Bit of a Misstep

I was listening to a recent episode of Slate Money, and Felix Salmon was noting that there still wasn't a particularly compelling use case for Bitcoin. Co-host Elizabeth Spiers immediately chimed in with "money laundering." Mr. Salmon and guest co-host Stacy-Marie Ishmael stepped in with corrections, noting that Bitcoin is a terrible vehicle for money laundering.

While it's a fairly common misconception, I was somewhat surprised that a veteran financial journalist and former analyst would make that sort of error, which requires a fundamental lack of understanding of how blockchains work, and therefore how crypto/digital currencies can even be viable. As an aside, while Mr. Salmon and Ms. Ishmael didn't take the time to explain just why Bitcoin isn't a good money-laundering too, and I felt this was something of a miss, I understand it from the point of view of time-limits on a podcast.

But it's a useful reminder of something that it may be easy to forget when it comes to the news media, even relatively specialized news media; a lot of even narrow-seeming topics still contain vast bodies of knowledge within them, and it's hard to know all of it. While Ms. Spiers error caught me off-guard, in hindsight, it's understandable; cryptocurrencies (not the best name for them, really) aren't something that most people have to deal with very often, so the details aren't always relevant. And one can report on, say, the airline industry without needing a working understanding of how airplanes work, after all.

Part of the thing about trusting the media, or any other sort of informed party, about topics one doesn't know much about is the need to assume that the person presenting the information actually has accurate sources themselves. In this sense, I suspect that the media isn't any more biased than anyone else... because why should journalists be any better about knowing what they don't know than the butcher, baker or candlestick maker?

I get it, however, because it's not always comfortable to have the feeling that one can spend a significant amount of time engaged in learning about the world around one, only to not be use that one knows any more than they did before.