Cryptocurrency has been in the news recently and not in a good way. The chicanery of Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX Exchange now stands in league with other great financial swindles, like Bernie Madoff’s. There are large questions that need to be addressed both about the economic utility of this relatively new asset class and the role that government oversight should play in the regulation of it. To address those issues and all things cryptocurrency is Lee Reiners, the Policy Director of the Duke Financial Economic Center and a lecturing fellow at Duke University. He explains what cryptocurrency is and why in his mind it has a murky future given that it does not perform the common functions of money, as we know it, and its volatility makes it, indeed, risky business.