05/15/2023
“Crypto is Vegas without the drinks, the dinner, or the show,” contend Gotham actor McKenzie and journalist Silverman (Terms of Service ) in this zippy polemic. McKenzie recounts reading up on crypto during a Covid-induced lull in his acting career and coming to the conclusion that digital currencies are “akin to gambling” because, unlike shares in a company, crypto is “uncorrelated with any actual asset.” With Silverman, he examines major players in “one of the greatest frauds in history,” detailing how confidence men around the globe convinced ordinary people to make misguided investments that were wiped out after the spring 2022 crypto crash. The authors describe El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s disastrous rollout of a fraud-ridden, government-sponsored platform for exchanging Bitcoin, Sam Bankman-Fried’s illegal strategy for artificially inflating the size of crypto exchange FTX, and South Korean entrepreneur Do Kwon’s fall from grace after his Luna currency lost around $40 billion in value over the course of one week in 2022. The crypto-curious will appreciate the authors’ accessible explanations of how digital currencies work, and the profiles illuminate how hype and irresponsible business practices inflated the crypto bubble for years before its inevitable burst. The result is a damning study of how and why the crypto market collapsed. (July)
"One of the golden rules of finance is never invest in something you don’t understand. This book shows what happens when you ignore it."
Easy Money is the delightful story of how actor Ben McKenzie and journalist Jacob Silverman realized long before most of the rest of us that cryptocurrency was a scam, and set out to take it and all of its promoters down. One part travelogue and one part anatomy of a fraud, it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what the hell happened—and how human nature works when there’s money to be made.
New York Times-bestselling author of The Smartest Bethany McLean
Easy Money is a deceptively ambitious project—at once a riveting account of the financial crime of the century, and a thoughtful meditation on the nature of democracy and what we owe each other.
Superb . . . the terrible story of our economic times.
coeditor of Myth America and professor of history Julian Zelizer
If you're looking for a smart, savvy road map through the mayhem of the cryptocurrency madness, Easy Money is the guidebook for you. Ben McKenzie has given us a wry and knowing saga of his personal quest to expose the crypto charlatans, and his sleuthing uncovers a world of frauds, true believers, and opportunists that you won't soon forget.
Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times be Ron Chernow
Ben McKenzie's Easy Money is a perfectly timed page-turner that gets to the heart of the fundamental scam that was (and is) the mania around cryptocurrency. It's a devastatingly well-told story of greed, con men, and endless gullibility. McKenzie goes down the rabbit hole, only to become a full-throated skeptic who then takes us along on his journey of enlightenment and discovery, proving once again that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
William D. Cohan New York Times bestselling author of Power Failure and House of Cards
Ben McKenzie takes us on an amazing journey, guiding us through the astounding story of how a bizarre cast of swindlers and scammers persuaded millions of people to take leave of their senses and part with trillions of dollars, only to put them into the surreal and illusory world of so called ‘crypto assets’ and watch them vanish into thin air. When it is all over, the last couple of years will prove to have been one of the strangest episodes in the history of money.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lords of Fi Liaquat Ahamed
The perfect guide to the recent bitcoin hysteria…. gripping.
Easy Money is a smart, fast-paced, and timely exposé of corporate greed, fraud, and incompetence masquerading as genius. Simultaneously illuminating and infuriating, authors McKenzie and Silverman’s page-turning book goes on a global journey to explain how crypto is the latest Ponzi scheme orchestrated to seduce and defraud the masses while benefitting the very few.
author of Go Back to Where You Came From Wajahat Ali
If you're looking for a smart, savvy road map through the mayhem of the cryptocurrency madness, Easy Money is the guidebook for you. Ben McKenzie has given us a wry and knowing saga of his personal quest to expose the crypto charlatans, and his sleuthing uncovers a world of frauds, true believers, and opportunists that you won't soon forget.”—Ron Chernow, Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Alexander Hamilton and Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lords of Finance Easy Money is a perfectly timed page-turner that gets to the heart of the fundamental scam that was (and is) the mania around cryptocurrency. It's a devastatingly well-told story of greed, con men, and endless gullibility. McKenzie goes down the rabbit hole, only to become a full-throated skeptic who then takes us along on his journey of enlightenment and discovery, proving once again that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”—William D. Cohan New York Times bestselling author of Power Failure and House of Cards Julian Zelizer, coeditor of Myth America and professor of history and public affairs at Princeton Un Easy Money is a deceptively ambitious project—at once a riveting account of the financial crime of the century, and a thoughtful meditation on the nature of democracy and what we owe each other.” —Zachary Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes Easy Money is a smart, fast-paced, and timely exposé of corporate greed, fraud, and incompetence masquerading as genius. Simultaneously illuminating and infuriating, authors McKenzie and Silverman’s page-turning book goes on a global journey to explain how crypto is the latest Ponzi scheme orchestrated to seduce and defraud the masses while benefitting the very few.”—Wajahat Ali, author of Go Back to Where You Came From Financial Times Times of London Easy Money is the delightful story of how actor Ben McKenzie and journalist Jacob Silverman realized long before most of the rest of us that cryptocurrency was a scam, and set out to take it and all of its promoters down. One part travelogue and one part anatomy of a fraud, it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what the hell happened—and how human nature works when there’s money to be made.”—Bethany McLean, New York Times-bestselling author of The Smartest Guys in the Room and The Big Fail
2023-06-08
Matt Damon hawked crypto in ads during NFL games. Kim Kardashian made such extraordinary claims for it that it drew the attention of British regulators—though, in the U.S., “Kardashian’s promotion was initially met with typical regulatory silence.” Crypto seemed to be just the thing for the rich and powerful, a means of hiding transactions via the secrecy associated with a financial instrument that isn’t really a currency, at least by American law. Writing with financial journalist Silverman, McKenzie charges that since crypto behaves like a security, and an unregulated one at that, its price “jumps up and down like a rabbit on amphetamines.” Furthermore, the technology doesn’t scale well enough, it’s environmentally disastrous because it requires so much electricity to “mine,” and it’s surrounded by “fraudsters” and “con men.” Ethereum, founded in 2015 and the “second largest cryptocurrency as of this writing,” appears to be a smoke-and-mirrors operation, while Tether “was as if a random group of middling ne’er-do-wells had been issued their own money printer,” a bomb waiting to take down the entire system of casino capitalism. The author chronicles how some of the less cautious principals were taken down by international police forces, while others simply disappeared after their businesses evaporated—but not, he adds, before a few of them bought yachts. As for Kardashian, she was “fined $1.26 million by the SEC for her participation in shilling the shitcoin Ethereum Max”—even if she was just a willing tool and not herself a fraudster. “Would anyone in crypto ever see the inside of a jail cell?” asks McKenzie. At least since the author finished the book, it appears that at least one or two—Sam Bankman-Fried most notable among them—are on the way to the slammer.
A well-reasoned, occasionally shrill critique of the crypto universe.
