In their "Money Explained" series, Netflix contributes to the "crypto is a scam" narrative, without bothering to give a basic explanation of what crypto actually is.

A couple of edits in response to some frequent comments I've been seeing:

• This post is about the "Money Explained" series, which has five episodes that are (kind of) about money. This is different than the cryptocurrency episode in the regular "Explained" series (season 1, Episode 15).
• The point of my post was not to say "there are no crypto scams and Netflix is lying". Nor was it to say "Netflix says all cryptocurrencies are scams". My point was that, over the course of the series, there we plenty of opportunities to mention crypto in a neutral/positive way, but they only came up in the same breath as scams. This to me seems like unfair representation, especially for a show that was supposed to explain money.

TLDR: Netflix portrayed crypto as pump and dumps and Ponzi schemes, without showing the legit side or even explaining what crypto is.

Today I watched Netflix's "Money Explained" docu-series. The Bitcoin logo was on the thumbnail so I was intrigued. Turns out that was just clever targeted advertising.

Of the five episodes in the series, crypto was only mentioned in one, "Get Rich Quick". The episode covered various types of scams and mentioned crypto on two occasions:

The first was as an example for a pump and dump. They introduced the concept of a pump and dump, then said something like "this happens a lot with cryptocurrencies". Then they displayed two newspaper articles with the words "Cryptocurrency" and "Bitcoin" highlighted. I thought this was laughable for two reasons: first of all, pump and dumps existed well before cryptocurrency. I remember watching Jerry Orbach talk about a pump and dump in a 1990s Law and Order episode. Secondly, if you're going to try and disgrace crypto as a giant pump and dump, why would you use Bitcoin as an example? Fools.

Then they covered Ponzi Schemes. To be fair, the scope of Ponzi schemes that they covered was a bit broader, but they still zeroed in on Bitconnect and Onecoin to really drive the point home. The only positive thing I can say about the episode (wrt crypto) was that they included Carlos Matos' "BITCONNNNEEEECCCCTTTTTT", so that was cool I guess. I'm not denying that these are scams, I'm just saying they didn't make any effort to show the legit side of crypto.

All told, they portrayed crypto in a very negative light, and didn't bother to explain crypto at all. They just used it as an example for various scams. In fact, for a series that was supposed to be about money, they didn't talk about actually money all that much.