When it comes to the wild, largely unregulated world of Bitcoin, a documentary about its rise, and how it works, is certainly warranted. Especially at a time when some of the top crypto criminals have been pardoned by a president who has been making its own billions from it.
The new documentary “Unbanked” by David Kuhn and Lauren Sieckmann begins at a surprising place — the recycling truck in New York City, where a collector also drops off info about Bitcoin and suggests those who do business with him pick it up — a kind of street level advocate.
Soon, there is a blast of fast-moving images and sound bites, including interviews from some of crypto’s most enthusiastic proponents, from Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey to former PayPal president David Marcus. Eventually, we think, after all this introductory buzz, things will settle down and there will be an explanation of what all this actually is, how it works, where it came from and how it’s going.
And yet the pulse of the film, as if worried to lose an audience with little attention span, never slows down. A narrator never arrives, and the discussion skips from one talking head to the next, interspersed with visuals that may have little to nothing to do with what’s at hand. There’s a lot of footage of overwater tightrope walkers, for instance.
The camera crews jet off to England, Argentina, Portugal, Nigeria and Ghana and come back with some sell photography and a few instances of its use on the ground in a variety of situations.
The quotes that stick out on “Unbanked,” though, are those that dismiss it, such as “digital gold is no more gold than digital food is food” (possibly because they bolster my own inclinations). There’s no there there, it means nothing.
Its main selling point, it drives home is that it flows internationally easily, is unregulated by government and is as the title says, unbanked. For those with distrust of government and banks — or those who have been burned by past bank practices like redlining — this is all very persuasive.
And legal tender is a stand in for gold which doesn’t necessarily track, right?
On the other hand, few things have seemed as clear a Ponzi scheme as crypto, and nothing in “Unbanked” shakes that impression. When Warren Buffett and other scions of finance pooh-pooh it, they are dismissed for being too old.
Views that question crypto are included, but usually through news footage sound bites from hearings. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a sharp critic but, particularly for its flagrant use in money laundering, drugs and funding terror. Some time is spent for Samantha Messing a “writer and Bitcoin advocate” to write a letter to Sen. Warren to get her to change her mind. I find it hard to believe she’d write it on loose leaf paper with a pen instead of an email, but I suppose it serves the film narrative better.
The predominant tilt toward Bitcoin as a financial savior is so strong, though, it’s as if the film itself were made to convince Warren. (She “did not respond to an interview request for this film,” a title says before the credits. “The door remains open, Senator.”)
“Unbanked” is a directoral debut for David Kuhn, who has worked on several Eugene Jarecki documentaries in various capacities, and Sieckmann, a former nationally-ranked beach volleyball player who is clearly a Bitcoin advocate.
That Bitcoin is derived from tthe work of some cloaked person working under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto puts it in the realm of QAnon, where nobody knows the identity of Q either.
And having Sen. Ted Cruz is the most prominent lawmaker who sits for an interview, decrying the ignorance over cryptocurrency in Washington and extolling a anti-vax truckers strike somewhat funded by Bitcoin donations, doesn’t bolster the argument that much.
The environmental concerns of raising electricity and water are mentioned, but treated as a necessity for security. And one guy is recycling tires to power the plants, so…
The collapse of cryptocurrency’s FTX and jailing of Sam Bankman-Fried is mentioned — but certainly not his pardoning, which came after Trump, once skeptical of cryptocurrency, suddenly found out how much he could make with his own exchange.
The quick cuts constant change of place and subject becomes exhausting but has a cumulative tilt so strong you expect they’ll display a QR code to sign you up right there.
The problem with this fast changing technology is keeping it from being timely. The pardons have come too recently and Trump only appears during the credits vowing to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.”
And the film is getting its wider streaming platform at the end of a month where Bitcoin showed its first monthly loss since 2018.
‘Unbanked” is available on demand at Prime Video, Apple TV, Vimeo and Google.