Crypto Explained, In Plain English

get my head around how it works. Our producers asked people in the streets in a few cities what they want to know about crypto, and one question kept coming up again and again, only one question, What is crypto? What is crypto? What is it? Because I have no idea what that actually is, we don't put the money, so we asked Bloomberg opinion columnist Matt Levine to help us out. So at its core, it's a sort of

centralized permission in form of money. How do we send money to people without relying on banks, without relying on the central intermediary mass day job is making sense of the world of finance. So he's no stranger to weird things people do. Recently, though, he turned his attention to crypto in a forty thousand word opus that took over an entire issue of Bloomberg Business Week. Read it. It

is very worth your time. But before we get started, let's take a moment to explain a few common crypto terms you heard Matt mentioned just now, because you're gonna hear them in this episode. Unlike traditional currencies that are controlled by the government I think the Federal Reserve or Treasury Department, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are decentralized and distributed. That means transactions are made and kept track of across a network of computers anyone can join by downloading the

open source software. There can be millions of computers on a network sharing the same data. Another important thing crypto is permissionless. If I want to sell you a crypto token and you want to buy it, the transaction can happen between us without having to go through a third party like a bank or a regulator of any kind. And crypto is designed to be secure and anonymous. Your identity on a given currencies network is an encrypted string of numbers and letters. At the heart of it. All

is what's called the blockchain. You'll hear that term a lot. Essentially, a blockchain is an encrypted, up to date ledger of every crypto transaction. Anyone on the network can see it and check it on their own computer. Every ten minutes or so, the latest transactions are added to the ledger. That segment of crypto history is called a block, and that block is then added to the long chain of

bocks that came before it, Thus black chain. The blockchain lets you see transactions stretching back in time, informs a permanent record that can't be changed. That's the idea anyway. So how's all this working out in real life? Matt Levine joins me now with some answers. Matt Levin, thanks for being here, Thanks for having met. When the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was released, what was the problem it's creators were

trying to solve. Bitcoin is a clever bit of like cryptographic design to allow people to send money to each other in a way that that doesn't rely on a bank. It sort of relies on the sort of contribution of the entire community to make sure that the ledger of money is correct. So that's kind of the basic idea, and then since then it's branched off into a lot of directions. One is there different kinds of ways to

send digital money with different features. But another is that people, you know, build on that basic idea to say, well, what if we had, you know, our entire financial system that had the same sort of decentralized permission list properties. So what made you want to write for words digging into those questions. The way I think about it is there's a lot of technology and crypto that is like, like the pipes are exposed, you kind of see the

workings of it. Like if you have money at a bank, I know some stuff about how bank payments work, and also about how like your money at a bank, it's just like the liability of the bank, and like how the sort of accounting for that works, and what the sort of backstop of that is and why you can trust that the money is there. But for most people you don't need to know that. You can just like you have money at the bank, and it's just sort of like this accepted, trusted, like normal thing in crypto.

I think there's a lot of emphasis on people want to tell you a lot about how the blockchain works. And like exactly how the cryptography works. That you have the money the victoins in the ledger, right, you're expected to know more about the pipes to make any use of it. And so I think that turns a lot of people off, like completely, rightly, right, like completely it is completely sensible to say I don't want to know

all that much, like my bank account has worked. So, I mean, one reason I wrote the story is to is to try to explain all of that piping in one place and in a way that's not like a wild eyed person grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you and saying you need to know about the blockchain. But just like if you want to know the blockchain, here it is, and like try to um, you know abs straight away from it. So if you don't want to know about the blockchain, you don't have to know

that much read it. The barriers to entry to learning about crypto seemed very high. You're learning about like the database architecture of how they keep the ledger, and like

you don't have to do that with a bank. The other thing that is very much an important presence in crypto is that the price of bitcoin went up from zero to tens of thousands of dollars over the course of like the first you know, ten or so years of the existence of crypto, and that gets people thinking other thoughts like I should buy a bitcoin, you know, or I should buy some other crypto that will also

go out that much. And so it is in practical terms, just like the the idea of crypto is really inseparable from just financial speculation, and if you're in it for financial speculation, you make care less about some of this philosophical decentralization stuff. And I guess it's one question about crypto that differentiates it from traditional currency, the dollar, where there's speculation about the dollar and it can move up and down to value, but it's not primarily there to

use as an investment that you hope will appreciate. So is cryptocurrency a currency or is it an investment? Yeah, I mean I think it's it's almost not at all a currency at least like the big ones like bitcoin and ethereum are really kind of have the property of being almost like stock in some sort of decentralized company, some project that you're betting will do well, and if the project does well, then the tokens will be worth a lot of money and you get like a sort

of equity like return. And in fact, these tokens often turn out to be kind of correlated with um with tex stocks, because like it turns out there kind of our tex stocks. Bitcoin is a little bit like that. It's a little bit it has other functions that sort of people talk about digital gold, where bitcoin is this like store of value where some number of people are buying bitcoin as a hedge to inflation or just like a you know, a thing that they think is a separate,

like safe place to store value. And so it's like a little bit of currency like properties. But what it isn't is a way to send cash digitally. It's like not I say this, and then bitcoin people get mad at me, But it's like not really an ideal way to buy a sandwich, right, you can do it, you know.

I've been to like barber shops that take bitcoin, and like online there are more places that take bitcoin um although it's still not you know, universal, But because bitcoin fluctuates so much in value, is you said, it's not like the best you know, not the best currency right for for much of its existence and mostly went up in value and so if you had bitcoin because you thought bitcoin would go up in value, it would be kind of silly to spend it on a sandwich. So

it doesn't really have like a supercurrency like function. That's one thing I wanted to ask you about, which was the idea of the inherent value of crypto or really of any money. When you think about a dollar, Uh, it has value because I suppose it's tied to the state of the United States, and it's been a pretty good bet. What is in the case of say bitcoin, the thing that you reference it to to say that

it has value. Yeah, I mean it's the same. There's some sort of like social collective project and some social collective acceptance that like, this is the currency of that project. Right, And in the US, the project is you know, big and has an army and a two hundred years old or whatever. Like the project that the US dollar is linked to is pretty well understood, and you know, there's a central bank that tries to maintain the value of the dollar. In bitcoin, it's like this kind of new

utopian crypto project, right. But it's a lot of people, right, it's a lot of people online who believe in this project and believe, like in the value of bitcoin a cool piece of technology, or as a way to fight censorship, or as an actual way to transfer money easily. Like, there are a lot of different sets of beliefs about it, but it's you know, fundamental. The value comes from like a bunch of people in a market working out how

much they think it's worth twelve years in. It's like, it seems plausible that like a lot of people believe it's worth something in a fairly robust way. You know. One thing I would say about stocks is that there is some kind of floor under the value of a regular stock at its cash flows, right, like any more

or less. Right, Like, if you have a stock trade like a penny, you can buy all of it and then you own the company and then you can like you know, use its factories or solids factories or whatever. But there's no cap on the price of a stock, right If people really really like the stock, then it

can go to, you know, whatever price you want. And the fact that it's cash flows don't support that price is like, you know, sort of an interesting academic point, but it doesn't necessarily affect the market price, at least in the short term, and so yeah, I mean that's true a bitcoin, but it's also true of like you know, like loosely speaking, it's true of gold as well, right, I mean, like this is like a thing that exists in the financial world where like things have value because

there is a community of people who accept that they have value, and it's useful for people to have this sort of accepted thing that carries value. And you know, like the first day of bitcoin, it sounds insane to be like, this is going to be a new thing that will be widely accepted to have value. But you know, years and years in like this turned out to be

true that people widely accepted at that value. But I suppose if we had a purely barter economy where you come and fix my sink and I give you a sandwich and we agree that that's the transaction, and then one day I said you, well, I'm not going to give you a sandwich. I'm gonna give you this piece of paper which represents what I think is the value of the sandwich. You would say, well, that's crazy, And yet that's kind of what we do now because everyone

agrees in it. So is it that much different with bitcoin? There's like a sort of deep answer to that question, which is that like dollar sort of represented debt, right, like a dollar represents I think in the first instance, it's it's you know, the dollar in my beap accunting is like a dollar the bank owes me. And in theory,

like every dollar kind of works that way. Every dollar is a is a debt obligation, and you know, broadly speak king philosophically speaking, a dollar sort of represents the obligation of somebody else in society to do one dollars worth of work for you. Bitcoin is like a little different because it's because no bitcoins are debts, right, Like bitcoins exist on their own. They're not like a leisure entry at a bank where the bank has to give

you a bitcoin. It's just its own thing. But like, yeah, like in theory, a bitcoin is the same sort of thing where it's like a claim on you know, on resources and someone doing something for you in the future, where like if I give you a bitcoin, you'll do you know, seventeen thousand dollars worth of you know, journalism

for me or whatever. Right, and uh not everyone accepts that, right, Like a lot of people don't want to be hidden bitcoin for you know, often for good reasons, but like there's still enough of a sort of exchange mechanism where like, if I have a bitcoin, I can sort of count on getting you know, seventeen thousand dollars worth of sandwiches for it at some point in the future. My conversation with Matt Living continues after the break, I thought that

it's one currency that they can really not duplicate. I set up a coin based account and then decided that I couldn't be asked to get my ID documents because I thought the whole point of crypto is it's anonymous. Well, it's supposed to be unhappable, uh and out of the hands of centralized authorities, and that's one of the selling points. These cryptocurrencies uprate and are able to operate because people trust the system is valid and they believe that it

will continue to be valid, that the system works. And yet it's under attack a lot, like people lose bitcoin, people hack it, uh, and and it fails quite a bit. I would dry a distinction there. So there are like crypto protocols of which you know, Bitcoin is the most famous, and I don't think that a real bitcoin booster would say that you need to trust in the protocol, right, and the idea of it kind of that the protocol is all open source software, you can see how it runs.

The ledger is all you know, open and transparent. It's all cryptographically encoded in a way that you can prove that you own a bitcoin essentially, and so you sort of have to trust that the system will continue operating well. And like the reason you would trust that is because of essentially like economic incentives that are built into the open protocol. But compared to anything else in your life,

it is a relatively low trust thing. It's a it's a system where you don't really have to take things on faith, where you can kind of like read the code yourself, read the blockchain yourself, and be really really satisfy yourself to a pretty high to greet of certainty that everything is working as that's supposed to. And so, like you know, people in the cryptor world often are sort of philosophically opposed to trust. They say, we don't want to trust banks, We don't wanta have to trust anyone.

You want to be able to trust our own eyes, objective evidence on like the code, you know, and like that kind of works like more or less like with a lot of exceptions, but like Bitcoin has not been hacked, right, Like the one has ever hacked the bitcoin blockchain. Some of the protocols have been like smart counting. There's like they're hacking kind of thing. Blockchain is basically it's court.

It's like a list of transactions, and it's a list of transactions that's maintained in a way where everyone in the bitcoin community kind of agrees on the list, and there is a timestamp, like cryptographically timestamp, so you know which transactions happened when, and it's all you know, the word that they use is immutable, right, It's like no

one can mess with the list. But the thing that is more sellient right now is that it turns out that a lot of people in crypto don't actually really follow all these like all these prescriptions that you shouldn't trust anyone, right, Like a lot of people in crypto are like, Okay, bitcoin goes up, I'd like to buy bitcoin.

It's the easiest way to buy a bitcoin. And the easiest way to buy bitcoin is like there's some website where you go and you put in your credit card and they'll give you some bitcoin, and when they do that, like you're not like, that's not the blockchain, that's not you know, you're not like reading the code, like they're just holding the bitcoin for you, and they've got like

a little spreadsheet that says we owe you one bitcoin. Right, it's just like a bank, except that it's totally unregulated and often much more poorly run than than an actual bank.

And so most of the scandals and not all, and there are some that are like more in the decentralized space, but most of the scandals are in what crypto people call centralized finance, where instead of like buying a bitcoin on the blockchain and checking the coode, you like essentially have some company with a website where they owe you a bitcoin, and when that happens, the odds of them

stealing or losing your bitcround are like shockingly high. Right exchanges like the sort of term of art that people use for these companies that will sell you a bit crnd, they're like they sort of work like stock exchanges, but not they're not exactly the same as real stock exchanges. Over and over again we see crypto exchanges get hacked or lose the money in in sort of dumb ways

or um steal the money. Well, speaking of stealing the money, not long after you wrote your big piece on crypto, we saw a very big event having to do with one of the biggest players in the crypto space. Can you talk about exactly what happened in what effect that his head? And of course I'm just talking about Sam Bankman Free, I should say I don't know exactly what happened.

I can. I can give you like a fair amount of detail that I'm pretty confident in, but but we're still like not quite all the way there I knowing exactly what happened. But the basic story is that Sam Bankman Freed is this sort of charismatic young crypto billionaire who ran an exchange, one of these companies that you know, takes your credit card and gives you a bitcoin, an exchange called ft X. And he also, like he started that exchange, he would previously run this trading firm called Alameda,

like a hedgeho on. Basically that traded crypto. I made a lot of money. And the origin story of f TX is like they were like, we are good at trading bitcoin and making a lot of money, but we we would rather trade on a better exchange. We need like a better user interface on the exchange. We need to trust the exchange more. So they started their own exchange and it became one of the biggest crypto exchanges.

It was based on the Palmers. It was sort of known for being you know, a good like good user interface, high tech exchange. Sam Bankman Freed or SPF as everyone calls him, sort of became a media figure and like was and and a and a figure of he like he testified before Congress and he was very involved in lobbying for crypto regulation, and so ftix definitely created this impression that it was a well regulated where like regulatory friendly,

sort of upstanding exchange. And then it came out one day that they had just taken all the customer money and that was the end of fd X. Like they sort of, you know, the CEO of a rival exchange tweeted something mean about the customers started with throwing money, and SPF took to Twitter and it was like, everything's fine, we have plenty of money. And then like the next day they halted withdrawals and then like two days later

they filed for bankruptcy. And it turns out that there is something like an eight billion dollar hole in their balance sheet where they took money from customers and forgot about it, allegedly and gave it to Alameda, the trading firm, which then allegedly lost it or spent it on like effective altruism projects and venture capital investments and bar tabs at the Margaritaville resort in the Bahamas. So it's a

really bad story. You know, in broad strokes, that similar to running like a stock brokerage or uh financial brokerage firm and just taking all the customer money and using it for yourself, except that instead of stocks and bombs, they're trading cryptocurrencies. Back in April, you actually put that question to Sam Bankman Freed himself on an episode of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, like you're just like, well, I'm

in the ponzi business and it's pretty good. So on the one hand, I think that's a pretty reasonable response. But let me play around with this a little bit, right, because that's one framing of this, and I think there's like a sort of depressing amount of ablidity. I should say here that on Tuesday, Sam Bankman Freed pleaded not guilty to charges that he cheated his investors. There's nothing you know, block chaining about it. There's nothing decentralized about it.

For the most part, As I said, like a lot of people are not in crypto because they are extremely adept technologists who are reading the source code and like reviewing the cryptography of the blockchain and and are making

themselves confident that everything is upstanding, right. A lot of people in crypto because they think it'll go up, or because they have some sort of like basic philosophical commitment to it where they think it's like a cool thing to decentralized finance or like you know, unregulated remittances or whatever. But in practice they just want to put their money at a company they trust. And f t X was like really high on the list of companies people trusted.

It was a really big exchange. It set itself up as being like one of the more regulatory friendly, trying to make crypto, you know, more mainstream and normal and regulated. It Also, like this summer, a lot of other crypto projects ran into a lot of trouble and f t X or Sam bankman Fried was kind of there to bail them all out, you know, people called him Jpeg Morgan. He was like the the the Jp Morgan of crypto finance,

like rescuing all of the worst projects. And so when f t X imploded through what seems to be a lot of fraud and also a lot of like really inept management and like bad accounting and bad risk management that happened, it really shook a lot of people's trust, not in like crypto as like a concept, but in

the actual existing, you know, crypto system. Right now, you're like, yeah, everything is really, you know, kind of kind of sketchy, and that doesn't like undermine the technological case for decentralized finance, but it does undermine like the chances that black Rock and Vanguard are going to invest a lot of client money into crypto because just like the whole space just looks a little bit sketchier, right, Like whether whether or not any particular like custodian or blockchain has anything to

do with any of this. If your priors were like crypto is kind of sketchy, but getting more mainstream, like that's taken a step back now it's like crypto like it's still pretty sketchy, you know, Like in my crypto story, I wrote that it used to be that the fate of every crypto exchange was the stale customers money, because for years and years and years and years, if there was like the biggest crypto exchange, it eventually vanished in

a scandal. And then, you know, as I was doing this crypto pieces like that's kind of stopped happening, Like that's that's not really true anymore, because there's a lot of money in crypto exchanges, and you know, like you should run it legitimately because you can be a billionaire, Like there's so much money, you don't need to steal it. Since fd X employed a number of the biggest, highest profile we're gonna move to the black chain projects have

just been like, okay, we're done. We're not doing it. Like the Australian Stock Exchange, it was like we're gonna move to the black chain there again, never mind, we're not doing that. So just like the whole mainstreaming of crypto has taken a step back because of this like very mainstream looking crypto exchange turning out to be a fraud. So I'm on the fence as to whether he's like a body or whether ah, he is just kind of some clef guy. He's got a bit caught up in

his own success. I think it was a fiasco, but I think that crypto and the blockchain system is fair to stay. I know that not the crypto itself, but the technology behind it, which is blockchain, is the future of the of the world. When we come back the government unders a crypto crackdown. Do you think that Western regulates is now trying to finally kill it or do you see a future in it where governments except it's here for the long run. What's going to happen with

crypto in the future. Given the current downturn in the market, Matt In the aftermath of the ft X collapse, we've seen increased interest in crypto from the US government, which has struggled over how to regulate it. The CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, thinks it should oversee crypto. The SEC, the Security Exchange Commission, which regulates the stock market, says no, no no, no no, Crypto should be treated more like a stock and the SEC especially is taking this very hard line.

The chairman, Gary Ginstler is called crypto wild West. And then of course there's Congress. Do you think what's happening now gives the government more leverage to clamp down on crypto in the way they have been before, and do they really want to do that? I think it's really hard because I think that a lot of people at U S regulators and outside of US regulators would say that this is proof that crypto is bad and regulating

crypto is bad. In other words, like there are a lot of places that regulate crypto, and when those places regulate crypto, they tend to write regulations that are influenced by crypto lobbying, right, And they tend to want to attract crypto businesses, and they say, we're going to balance consumer protection versus the desire to like foster this this crypto ecosystem and have a lot of crypto hedge funds

and exchanges located in our jurisdiction. Right. The Bahamas is kind of like that, and the US has a lot of people who think like that. A lot of Congress people think that the CFTC has seemed curious about that. The SEC has had a different view, which is that crypto is entirely crime, and rather than write new regulations that would balance you know, fostering crypto or consumer protection. They will just crack down on upto whenever they see it.

And I don't know, like, I'm not sure that view is correct or that it's been vindicated by the claps of f t X, but it seems vindicated by the claps of ft X, right because f t X was going to the CFTC at having meetings and saying this is how we should regulate crypto, and the CFTC is like, yes,

you're right, you have interesting ideas here. And then you know, Sam Bankmantry was going to Congress and saying this is how we should regulate crypto, and people were like, oh, thanks for the campaign donation and like, you have really good ideas here, and then they would go to SEC

and the like you should all be in jail. And I think there's definitely an argument that that was wrong and that if the SEC had been or if let's a U S regulation generally have been more thoughtful about regulating crypto, you could have like a sort of clear regulatory structure for running crypto exchanges in the US, then more crypto trading would happen in the U S under

that clear regulatory structure. And it wouldn't just go poof in a in a ceo of fraud, right because like like US public companies that are regulated and like examined by regulators. But I think that all in all, the view that is winning out here is that crypto is not really ready for prime time, and that it has been good for the world, that it is still relatively small and relatively isolated from the mainstream financial system and

you know, not where grandmothers put their life savings. And I think that the worry about crypto regulation is like the SEC puts out rule saying here's how you can run a crypto exchange. Then like black Rock and Fidelity do put like ten percent of customer asselets enter crypto, and like banks start borrowing against crypto, and then the next time a crypto exchange explodes, like it takes down

the banking system with it. This has not led to calls for more regulation of crypto, like quite the opposite. It's led to op ed saying we should not regulate crypto and just let it burn, because I think that regulating crypto is a part of mainstreaming and like that's clearly what SPF wanted, right, Like that's why FTX was lobbying for more regulation, because if you get it regulated, it becomes more mainstream and more people will use it

and becomes more integrated with the regular financial system. And then ultimately you could have a situation where, you know, if a crypto exchange goes bankrupt, it will bring down the banking system, and you go to the FED and you say, we need you to prop up this token because otherwise there will be a recession in the banks will collapse. Like I'm not sure that was like exactly what what Sam bankmun Food was thinking, but it's a

kind of like the worry about regulation of crypto. And so the other reason is that there's not been calls for a clear regulation of crypto is like, you know, everyone who was writing those regulations is incredibly tainted by the ft X claps. Like all of the thought about crypto regulation has been like to some extent, driven by crypto frames because they want that regulation. And so if you're a congress person who was sponsoring a bill that like was you know, advised by ft X, you're not

talking about that anymore. And what kind of regulation was Sam Bang been freeing? Other people who were lobbying for regulation, What did they want that regulation to look like. The main thing is that people had a preference that crypto

would be regulated by the FTC. They wanted crypto to be treated as a commodity rather than a security, because it's easier to do disclosure about that, it's easier to start an exchange, and there's just the view that the CFTC is more crypto friendly Sam Bankman Freed in particular, had a lot of ideas about the mechanics of how to run a futurist trading platform and how to like do margin calls that seemed sort of technical when he proposed them, and like you know, talked about them in public,

and then they actually dovetailed very nicely with how his exchange collapsed. Basically, he had all these ideas about like automated risk management in a way that would make it impossible for an exchange of the collapse, and then he wasn't doing those things at all. So there's a lot about like sort of technical arguation details of regulation. But it's just like if the CFTC passes some technical regulations about how to run a crypto exchange, it doesn't matter

what the details are. What matters that the CFTC is that you can run a crypto exchange, right, even a crypto future ex change. There are crypto exchanges in the US, but they offer a relatively narrow suite of products compared to what ft actually offering. And even so they are you know, coin Base is the main one, like the

big US. You know, it's a public company. It also tries to be you know, good, a good citizen, but it offers trading and a lot of cryptocurrencies and the sec things that a lot of them are securities and that it's illegal to offer that trading with that registering, the securities exchangion, so stuff like that about clarity around what's the security and who regulates it and if cryptocurrencies are securities, like what you need to disclose in order

to trade them. Those are the sort of main things that people want. But it's it's really you know, it's like it almost doesn't matter. What matters is like the regulations exist so that you know, it's kind of like once the regulations exists, you can work with anything. But like you need a regulation that says somehow you can buy crypto, right, and then how you buy it doesn't

it almost doesn't matter. You see a lot of people describing what's happening right now as a crypto winter, where things are looking pretty cold and bleak when you look down the road. I don't know, a couple of years from now, five years, even ten years from no, what does crypto look like. Does it survive and thrive, does

it become something different? I don't know. It's really hard because I think the two sort of avenues for for it to work are one is like the more like the commitment to more decentralized, you know, less trusting world where it's like no, no, seriously, guys, this time we need to make use of the innovations that crypto has offered to stop getting hacked all the time, to stop having people steal our money all the time, right, Like, crypto is a way to have your money in a

way that you're not trusting any central intermediaries and it can't be stolen from you. And you know, in practice, crypto justst is about getting your money stolen over and over again. So I think that like it is certainly the case that like overall this year, a lot of centralized intermediaries have all imploded in a way that makes you think you shouldn't trust the people who around them

that like defy. The decentralized finance ecosystem has like held up pretty well, so when people think, like, instead of going to an exchange that is like a company with a website that will take your money, we should use like the blockchain technology to build exchanges that kind of run on their own and are transparent. That pitch attracted a lot of people in crypto a year ago because people in crypto are philosophically disposed to think that's good.

But it's much more attractive relatively speaking now because again it turns out you can't trust the centralized exchanges. So that's one avenue is like the decentralization of crypto really becomes more important, and people build like usable interfaces for that so that you don't have to be a computer scientist to kind of use a lot of decentralized crypto applications.

The other one is regulation. Right enough, people say you know there is something worth saving here, we're gonna make it so that, like US regulated exchanges are very trustworthy, and then we're gonna have audits and we're going to have some sort of like prudential supervisory authority checking you out and making sure that you're not just stealing your customers money, and that that felt very likely to me

six months ago. The less push for that now, but I'm not I don't think it's impossible that that will come back, and then that will be the sort of solution here, Matt Lavin, thanks for talking to me today. Thank you. You can read Matt Levine's brilliant crypto story for Business Week at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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I'm West Casova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take. H