I just got back from watching Ben McKenzie's Everyone Is Lying to You for Money where he did an in-person Q&A afterward (he grew up in Austin).

It'll be a big hit with nocoiners. It's well done and sums up the nocoiner zeitgeist extremely well. You don't get it and don't have to because it's all crime and scams anyway. Here's a few scammers, some poorly contextualized events, and my beautiful life as a former heartthrob for proof.

Strangely, I also think it's better for bitcoin than any pro-bitcoin documentary I've seen. When choosing between bitcoin getting lumped in with

1. crypto bank failures and scams
2. crypto bank momentary successes, false promises, and get rich quick hopium

(1) is better for the average person uninterested in personal responsibility. It protects them from scams until they are willing to do their own research. (2), by contrast, hides scams in bitcoin's halo and tends to cause harm.

The documentary is very well made. It is high production value, filled with gotchas, shallow, Michael Moore levels of cynical, misleading for the sake of storytelling (h/t Werner Herzog), and has a great sense of humor. McKenzie did a lot of research to confirm the conclusion he and most people start with. But, he's too pretty and charismatic to do math-like things. The most he can conclude is something bitcoiners agree with: cryptocurrency's banks are even worse than traditional banks.

He uses the word trust a lot in the documentary but can't admit its inevitable uneven distribution. For him, trust is there or not. For him, trusting code, and coders, is like trusting a bank. Such a yuppie that he's typecast as one, McKenzie doesn't understand that nearly everyone on earth has a riskier relationship with banks than he does.

Status is granted to me at a glance and therefore trust. I'm happy to trust institutions given my access to recourse. Trust is the foundation of my life. Isn't it great? Oh, and trust me (which you'll have no trouble with because you remember me from OC), I get it. The system hurt you. But, you sad sack of misguided trash, the solution isn't imbuing money with optional trust. The solution is to regulate the institutions fucking you to death such that they give you the privilege I currently enjoy. That's just, like, never been tried before. I know you have your doubts, but you might not be aware that I'm married to Morena Baccarin.

The right way to make a bitcoin documentary is almost what Ben McKenzie did. Scams need to be addressed exhaustively. Bitcoin not crypto chants aren't enough. The right way to make today's bitcoin documentary is to make an anti-cryptocurrency documentary. If we teach people what not to trust first, we'll earn a chance to teach them about trusting code and markets. Then, and only then imho, they might trust bitcoin.