I’ll read a news story about more or less anything, but I glaze over at the prospect of consuming any article about cryptocurrency. That’s because even when I do read one, I never totally get it — what cryptocurrency is, how it works, why it’s treated as the second coming by some while others roll their eyes. The future of many things, including money, will surely be digital. So is cryptocurrency just an early-adapter version of the digital monetary future? Yet if that’s so, why does it always feel like crypto is the sort of thing that used to be advertised on late-night TV along with K-Tel pop-hit collections? And why does the very concept of crypto leave me so confused?
If, like me, you suffer from perpetual half-submerged crypto angst, the movie to see is “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” a lively, knife-sharp, impeccably researched and reported documentary that answers every conceivable question you’ve ever had about crypto, and does so in a way that’s brisk and funny and illuminating rather than intimidating. Above all, it explains the hidden reason why crypto, after all the media bloviating we’ve been subjected to about it, remains such a weirdly obtuse and intimidating topic.
The reason? Because it’s all designed to sell an illusion. The nature of cryptocurrency is that it’s meant to seem like a shiny new object, one that’s heady and elusive enough to feel just out of reach. That’s the secret appeal of crypto, and what makes its true believers into something of a cult. (Cults are built around magical thinking.) And it’s what lends crypto a mystique that has allowed its marketers to inflate a viral junk-cash phenomenon into irresistible digital snake oil.
“Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” is the unlikely brainchild of a Hollywood actor: Ben McKenzie, who wrote, produced, and directed it. (It was made in conjunction with his 2023 book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud,” written with Jacob Silverman.) McKenzie is someone who many remember as the heartthrob costar of “The O.C.,” where he played the glam rebel outcast Ryan Atwood. He had a few TV roles after that, costarring on “Southland” and “Gotham,” but in “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” McKenzie, now 47, makes winning sport of the fact that he’ll never outrun his slightly schlocky youth-TV past — and that’s okay with him. He still works as an actor (occasionally), he’s married to the Brazilian-American actor Morena Baccarin (as we see in the movie, they have two sons and live in a beautifully renovated SoHo townhouse), and he’s a very serious dude with a degree in economics.
In “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” McKenzie cuts through reams of misinformation and conducts unshowy but confrontational interviews with finance players who are famous and powerful (he also talks to a lot of people who are not). He chases the story of cryptocurrency and gets to the bottom of it with such muckraking zeal that by the end of the film, I was convinced he should become a politician. (I’m not kidding: He’s as photogenic but combative as Gavin Newsom, though closer in spirit to Pete Buttegieg.)
McKenzie starts off by plumbing the mysteries of bitcoin, which was the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Bitcoin marketed itself with a savvy hook: the declaration that there would only ever be 21 million bitcoins issued. The implication: Since the number of bitcoins wasn’t going to multiply, it was the value of an individual bitcoin that would go up. But here’s how bitcoin really become the prototype for all the crypto delusion that followed. The new currency would operate kind of like a stock (people would trade it; the value would fluctuate)…except it wasn’t tethered to a company that made actual goods. It presented itself as a kind of bank…except it wasn’t a bank.
And here was the insidious part, the very 21st-century part. The 2008 financial meltdown and its corrupt aftermath (i.e., the Obama administration’s spineless bailing out of the banks and no one else, with no heads rolling) had set the stage for a world in which ordinary citizens no longer trusted our financial institutions. At the same time, the launch of Napster had heralded an era when we were all going to be rebel disrupters. So while bitcoin offered none of the protections of a traditional bank, that very fact made it seem an insurrectionary currency. It was operating outside the laws of the financial world (which was now seen as the enemy). That made it cool. And that was the neo-1960s snake oil, all built around the idea of flattering the potential marks who wanted to think that they — like bitcoin itself — were going to be joining in some sort of transgressive undermining of The System.
Ben McKenzie elucidates all this, and he tracks down some of the reigning hucksters who have led the crypto revolution. He goes to El Salvador, the first country to use bitcoin as legal tender, and where the president, Nayib Bukele (who has been in office since 2019), is like a grinning Marcello Hernández character. He has promised to build a place called Bitcoin City, which will be a utopian metropolis of gold. (When McKenzie gets to the location, it’s just a sleepy fishing village whose residents are being squeezed out.)
McKenzie then stakes out Alex Mashinsky, the Israeli-American co-founder and CEO of Celsius, a now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform. Mashinsky is a vintage hustler, selling the idea that crypto can make you rich, but here’s where the old-fashioned underpinnings of the scam are revealed. Celsius turns out to be a Ponzi scheme. The price of Celsius crypto would go up, but it was being manipulated by those in charge, all as a way to get ordinary citizens to invest. And millions upon millions did, which kept the charade afloat (and funneled the “profits” to the top).
Celsius ultimately declared bankruptcy, but that’s small potatoes compared to what happened to FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who was famously convicted of seven counts of fraud and is now serving 25 years in prison. McKenzie got an interview with Bankman-Fried before he imploded, and this sequence alone is worth the price of admission, because of how nakedly it reveals the particular sort of weasel Sam Bankman-Fried is.
Many have likened him to Bernie Madoff, because of the scale of his operation (the sheer amount of money lost by those who invested with him). But what’s very particular about Bankman-Fried is his youth and his generational vibe. Under his dark mop of saintly tech-geek curls, he’s got that teasingly awkward, fake-tentative passive aggression descended from the style of Steve Jobs in his seminars, which Bankman-Fried mixes with his own mode of “Look at what a sensitively evolved Zoomer bro I am!” When McKenzie asks him how much he’s contributed to the coffers of politicians, his dodging of the question is pure dissembling theater. He’s a truly shameless poster boy for how to rip people off in an “enlightened” way.
And yet, the most astonishing comments in “Everyone is Lying to You for Money” occur in the interviews McKenzie conducted with a set of ordinary folks who lost their money in crypto. They were left shell-shocked and betrayed. But near the end of the film, McKenzie returns to them to ask if they still believe in crypto. And every one of them says yes. They may have gotten sucked into fraudulent dealings, but their faith in the crypto dream remains undiminished. “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” captures a brave new world where the snake-oil salesmen believe their own hype, and where no one lies to the victims as much as they lie to themselves.
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