Everyone Is Lying to You About Crypto

The Anti-Crypto Narrative Is Back — And It's Still Missing the Point

Another wave of crypto skepticism has washed ashore. In his book Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, actor Benjamin McKenzie — best known for his role in the early 2000s teen drama The O.C. — walks readers through a now-familiar story: cryptocurrency is nothing but hype, fraud, and reckless speculation. It's a compelling narrative, packaged with celebrity credibility and emotional appeal. The problem? It's also a deeply incomplete one.

This kind of storytelling follows a predictable formula. Spotlight the worst behavior the industry has to offer. Generalize those bad actors across an entire technology ecosystem. Then quietly leave out the lived experiences of tens of millions of ordinary people who are using crypto every single day in practical, responsible, and genuinely meaningful ways. The result is a portrait that generates clicks and book sales but fails to reflect reality.

Who Is Actually Using Crypto — And Why

The image of the average crypto user as a reckless speculator chasing overnight riches is a media creation, not a demographic fact. According to the largest-ever study of crypto holders in the United States, roughly 21% of American adults are currently using digital assets. That's tens of millions of people — not a fringe community of risk-addicted gamblers, but a broad cross-section of everyday Americans.

So what are they actually doing with it? The answer is surprisingly mundane. People are using crypto to:

Build long-term financial independence and diversify their savings portfolios
Send money to family members, including cross-border remittances that bypass expensive wire transfer fees
Make purchases at merchants and online retailers that accept digital payments
Donate to nonprofits and causes they care about with greater transparency
Power small businesses and creative projects through decentralized payment rails

These aren't the stories that make it into viral documentaries or celebrity memoirs. But they are the stories that define how most crypto users actually interact with the technology.

Bad Actors Exist in Every Financial System — Not Just Crypto

To be clear: no serious advocate for cryptocurrency dismisses the very real harm that fraud and scams can cause. Financial predators are a genuine problem, and some people have lost significant sums because of bad actors operating in the crypto space. Those harms deserve acknowledgment, accountability, and better consumer protections.

But here's the critical point that critics like McKenzie consistently overlook — scammers and fraudsters don't live exclusively in the crypto ecosystem. They exploit whatever financial tools and systems are available to them. This is a systemic human problem, not a cryptocurrency problem. Remember Bernie Madoff? His Ponzi scheme had nothing to do with blockchain technology, and it destroyed thousands of lives and wiped out billions of dollars of savings through the most traditional financial system imaginable.

The numbers are striking. According to Nasdaq's Global Financial Crime Report, bank fraud sustained by financial institutions in the United States alone reached an estimated $127 billion in 2023. That figure dwarfs crypto-related fraud by a substantial margin. And yet nobody is writing bestselling books calling for the abolition of checking accounts. Nobody is producing documentaries arguing that bank transfers are inherently criminal. We recognize bank fraud as a serious problem that requires regulatory attention and public vigilance — but we don't condemn the entire institution of banking because bad people abuse it.

The same logic should apply to cryptocurrency. Judging an entire technology by the behavior of its worst participants is not analysis — it's theater.

Crypto Operates Differently From Legacy Financial Systems

One of the most persistent misconceptions in the anti-crypto narrative is the implication that digital assets are simply a more dangerous, less regulated version of traditional finance. In reality, cryptocurrency operates on a fundamentally different architectural premise — one that, in many respects, offers greater transparency and auditability than the legacy systems it is often compared against.

Blockchain technology creates a permanent, publicly verifiable ledger of transactions. Every transfer is recorded. Every wallet address is traceable. In traditional banking, fraud often thrives in opacity — back-room deals, falsified documents, internal cover-ups. With crypto, the transaction history is baked into the protocol itself. This doesn't make it fraud-proof, but it does make many categories of financial manipulation significantly harder to sustain over time.

The Real Cost of Getting the Narrative Wrong

When public discourse about cryptocurrency is dominated by one-sided fear narratives, the people who pay the price are not the wealthy early adopters who already made their money. The people who lose out are the unbanked, the underbanked, the immigrant families paying 8% fees to wire money home, and the small business owners in developing economies who have no access to reliable banking infrastructure.

Crypto, for all its real and legitimate flaws, has opened genuine financial access to populations that legacy systems have historically ignored or exploited. Dismissing the entire technology because celebrities can construct a compelling horror story about its worst chapters is a disservice to those populations.

What Responsible Crypto Discourse Actually Looks Like

Healthy skepticism about cryptocurrency is not only acceptable — it's necessary. The industry has real problems: uneven regulation, persistent scams, environmental concerns with certain consensus mechanisms, and a speculative culture that sometimes crowds out substantive utility. These are legitimate critiques that deserve serious engagement.

But responsible criticism requires intellectual honesty. It means acknowledging the full picture — the scams and the remittances, the fraudsters and the families building financial stability, the speculation and the genuine utility. It means holding crypto to the same standard of scrutiny we apply to every other financial system, not a stricter one designed to produce a predetermined conclusion.

Everyone may have an incentive to tell you a particular story about crypto. The most important thing you can do is make sure you're hearing all of them.