Everyone is Lying to You for Money

A feature documentary of about 90 minutes, directed and narrated by the actor Ben McKenzie (The O.C., Gotham; he has an economics degree), and posted in full on CBC Docs on 16 October 2026. Its premise is that money runs on trust, and crypto is a story that borrows real grievances, chiefly the 2008 bailouts, while the story itself isn’t true. McKenzie plays it as a comedy at his own expense, with family scenes and a friend’s bad stock tip.

He goes looking for the use case. At a Bitcoin conference in Miami he can’t pay for anything in Bitcoin. The Human Rights Foundation’s Alex Gladstein makes the best case he hears: a hedge for people in unstable economies. In El Salvador, which made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021, shops don’t take it. The central bank’s own figure put crypto wallets at about 1.7% of remittances in 2022, and that counts every crypto wallet, not just Bitcoin. “Bitcoin City”, announced in November 2021 at the foot of the Conchagua volcano, is still empty land, and a fisherman says he was moved off his land for an airport for a fraction of its value.

Next come the frauds. At SXSW, Celsius’s staff insist it isn’t a bank and that it has no legal trouble, though New Jersey, Alabama and Texas had acted against it in September 2021. Celsius froze withdrawals in June 2022, and Alex Mashinsky was later sentenced to 12 years. The pseudonymous critic Bitfinex’ed argues that most trading volume is faked. The writer Dan Davies (Lying for Money) explains fraud as a magic trick: a façade, plus time, plus the victim’s own rationalising, and “trust the code” forgets that people write the code. Then FTX. McKenzie interviews Sam Bankman-Fried, who concedes that payments “aren’t working today” and that most people hold crypto as a financial asset. FTX filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022. Bankman-Fried was convicted on all seven counts after about five hours of deliberation and sentenced to 25 years. Kevin O’Leary, who had called crypto a scam, became a paid FTX spokesman for about $15M.

McKenzie testifies at the Senate Banking Committee in December 2022 and calls crypto “the largest Ponzi scheme in history”, one that about 40 million Americans had bought into. The bank failures of March 2023 (Silvergate, then SVB, then Signature, all within five days) are presented as crypto-linked. He co-wrote a book, Easy Money, with Jacob Silverman. His ending is rueful: he was as right as he hoped and it changed little. Believers still believe, and he goes back to acting.