Summary of Easy Money By Ben Mckenzie : Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Easy Money By Ben Mckenzie : Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

 

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• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
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In Easy Money, TV star Ben McKenzie debunks cryptocurrency, a massive fraud that threatens to crash during the pandemic. With the help of journalist Jacob Silverman, McKenzie reveals the climactic final days of cryptocurrency. The film explores the stories of traders, victims, crypto "visionaries," Hollywood's true believers, anti-crypto whistleblowers, and government agents seeking solutions at the precipice of a major crash. The film highlights the irresponsibility and criminal fraud that could be ten times more devastating than Bernie Madoff.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223098218

Willie M. Joseph

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MONEY AND LYING

This book is about cryptocurrency and fraud, a parable of money and lying. It begins during the wild speculative mania of the Trump years, which was the latest iteration of casino capitalism. Cryptocurrencies and their byproducts are generally regarded by economists as at best zero-sum, meaning one person's gain is another's loss. Cryptocurrencies don't create any value in and of themselves, making them more akin to gambling. Cryptocurrencies are computer code uncorrelated with any actual asset, and investing in them is more akin to gambling.

The Golden Age of Fraud, coined by Jim Chanos, is a troubling sense that graft and deceit have penetrated all aspects of the economy, operating with political and legal impunity. In 2016, the United States of America elected a con man as president, Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This led to the spread of misinformation and the erosion of trust between citizens and their government.

Easy Money is a work of reportage, culled from hundreds of interviews, brain-melting research, and more than a few bizarre adventures in the world of digital funny money. The book takes readers on a journey that begins in Brooklyn and rapidly expands to cover the globe, from Texas to Florida, El Salvador to Washington, D.C., and even into the wilds of Manhattan.

The author, Jacob Silverman, is a longtime TV actor with a decades-old degree in economics, who has learned about money and lying from two decades spent in show business. Cryptography, computer science, and finance are not his forte, but he can recognize when they're being used to conjure or sell a narrative that might not be true. Cryptocurrencies have become a popular investment option, with a speculative frenzy sweeping the world. With an estimated 40 million Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide, disproportionately young and male, drawn into the speculative frenzy. They invested billions of dollars, euros, yuan, and other real monies through the more than 500 crypto exchanges operating worldwide.

Most invested for the simple reason of making money, and were infected by FOMO (fear of missing out). As more people invested, the more prices rose, resulting in even more FOMO that drew in yet more people.

The origins of economic narratives surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be traced back to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), also known as the subprime crisis. In 2008, the housing market experienced a massive economic downturn due to financial deregulation and low interest rates. The Fed, the nation's central bank, lowered interest rates from 6.5 percent to 1 percent, encouraging credit to flow into the housing market. However, the economic effect proved far less noble, with lenders issuing subprime mortgages with higher interest rates, which were then bundled into mortgagebacked securities and collateralized default obligations (CDOs). Ratings agencies bestowed high marks on potentially worthless financial products to stay in the good graces of their Wall Street clients.

Economists focus on incentive structures, and with subprime loans, incentives were skewed up and down the chain. The dominant economic thinking of the time was that housing prices would only continue to go up, but the people holding the purse strings and their allies in power thought that the good times would go on forever, so they enacted self-interested policies and placed risky bets.

As the housing market continued to stall in early 2008 and the economy showed signs of entering a recession, the federal government intervened to stave off a broader disaster. The Fed slashed interest rates by three-fourths of a point in January, but more decisive action was needed to stem the collapse of the finance industry and the overall economy. In March, the government began bailing out bond dealers, who had made toxic mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps. After Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September 2008, equities and commodities prices crashed, and the world economy appeared on the brink of collapse. Quantitative easing (QE) was a short-term response to the subprime crisis, which led to the Fed's assets growing from $900 billion to $2.3 trillion.

This growth was fueled by the government's response to the crisis, which benefited deep-pocketed corporations. However, the crisis also led to the rise of cryptocurrency, which emerged as a new mutation to the financial system.

The Bitcoin white paper, published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, aimed to create a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that would allow online payments to be sent directly without going through a financial institution. Satoshi proposed a new method that would allow people to transact directly with one another, bypassing financial institutions. This solution relied on combining two previous technologies: public key encryption and blockchain.

Public key encryption is vital in modern life, as it protects users' credit card information and allows for the verification of transactions using publicly available information. Bitcoin's system of numbered accounts (or addresses) is linked to public keys, and transfers are authorized by the private key corresponding to the originating address. Addresses are organized into wallets, software that handles bookkeeping and translates it into a single bank balance.

The blockchain, created by computer scientists Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, timestamps documents so they cannot be altered. Each block contains the cryptographic hash of the prior block, creating an irreversible record. However, the double spend problem remained, as Satoshi relied on a consensus algorithm to ensure the system's security against manipulation.

The network targets a new block every ten minutes by dynamically adjusting the degree of difficulty required in the winning block. The more participants, the harder the process gets, and the more energy is required to guess the next block correctly. This process is known as the Red Queen's race, a reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was founded on the idea of a peer-to-peer currency free of intermediaries. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency, was launched in 2015 and introduced smart contracts, which allowed for the automation of financial markets and the introduction of complex financial instruments.

This led to the development of DeFi, or decentralized finance, a vast, unregulated ecosystem of crypto exchanges, lending pools, trading protocols, and complex financial products. Ethereum also led to the introduction of NFTs, which are links to receipts for JPEGs stored on blockchains.

The