On this week’s Big Interview podcast, actor-director Ben McKenzie talks about the rise of crypto, why he finds it dangerous, and why it benefits from having a mysterious creator.
Oh, that’s really sad.
Really sad. And then, he felt like he let her down, when he lost the money. I’m crying. He’s crying. Like, I’m a dad. He’s a dad.
I feel a lot of sympathy. At the same time, I came back to these guys at the end of the movie and I say, “Do you still believe in crypto?” They all said yes.
They’re gonna have to go that journey on their own, and maybe they’ll come out of it on the positive side, but they’re most likely to come out on the negative.
They unfortunately all hate WIRED, too.
Yeah, they’re not listening to this anyway. I didn’t make the movie for them. I made the movie for everybody else.
The vast majority of us are skeptical of crypto for good reason. Almost everybody that I talk to who isn’t into it says the same thing to me. They say, “I don’t know. It seems maybe I’m not that smart. It seems kind of complicated, but also it seems scammy.” I just want to say, “No, it’s not you. It’s them.”
People find the blockchain intimidating. They don’t quite get cryptocurrency. What is the clearest way to explain to someone what this is?
The thing you need to know is that blockchain technology sucks. It’s old. It’s really old. It goes back to 1991.
But I thought you could put everything on it.
Yeah, and that was what we were sold practically in 2022 or ’21. There was gonna be, like, medical insurance on blockchain …
It’s outrageous. The press releases I got. You could put farm animals on there. Literally whatever you wanted could go on the blockchain.
Yeah. It hasn’t found an application outside of crypto, right? Like companies don’t even use the word “blockchain now.” They use the term “digital assets,” which is a wonderfully vague term.
I will keep an eye out for this.
What is it? It’s digital. It’s an asset of what? What are you owning exactly? So you just need to understand that the technology sucks. To give you a sense of how much it sucks, Bitcoin can only process five to seven transactions a second. Visa can do 24,000. So, it cannot scale as a payment method.
You have to build all these layers on top of it, which sort of defeats the purpose of having it to begin with. Even Sam Bankman-Fried, when I interviewed him, I was like, “Bitcoin can’t work as global payments,” you know? Then he was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Then he tried to pivot and sell me on this other coin that worked better.
Blockchain’s really simple. It’s just a ledger, just a way of storing information. The advantage that it has is it obscures the identity of whoever’s interacting.
Right. Hence the crime.
Exactly. So you can have all these different addresses in the form of wallets. You can also run your crypto through these things called mixers, which sort of further obscure the identity, making it even harder to track.
