Easy Money Quotes

“Cryptocurrency, which was supposedly created as a solution to the myriad failures of our regulated financial system laid bare during the subprime crisis, had effectively reproduced and even amplified the same dynamics, leading to a similar implosion. Thankfully for the broader public, it had all happened on a smaller scale and the real banks were not involved (despite the crypto industry’s efforts to the contrary). But once again, it was regular people who were left holding the bag.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“That’s how it was in crypto: Fraudsters tended to move from project to project, sometimes concealing their participation, advising each other, investing at a discount, and hyping the latest coin offering.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Elected lawmakers create the law, professionals argue about it, judges interpret it, and public servants assist in the process of implementing it, but often, ultimately, a randomly selected group of citizens decides it. Like all human endeavors, it is as flawed, and prone to unexpected twists of fate, as we are. It might also be the best we can do.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“People were always trying to get rich quick, and there was always someone around willing to promise fantastic wealth while picking their pocket. “You start to realize, anyone can be vulnerable.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“But the reality is that Bitcoin’s ownership is actually extraordinarily centralized, concentrated in a tiny group of whales and mining pools. In fact, just two mining pools account for 51 percent of its global hash rate, meaning just two large groups control the majority of new Bitcoin created.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Instead, there was an inevitable acknowledgment of the political complexities at play. Every meeting basically ended the same way: Let’s stay in touch. They had to move slowly, sensitive to political realities. It was an election year, remember?”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Most people consider themselves good people, Jim said, no matter what bad things they may have done. The overwhelming majority of the population is not evil. They care what others think of them, but even more importantly, it’s crucial to their own self-image that they justify their own behavior.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Leverage + Rigidity + Complexity + Bank Run = Crash”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Constantly preaching ideas of community, democratic empowerment, and individual liberty, crypto’s leaders and influencers had instead created an anarchic set of markets that invariably funneled money from information-poor retail investors to well-connected insiders and whales.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“At the end of the day, the Bitcoin rollout in El Salvador suffered from some of the same problems that plague cryptocurrency adoption more generally: It just didn’t work very well, it was centralized rather than decentralized, and it was prone to fraud.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“The supposedly democratizing, decentralizing currency of the future had come full circle: a way to enrich the few at the expense of the many, in opaque games of chance the public couldn’t hope to understand.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Fearing worse times to come, people hoard rather than spend. Economic activity nosedives, and less spending leads to less production, which causes unemployment to surge, resulting in even less spending and thus less production.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“What started as simple speculation and peer-to-peer exchange became a web of derivatives markets, DeFi protocols (a set of rules governing a particular asset, often using so-called smart contracts, run on blockchains), lending pools, and other newfangled features of digital finance.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“In that way, “community” can be seen as just another way of turning a mark’s outward anger at getting scammed inward, so the sucker blames himself/herself rather than the con men who perpetrated the scheme.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“A few win, most lose, while everyone thinks they can scale the mountain. The overall structure is designed to funnel money from a large group of ordinary people upward to a few people at the top, who occupy privileged positions of control.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“In theory, the difference seems to be that members of MLMs like Avon and Amway chiefly earn compensation from selling a particular good or service, while pyramid schemes primarily compensate members for recruiting new sellers as quickly as possible. But in practice, a pyramid scheme is essentially just an MLM that was run poorly and got caught.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“The “fraud triangle” has three components: need (also termed motivation), opportunity, and rationalization.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Again, from Dan Davies’s book Lying for Money, “a fraud can be called a Ponzi scheme with greater validity, the greater the extent to which the mechanics of the crime revolve around managing the renewal of its financing and convincing the investor and lender communities to keep their money in the scheme rather than demanding repayment in cash.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Thanks to a 1946 Supreme Court decision, securities are often defined by what’s called the Howey Test. The test has four prongs: (1) an investment of money, (2) in a common enterprise, (3) with the expectation of profit, (4) to be derived from the efforts of others.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Investors, their confidence and expectations buoyed by past price increases, bid up speculative prices further, thereby enticing more investors to do the same, so that the cycle repeats again and again, resulting in an amplified response to the original precipitating factors. The feedback mechanism is widely suggested in popular discourse and is one of the oldest financial theories.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies didn’t have to be money or a store of long-term value. They could be wildly speculative instruments, pumped via hype, social media, and celebrity endorsements.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“He defined an economic narrative as “a contagious story that has the potential to change how people make economic decisions”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Even licensed gambling is not a productive use of capital, and we will delve into its myriad drawbacks throughout this book,”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Life's a gamble and nobody knows the odds.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“Our reporting from El Salvador would not have been possible without the assistance of fellow journalist Nelson Rauda. I cannot wait to see what you do next, Nelson.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

“When enough members of a society no longer trust each other or the government that purportedly represents their interests, its economy and its currency, which similarly depend on trust, may be soon to follow.”
― Ben McKenzie, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud: The Basis for the Documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money