Jon Stewart recently interviewed Ben McKenzie on The Weekly Show podcast. McKenzie co-wrote Easy Money, a New York Times bestselling book on crypto and economics, and directed Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, a documentary on the industry. He testified before Congress and interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, a crypto exchange that collapsed in 2022, taking eight billion dollars in customer funds with it.

This interview reveals the cracks in crypto critics' arguments.

McKenzie builds his case on two pieces of evidence and draws two conclusions from them. The evidence sounds damning. The conclusions sound logical. But both rest on an assumption he never examines — and that assumption is where the argument breaks down.

McKenzie's evidence: Bitcoin processes five to seven transactions per second while Visa processes thousands. A system this slow, he argues, will never function as a global payments method. Bitcoin was the first successful use case of blockchain technology, but the category has evolved significantly since then. Solana, for example, solved the speed problem through a mechanism called proof of history, processing around 1,200 transactions per second in real-time operation with a theoretical capacity of 65,000 — matching Visa's own high mark. To validate his assessment, McKenzie cites David Chaum, one of the original architects of cryptographic money, who calls blockchain “primitive”. But Chaum is not a neutral observer. He is a founder with a specific vision for how this technology should work, but blockchain went in a different direction. His calling it primitive reflects his own preferences, not an objective technical verdict. The idea that the technology is primitive is itself a primitive understanding of the technology. Dismissing blockchain based on Bitcoin's speed is like dismissing aviation based on the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk.

McKenzie's evidence: Iran uses crypto to evade sanctions. North Korea has funded half its nuclear weapons program through hacked cryptocurrency. Russian oligarchs settle sanctioned oil trades through stablecoins. $154 billion in illicit activity was financed through crypto in a single year.

But this argument has four problems.

First, the scale of adoption is itself an argument. These are not small crime syndicates evading local authorities. These are nation-states maneuvering in a complex global society, building sovereign financial infrastructure on this technology. When actors operating at that scale adopt a technology, it is not evidence of the technology's illegitimacy. It is evidence of its capability.

Second, who decides who is a bad actor? The designation comes from the central system itself. The same institution McKenzie is defending gets to decide who has access and who doesn't. That is not a neutral judgment. It is a political one. Countries get sanctioned for geopolitical reasons that have nothing to do with the morality of their citizens.

Third, the central system has its own bad actors — and McKenzie never applies the same standard to it. The dollar finances more illicit activity annually than crypto does, by orders of magnitude. HSBC was caught laundering money for drug cartels inside the fully regulated system. Every financial tool in history has been used for crime. That has never been the standard for legitimacy.

Fourth, the binary is false. McKenzie's framing is: central oversight equals legitimate, no central oversight equals criminal. But the people using crypto are not simply criminals or dissidents. They are ordinary people in countries with collapsing currencies, immigrants sending remittances, businesses operating in sanctioned economies, and people locked out of banking for reasons that have nothing to do with criminality.

Stewart raises the woman in Afghanistan, unable to access banking services because she is a woman, who is paying employees in crypto because those are the only rails available to her. McKenzie registers her briefly and moves on. He treats her as an exception. But she is not an exception. She is evidence of something his framework has no category for — a population the central system was never designed to reach, for whom crypto is not a speculation vehicle or a scam, but the only functional financial infrastructure available.

Without a central issuer, McKenzie concludes, there is nothing underneath the price. You are buying the belief that other people will give it value. When that belief breaks, ordinary people lose their savings. He calls this the greater fool theory — you buy hoping to sell to someone who will pay more, until someone is left holding the bag. For meme coins, celebrity coins, and most of the 20,000 speculative tokens he references, he is right. There is no productive asset underneath them. The price is purely narrative. But McKenzie never makes this distinction. He applies the meme coin critique to the entire category — including the infrastructure layer that is genuinely producing something. Bitcoin is a decentralized settlement network. Ethereum is a programmable financial infrastructure. Solana is a high-speed transaction network. These are not stories about something that might exist one day. They are networks that people and institutions currently pay to use. That is structurally closer to owning equity in Visa or in the SWIFT network than to buying a meme coin. And McKenzie's own evidence makes this point for him. Iran, North Korea, and Russia are not building sovereign financial infrastructure on meme coins. They are using the infrastructure layer. His strongest evidence against crypto is actually evidence that the productive asset exists and works.

Without a central institution, McKenzie concludes, when things go wrong, there is nothing to grab onto. FTX collapsed, and $8 billion in customer funds disappeared, with no backstop, no regulator stepping in, and no mechanism to make anyone whole. This is his strongest consumer protection argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But it rests on the assumption that the existing system's accountability mechanisms actually work for the people they are supposed to protect.

The 2008 financial crisis happened inside a fully licensed, fully regulated system. The banks were made whole through a government bailout. The homeowners lost their houses. The accountability mechanism existed. It protected the institutions. The people paid the cost.

Stewart finds this crack, too. When McKenzie calls the conflict of interest at FTX — an exchange and a trading firm operating in the same building — blatant, something that would never happen in a regulated market, Stewart raises Citadel. Citadel routes roughly 40% of all US retail stock orders while simultaneously running one of the world's largest hedge funds. This is the same conflict of interest happening in a fully licensed institution.

So the question McKenzie never asks is: if the accountability mechanisms of the existing system produce the same conflicts of interest, the same insider extraction, the same protection of institutions over people, then the problem is not the absence of accountability mechanisms. The problem is who those mechanisms are designed to protect.

This interview is a perfect demonstration of the Central Trust Worldview — the belief system I wrote about in a recent essay that shapes how crypto's most credible critics think.

The belief is this: coordination at scale requires accountable authority — an identifiable institution that can be held responsible when things go wrong. From that belief, three things follow automatically. Money requires a central issuer. Participants require institutional protection. Money requires central management. Remove any of those three, and the system, in their view, fails.

Everything else he argues flows from this. McKenzie's evidence, his conclusions, and his dismissal of the technology are all downstream of this one assumption. He carries it into the interview the way most people carry their deepest assumptions — not as a position to be defended, but as the ground beneath his feet.

McKenzie is stuck inside that worldview. But what happens when we apply his investigative process to the central system itself?

First, you need a new core premise: The central financial system is not the only way to coordinate money at scale. It is one architecture — and like any monopoly, its failures are predictable. A system with no alternative has no incentive to serve the people it is supposed to serve. Power without competition produces exploitation. That is not a moral claim. It is an economic one.

Now let’s find the evidence.

The Federal Reserve is a private institution run by the banks it is supposed to regulate. In 2008 the Treasury Secretary was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Regulatory agencies are routinely captured by the industries they oversee. The revolving door between regulators and the regulated is not an accident. It is what happens when the institution being regulated is also the institution with the most power to reward its overseers.

HSBC laundered $881 million for the Sinaloa cartel inside the fully regulated system. Executives paid a fine equivalent to five weeks of profit and kept their jobs. No one went to jail. Citadel routes 40% of all US retail stock orders while simultaneously running one of the world's largest hedge funds — the same conflict of interest McKenzie called blatant at FTX, operating with a license and a blessing. The dollar finances more illicit activity annually than crypto does, by orders of magnitude. Regulation did not prevent any of it. It managed the consequences for the institutions involved.

The dollar has not been backed by anything physical since 1971, when Nixon ended gold convertibility. Its value rests on the petrodollar system — OPEC pricing oil exclusively in dollars in exchange for US military protection — and on legal tender laws that require its acceptance. Argentina has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times. Lebanon froze customer deposits in 2019. Venezuela's currency collapsed. In Iran, Nigeria, and Turkey, centrally managed currencies have been used to extract value from ordinary citizens to serve institutional and political ends.

In 2008, 3.8 million families lost their homes. The banks received $700 billion in bailouts. The accountability mechanism existed. It protected the institutions. The people paid the cost.

If the central system consistently produces these outcomes — not as exceptions but as predictable results of concentrated power without competition — what is the solution?

Devotees of the Central Trust's worldview answer that better regulation is the answer. But regulation is administered by the same institutions it is supposed to constrain. The revolving door between regulators and the industries they regulate is not an accident. It is what monopoly power produces when it captures its own oversight.

A permissionless alternative is not a perfect system. But it is the first real competitive pressure the central financial system has ever faced. And competitive pressure — not regulation — is what historically forces monopolies to serve the people they are supposed to serve.

McKenzie actually comes closest to seeing this in a single unguarded moment. He asks: "how bad is our regulated system that people are doing this, that regular people are gambling with sometimes their life savings?" He sees the demand signal. He just never follows it to its conclusion. If the regulated system is failing people badly enough that they are doing this, the question is not only how to shut down the alternative. The question is what is producing that level of desperation in the first place.

Stewart calls it a funhouse mirror. But it is more accurately just a mirror. The speculation, the leverage, the insider extraction, the conflicts of interest — crypto reflects these not because it distorts the central system but because it runs on the same human incentives without the institutional veneer that makes those dynamics look legitimate when the central system does them.

These are not crypto problems.

There are financial system problems. And having a permissionless alternative — one that anyone can access without institutional permission — is what creates the pressure that protects ordinary participants from the exploitation that monopoly power without competition produces.