Hi, my name's David Siegel, and I'm a business reporter for the New York Times.
What I'm going to read to you now is my article about a small town in Argentina
that last summer fell into the grips of a mania.
The people in this town, which is called San Pedro,
started hearing about a crypto exchange where they could invest a few hundred dollars in and get rich.
And for a while, people did.
They bought cars, they bought motorbikes, televisions, and the town was buzzing about this.
This was something of a miracle in Argentina,
a country that has been struggling for decades with extreme hyperinflation.
People in San Pedro were desperate and they were looking for solutions.
So when people started making money,
they asked fewer questions than they probably should have about who's running this exchange or why.
They just were getting lucky.
But a couple of local journalists did start asking questions,
and when they began digging, they feared the worst.
That this crypto exchange in reality was some kind of Ponzi scheme, some kind of fraud,
and that all these people who thought they were making money were in fact, not making money at all.
It was a type of scam that has been used and reproduced hundreds of times around the world.
Think Bernie Madoff, but given a digital age makeover in the form of crypto.
And so these journalists were really in a very peculiar bind,