Easy Money

McKenzie (yes, the guy from The O.C., who happens to have an economics degree from Virginia) teamed up with veteran tech journalist Jacob Silverman to produce a sustained, angry polemic against the 2021 crypto cycle. The book is unmistakably a polemic — it does not pretend otherwise — and on those terms it lands more often than it misses.

Who it's for

Readers who already suspect crypto is mostly a casino and want a well-written, well-reported confirmation of that suspicion. Also useful for crypto-friendly readers who can tolerate sustained criticism: there are real points here that the rest of the literature mostly elides. Not the place to start if you've never thought about Bitcoin at all.

What it does well

The reporting is stronger than the framing suggests. McKenzie and Silverman attend industry conferences, sit down with SBF before the collapse, interview promoters and victims, and travel to El Salvador to check the actual state of the bitcoin rollout (which they portray, fairly, as more PR than adoption). The chapters on celebrity endorsements — Matt Damon, Larry David, Tom Brady, the FTX Super Bowl ad — are damning in the most useful way: they walk through how the celebrity-fund-flow machine actually worked, on whose advice, and at whose ultimate cost.

The Tether material is also substantive and worth reading even if you end up disagreeing. So is the recurring point that "code is law" was, in practice, a slogan for shifting risk onto retail while sophisticated insiders extracted real dollars. Even sympathetic readers should be able to grant that this happened and matters.

Where it falls short

McKenzie is unapologetically a no-coiner, and the book occasionally argues from that conclusion rather than to it. There is essentially no distinction drawn between Bitcoin and the broader crypto-industrial complex; Lightning, self-custody, the actual mechanics of Bitcoin's monetary policy, and the use cases in authoritarian countries are barely engaged. The book also leans hard on Hindenburg-style "the whole thing is a fraud" arc, which works for FTX and Celsius but doesn't scale.

The tone — wry, indignant, occasionally smug — will charm or alienate depending on your priors. Read it alongside a more sympathetic account and you'll get a much more honest picture than either book alone provides.