Crypto isn’t a scam … people are

There is a problem with the way we talk about cryptocurrency. Every time there is a major fraud, hack, Ponzi scheme or spectacular collapse involving crypto, the headlines quickly become another indictment of cryptocurrency itself: crypto is a scam; bitcoin is for criminals; digital currencies are dangerous … the whole thing should be shut down.

The problem is that this confuses the asset with the activity.

Cryptocurrency itself is just a tradeable asset in the same way we think of assets like gold, property and the US dollar … it’s just done digitally rather than physically. bitcoin, ETH and thousands of other digital assets can be bought, sold, held and transferred digitally, globally, immediately in real-time.

Some are used for payments. Some provide access to networks and applications. Some are treated as investments. Some are little more than speculative bets. Some will probably disappear completely. None of that makes any of them fraudulent.

If I buy Bitcoin for $100,000 and its price falls to $50,000, I have not been scammed. I made an investment and lost money. That happens every day in every financial market. Shares collapse, bonds default, property prices fall, currencies devalue, commodities crash. We do not then conclude that the existence of a lost investment proves that the entire asset class is criminal.

A scam is something different.

If I tell you to give me $100,000 because I have a secret cryptocurrency trading strategy that guarantees a return of 20% a month, and I simply take your money, that is fraud. If I create a token, secretly control most of its supply, promote it aggressively, drive up the price and dump my holdings onto unsuspecting buyers, there may be fraud and market manipulation involved. If I create a fake cryptocurrency exchange and persuade customers to deposit assets that I then steal, the problem is not cryptocurrency. The problem is that I am a thief.

That distinction matters because we accuse cryptocurrency of fraud and scams and yet do not apply the same logic to traditional money.

Criminals use dollars; drug dealers use euros; fraudsters ask victims to transfer pounds; money launderers use banks; corrupt politicians own property. Organised crime has spent decades moving money through shell companies, offshore jurisdictions, casinos, trade finance and perfectly legitimate financial institutions. Nobody seriously argues that the dollar should therefore be banned because criminals use dollars.

Yet cryptocurrency is regularly judged by a different standard.

There is a reason for this which is that crypto is new, complicated and poorly understood by most of the population. It is global, digital and often operates outside the traditional institutions people associate with financial security. It has also attracted enormous amounts of speculative money and produced extraordinary fortunes almost overnight. Whenever you combine complexity, money, greed and the possibility of getting rich quickly, criminals will arrive.

In fact, this is not particularly new either.

The technology changes, but the scam remains remarkably familiar.

Charles Ponzi did not trade in bitcoins. Bernie Madoff did not need blockchain. Boiler-room fraudsters did not need stablecoins. The basic architecture of financial fraud has existed for centuries because it exploits something far older than cryptocurrency. It exploits human trust, which happens to be the theme of my latest book Diary of a Ponzi Scheme.

The fraudster does not begin by selling you an asset. The fraudster begins by selling you a story.

They tell you that they know something other people do not know. They show you extraordinary returns. They introduce you to other people who appear to be making money. They create urgency because the opportunity will disappear. They make you feel clever for discovering it and foolish if you question it. Then, once you trust them, you give them your money.

Crypto simply gives that ancient behaviour a new wrapper.

What has changed dramatically, however, is who now considers cryptocurrency to be a legitimate investable asset. One of the strongest arguments against dismissing the entire crypto market as a scam is not coming from the crypto evangelists. It is coming from some of the people and institutions that spent years questioning it.

Take Jamie Dimon.

The JPMorgan chief executive has been one of Bitcoin’s most famous critics. He remains deeply sceptical of it personally, particularly because of its association with leverage, money laundering and criminal activity. Yet JPMorgan’s commercial position is considerably more nuanced than Dimon’s personal opinion. In 2025, Dimon said JPMorgan would allow clients to buy bitcoins and show those holdings on client statements, while the bank continues deploying blockchain through Kinexys for areas including repo, data sharing and correspondent banking.

That is an extraordinary transition when you think about it. One of the world’s most powerful bankers does not have to like Bitcoin to recognise that his customers regard it as an asset they want to own. There is a profound difference between saying I don’t believe in this investment and saying this investment is illegitimate. Traditional finance is increasingly making precisely that distinction.

Then look at BlackRock.

Larry Fink was hardly born a Bitcoin evangelist either. He has openly acknowledged that his thinking changed as he learned more about cryptocurrency. BlackRock subsequently launched its iShares Bitcoin Trust, IBIT, giving investors exposure to Bitcoin through a conventional exchange-traded product rather than requiring them to manage wallets and custody themselves. By 8 September 2026, BlackRock reported that IBIT held around $61.6 billion in net assets.

This matters far more than another crypto enthusiast predicting that bitcoin is going to the moon. BlackRock is one of the giants of global asset management. When an institution of that scale packages Bitcoin exposure inside the infrastructure of mainstream investment markets, cryptocurrency is no longer sitting outside the financial system shouting at it. It has entered the building.

BlackRock itself now talks about the growing maturity of digital assets. Its 2026 investment outlook noted that $25.2 billion flowed into Bitcoin exchange-traded products during 2025 and discussed how a modest Bitcoin allocation could affect portfolio diversification and risk-adjusted returns.

That does not mean BlackRock is saying everyone should pile into Bitcoin. It means Bitcoin is being analysed using the same language institutional investors use when considering other portfolio assets: allocation, diversification, volatility, return and risk.

That is the real transformation.

Bitcoin does not need Jamie Dimon to love it. It does not need Larry Fink to evangelise about it. It needs financial institutions to recognise that there is sufficient investor demand, market infrastructure, liquidity and regulatory legitimacy for it to be treated as an asset.

That has happened.

It does not make Bitcoin safe. It does not guarantee that its price will rise. It does not make every cryptocurrency legitimate, and it certainly does not eliminate fraud. What it does is make the blanket statement that “crypto is a scam” increasingly difficult to defend.

There is another distinction that is equally important.

Crime involving cryptocurrency does not make cryptocurrency criminal.

Ransomware gangs have demanded payments in bitcoins. Hackers have stolen billions of dollars of digital assets. Criminal organisations have moved funds through cryptocurrency networks. Money launderers have attempted to obscure transactions using digital assets. These are serious issues, and the cryptocurrency industry has had to develop far stronger controls around custody, identity, transaction monitoring and financial crime but, once again, cryptocurrency is the instrument being used in the crime but not the crime itself.

A bank robber driving away from a robbery in a BMW does not make BMW a criminal enterprise. A fraudster using an iPhone does not make Apple responsible for fraud. A money launderer transferring dollars does not make the dollar unstable. The relevant question is what the person is doing, not what technology or asset they are using to do it.

This becomes particularly important as cryptocurrency moves deeper into mainstream finance. Crypto investing is increasingly accessible through traditional financial products, and JPMorgan’s own research notes that cryptocurrency-tracking ETFs have created another channel through which ordinary investors participate in the market.

Meanwhile, stablecoins are becoming part of the payments debate.

Banks are experimenting with tokenised deposits. Central banks are exploring digital currencies. Financial institutions are building blockchain infrastructure. The boundary between something called “crypto” and something called “finance” is becoming increasingly difficult to draw.

Perhaps the biggest mistake is therefore to ask whether cryptocurrency is good or bad. That is like asking whether money is good or bad. Money is neither. Money is a mechanism through which human intentions are expressed, and cryptocurrency increasingly performs the same role in a digital environment.

There are bad cryptocurrencies. There are ridiculous cryptocurrencies. There are tokens whose economic purpose is questionable and projects whose valuations make little sense. There are enormous speculative risks. There are fraudsters, hackers, manipulators and criminals operating throughout the ecosystem … but then there are also legitimate investors, developers, institutions, businesses and ordinary people using digital assets perfectly legally.

Those realities can exist at the same time whether it be cryptocurrencies, national currencies or digital currencies. It is just the way it is.