If your company has created something that is really popular with Chinese gangsters and human traffickers, you ought to reconsider how your company does business.

I'm Bethany McLean.

Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea?

And I'm Luigi Zengalis.

We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

And this is Capital Isn't, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?

And most importantly, what isn't?

We ought to do better by the people that get left behind.

I don't think we shouldn't kill the capital system in the process.

Over the past few years, the world, well, a big portion of it, had been transfixed by the rise and fall, and maybe rise again, of cryptocurrency.

We're recording this just a few days after San Benckman Fried was convicted

in New York, all of which begs the obvious question, is crypto a capital is or a capital isn't,

or something else entirely different? Good question, Luigi. As an aside, my favorite bit of testimony was when

Carolyn Ellison, SBF's sort of girlfriend, said she'd had to prepare seven balance sheets. She said,

he, meaning SBF, suggested I should prepare some alternative ways of presenting the information and

send it to him. And Matt Levine wrote, zero balance sheets is hapless fraud, seven balance sheets

is calculating fraud. I guess the jury agreed. Anyway, SBF, of course, is the public face of the

cryptocurrency industry or bubble or fantasy gone wrong or whatever it is. But it's provided us

with the inspiration we needed to talk about crypto. And while Michael Lewis wrote the book on SBF,

a lot of reviewers have said that the better book is Number Go Up by Zeke folks. Number Go Up is a phrase

in the crypto industry that, as folks puts it, means that the price of Bitcoin will go up because

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