you can't use cryptocurrency to buy anything and a bunch of people have lost money on it when they use it as an investment vehicle, who is it for?

**Ben McKenzie** (4:02)
The true believers, the people that believe that it's gonna keep going up no matter what. And I mean, look, in their defense, over time, it has gone up, it was worthless when it first came out and then it found this use case on the Silk Road, which was a dark web drug marketplace and people could buy drugs with it and the Silk Road was shut down and it floundered. And we now know from the Epstein files that Jeffrey Epstein helped swoop in and save the day by funding Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of developers that maintain Bitcoin's operating system. So Jeffrey Epstein helped keep it going.
And it's transformed into a situation where you have sort of the retail public basically betting that crypto, the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these other 20,000 cryptocurrencies is gonna go up or down. So they're sort of gambling. And then you have the other side of the ledger, which is criminal activity, which is basically some of the worst people in the world getting paid for their crimes via crypto, like Russian oligarchs sending sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones they sent to Ukraine, funding ISIS, North Korean hacking teams that steal crypto, have funded half of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. So there's gambling on one side and then there's crime on the other.