Photo: Jeff Neumann/SHOWTIME
If you’re a fan of the Showtime drama Billions but having a tough time following the current season’s cryptocurrency story lines, you’re not alone. Not only do the actors have trouble keeping up with the series’ twists and turns, even those who work in the financial sector don’t necessarily understand crypto mining, a subject that pops up several times in season five. “Half the people in finance couldn’t explain what mining is to you,” says New York Times best-selling author Ben Mezrich, who joined the Billions writers’ room this season as a consulting producer. “A large percentage of them have no idea, because it’s complex.”
As the writer of Bitcoin Billionaires and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal — the latter of which was adapted into the movie The Social Network — Mezrich is a natural fit for the Billions team. His expert knowledge of cryptocurrency has provided the series with an opportunity to further explore this once-dark, underground area of finance. He also wrote this season’s third episode, which has Gordie Axelrod (Jack Gore), son of billionaire Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis), running his own crypto-mining operation.
From the safety of his home in Quechee, Vermont, where he’s riding out the COVID-19 pandemic, Mezrich was kind enough to guide Vulture through the intricacies of these esoteric plotlines. The result is this useful explainer for those of us who love Billions, but are still lost when characters like Axe and Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) start talking Bitcoin and blockchain.
It’s a form of electronic money that sparked interest in recent years due to its skyrocketing prices. “It’s money that goes instantly from one person to the other, and there’s no middleman,” says Mezrich. A can be sent from person-to-person via their phone, just like a text.
The most well-known example of cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, which was created in 2009. “But there’s almost an infinite amount of cryptos at this point,” says Mezrich.
This is the process of how the money is transferred from person-to-person. Because cryptocurrency doesn’t use banks, miners are the ones who verify each transaction. “Say I send you a Bitcoin,” says Mezrich. “The way that transaction is verified is, miners are working on computers attached to the network, which are doing these mathematical equations. And these equations, when they’re solved, they verify our transaction, and as a reward, the miner gets a certain amount of Bitcoin.”
The process is very much like a contest, because all…
