Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays

Computer Says Maybe

Hey you! Do you want some free internet money? If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is!

More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now

This is Gotcha! A four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. We start with Mark Hays from Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), and get into one of the biggest tech-fuelled financial scams out there: cryptocurrencies.

Like many things that require mass-buy in, crypto started with an ideology (libertarianism, people hating on Wall Street post 2008). But where does that leave us now? What has crypto morphed into since then, and how does it deceive both consumers and regulators into thinking it’s something that it’s not?

Further reading & resources:

• Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
• Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington
• The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia
• Learn more about Americans for Financial Reform
• Check out Web3 Is Going Great by Molly White
• Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas — an excellent survey of all the tactics and rug-pulls during the height of the NFT boom
• The Missing Crypto Queen: a podcast by BBC Sounds, about a large scale crypto scam, where there wasn’t even any crypto

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