BitBoy and another less famous Ben are giving crypto a bad name
There’s a scourge of cringe enveloping the crypto industry, and it’s not from multibillion-dollar frauds or scammers building algorithmic stablecoin Ponzi schemes: it’s all down to two dudes named Ben.
One of those Bens — Ben Armstrong, aka BitBoy — has been covered repeatedly by Protos for his antics and faux educational material, but the other Ben — Ben dot Eth — is somebody that the media seems to be intentionally steering clear of. Let’s talk about both, why they’re making waves, and how they’re both terrible for the industry.
First off, Ben dot Eth, a relatively obscure cryptocurrency and NFT proprietor, surfaced in the fetid pond of web3 scammers when he created the ‘$BEN’ token and sold it to BitBoy, a YouTube personality and longtime shill of failed and fraudulent projects.
Read more: So you don’t have to: Watching BitBoy and Trump Jr. talk about crypto
While the $BEN coin seemingly does nothing of value, at the time of writing, it’s still nearing all-time highs (perhaps because BitBoy has suggested it will be sponsored by Stake dot com, a cryptocurrency gambling website, in the future).
Besides the fact that the handover of the token between the two scammers was fraught with issues and concerns — namely that BitBoy promised not to sell any of the tokens for “at least six months” and then sold his tokens within five days of the takeover — Ben dot Eth has moved on to greener, scammier pastures: a token he’s coined $PSYOP.
Simply naming the coin PSYOP worked
It’s an unfortunate testament to the world we live in that by calling the new token $PSYOP, Ben dot Eth caused enough confusion to keep negative news at bay. Anything broken or downright stupid about the tokenomics could be brushed off as a purposeful psychological operation from the creator and his friends, and while millions of dollars worth of crypto poured into the project, media outlets largely refused to cover it because even negative stories were seen as positives by the creator.
Even though the launch was marred by contract issues and many individuals complained of receiving a fraction of the tokens they were promised, the coin has mooned and is still trading near all-time highs. CoinGecko fairly notes that nearly the entire supply of PSYOP is in a wallet controlled by Ben dot Eth.
Making a mockery of an already mocked industry
Ben and Ben have done their best to make a mockery of an industry already mostly known for fraud, scams, rug pulls, and massive failures of exchanges resulting in billions of customer dollars lost. With two obvious scam tokens, Ben dot Eth has still managed to attract millions of dollars from cryptocurrency investors, including those who’ve been involved with the space for years. BitBoy has continued to make a fool of himself at every opportunity — from claiming to have single-handedly brought down FTX and screaming that someone was a bitch at the Bitcoin 2023 Conference, to advertising scams to millions on YouTube.
It’s unfortunate that these two individuals have become the best metaphor for what crypto currently represents, but with no sign that either of them will stop until they’re forced to or can’t milk more cash from naive investors, it’s really up to the media and citizen journalists to call them, their projects, and their endorsements out.
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