Topic: TV series and Bitcoin: the debunking thread (Read 1006 times)

Yeah I remember Gilfoyle showing his old testing rig saying that he has used it to mine Bitcoin with the GPU. I searched YouTube for that moment but couldn't find a video however I found that gif instead: https://imgur.com/HPN1U79  

But as Silicon Valley is more of a comedy show than a reliable tech program I don't know if there is anything about Bitcoin to debunk there anyways.

By the way Bitcoin was mentioned again on the show and it's about Gilfoyle requesting his paychecks to be paid in cash or Bitcoin and the legality of Bitcoin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqlVU1VWAhw

It was also mentioned in Family Guy.

In Silicon Valley Gilfoyle had a mining operation going on in the garage.

Remember two more series that were mentioned with this one is House of Cards 2 season 2 episode was where it was mentioned about bitcoin and deep web, other is i can say for sure was it original NCIS or NCIS LA where there were also mentioned bitcoin and deep web as well here.

Edit for my previous mentioned for Almost Human it was episode 6 i have then all i just look to see which episode was. And i also think that is was mentioned in Simpsons and South Park but will check this to be sure can say it cuz i cant remember

Will do. Thanks for the idea.

Just to make things clear , you may want to make a changelog like on the Overview of Bitcointalk signatures otherwise people might think is thread is dead or no longer active after a few months/years and It's also easier for people to see what you added without reading the whole thread.

Here in India also TV News channels had started to showcase bitcoin in their news. It's a good news for all of us because in developing country like India we need more technological awareness.

Alright, franky1. I edited OP. Anything more?

OP, Well done on putting in a lot of effort and research into this topic. I have had the same argument at one of our local Bitcoin

meetups and the response to this from the group was basically that these series was sensationalized and not based on facts. The

viewers wants to see Bitcoin as a untraceable medium/currency and this is being pitched to them by mass media. I do not agree with

this and I think people should be educated with the correct facts.. Luckily for us, some people have created documentaries that are

fact based, for example : ‘Bitcoin: The End of Money As We Know It' / 'Life on Bitcoin' / 'The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin' to counter these

myths. Once again.. good point. 

yea.. nothing gencoin code related.. but she did screw up with the BANKING shell game of setting up dummy companies with banks accounts to move funds around bank accounts. she said it was safe against the usual 'authorities' from finding the money.
but hey there is not much you can do to "code" a bank account. so not really a coding error. more so a bad shell game (you know 3 shells/cards on a table and you have to guess where the pearl/queen is after its shuffled around)

she essentially she screwed up with banking, not cryptocurrency..

but sticking with the topic.
the series wasted many episodes on VC investment explanations rather than coding/ showing that the code can be real money by not needing money upfront... kinda lame overall

I must admit that I found that bit weird, too. It looks as if the money is in a bank account and not actually in Gencoin, but Nick does accuse Izzy's code for the security breach that was exploited by Daewon, and she agrees that she is accountable for it by saying that her code is safe "except from Daewon". I can try to find the reference for you. I'll need it at some point anyway. At any rate, it doesn't make sense to accuse her code if the money is on a bank account.

as for the tv series "startup"

the hack the OP refers to is the FIAT funds. in bank accounts. not a cryptocurrency hack, because "gencoin" in the series was not even running/released.. the failure of that series is that all the coin creators are asking for FIAT investments to get started. the stupid thing/myth is that it requires fiat.

if your creating a new money system there is no need for old money. you just create the coin. and sell the coin.. not use fiat just to be able to create it.
if you need old money just to create it..then the new money system has already failed.

Bitcoin was mentioned quite a few times in Almost Human, it was a recurrent thing in that universe and it was once used to buy a bionic heart, also in that future, bitcoin is 'totally untraceable' and people use cool hardware wallets.

Bitcoin was also mentioned a few times in Person of Interest, they made a whole episode of the Ross Ulbricht/Silkroad saga.

CSI Cyber also did bitcoin, but they did everything wrong in that show.

After watching a series/movie/whatever, I personally like to check whether the science in it is reliable or not. I think a lot of people are the same. Thing is: the information can sometimes be hard to find, so people give up easily. But bitcointalk is a very prominent board in the bitcoin community: if you type "bitcoin" in google, this board will surely be amongst the first results. If I type "izombie bitcoin" in google, for instance, this thread is the fourth result. That's easy to find information. So I'd like to make it as documented as possible.

the old image of bitcoin will hardly be forgotten... unfortunately.
probably because of deep web bitcoin is known/shown as a problem in most TV shows i've seen.

You can add here and from Almost Human i just can remember the episode number but it was some hostage ransom or something when they mentioned bitcoin payment as untraceable. Shame was that show was canceled after only 13 episodes and additional 13 never got air

My favourite hacking moment is this one: https://youtu.be/bS5P_LAqiVg?t=9m45s  
I agree. But sometimes people don't recognize it as "made up stuff" as they should. In the above cases they're talking about well-spread stereotypes. My guess is that theses series' creators don't know they're wrong (or at least not entirely true), as they're presenting them as facts. So the result on the population who might already have heard these wrong pieces of information, is that they'll likely believe them.
Well anyway I just want to make a list to post it later on a board of TV series amateurs, so that they can get the true information easily.

@MadGamer: Thanks for your participation. I'll look into it.

Bitcoin was mentioned in The Good Wife for multiple times and It first wasn't that bad : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fazu1rgr9k and Bitcoin wasn't even known that time.
A few years later on the 5th Season , episode 20 . It got mentioned once again and related to Silk road : http://watchseries.cr/series/the-good-wife/season/5/episode/20 , start watching from minutes 5 .

This is my favorite computer moment on a TV show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ

It is very common to see misrepresentations of how stuff works on television, we can criticize shows that try to have a realistic approach and then fail to do so, but many of them are just fiction and you can do whatever you want if you're just making stuff up.

This thread is about criticizing the science behind TV series (because people tend to believe what they're told and misinformation about Bitcoin in TV series can only make people's understanding of it fuzzy, to say the least).
Recently, most of the TV series I've watched, talked about Bitcoin one way or another (I knew before watching Startup and Mr. Robot that they would be partly about Bitcoin but not the others, so I was a bit surprised to see that they were talking about it).
I found that there were a few questionable affirmations regarding Bitcoin, as well as cryptos in general, in most of those series, and I'm rather displeased about it since chances are that people watching them will just take the bullshit information for granted, especially since it's usually already related to already well-spread misinformation regarding not only cryptocurrencies but also cryptography and hacking.
Not that these critics about the information given in said series is not linked to the series' overall quality. iZombie is actually one of my favourite series out there (together with Game of Thrones, that, strangely enough, doesn't talk about Bitcoin, and Breaking Bad, that would probably have, had it been directed starting from 2016).

Some of the mistakes occur recurringly in many series. To avoid repeating always the same stuff I made a category called "recurring misconceptions" at the end of this post. If you read: "See recurring misconceptions n below", you are advised to jump to that section to have a look at the detailed debunking.

Almost Human (source: azguard, undetailed))
Somewhere, someone says that Bitcoin is untraceable.
The truth: See recurring misconceptions 1 below.

The Blacklist (source : myself, undetailed)
I've only watched season 1 and the beginning of season 2 before giving up but I remember Aram, the FBI's computer specialist, used Bitcoin as the last step when he's asked by Reddington to launder money for him.
The truth: See recurring misconceptions 1 below.
In this case if the money was still clearly traceable back to Reddington before it was converted into bitcoins, it was still traceable back to him afterwards. Nothing changed "because it was converted into bitcoins".

iZombie (source: details given below)
(season 2, episode 5):
Agent Babineaux on the phone (25:28): "Ok, I understand that bitcoin is untraceable, but there must be... look, I know what untraceable means... Thanks anyway."
Agent Babineaux to the main character a little later (27:14): "It's a dead end. Whoever made that donation used Bitcoin. Untraceable apparently."
The truth: See recurring misconceptions 1 below.
So, that particular transaction they're talking about might really be impossible to trace back to the person who made it. It's always a possibility. But that's the hard way of using Bitcoin, and definitely not the regular way, contrary to what was implicated in the series.

(Somewhere during season 2)
The antagonist says he now accepts Bitcoin for his illegal brain dealing business.
The truth: That's one of the many possible uses of Bitcoin, just as it's one of the many possible uses of cash. Just as cash, Bitcoin can, and is, actually used for perfectly legitimate transactions. It's also worth noting that given the trouble one has to go through in order to use Bitcoin with an acceptable degree of anonymity, cash is in fact more convenient for illegal businesses.

The Good Wife (thanks MadGamer for bringing this one to my knowledge, all details are given below)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fazu1rgr9k
"Although bills can be lost, stolen or burnt, Bitcoin is here forever".
The truth: Bitcoins can be lost, stolen and burnt, too. If you don't want them to be stolen, hide them well, it should go without saying. If you don't want to lose them, remember where you hid them (that is, remember your passwords, seeds, etc, in most cases). "Burning" bitcoins is a figurative way to say "send them to an unspendable address", and well, if you don't want to do it, then don't do it.

http://watchseries.cr/series/the-good-wife/season/5/episode/20 (season 5, episode 20, I've only watched from 4:50 to 6:20, maybe there's more)
The truth: Bitcoin being traceable doesn't have anything to do with the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox. It was designed this way from the beginning. It doesn't even have anything to do with "law enforcement": anyone with an internet access can trace Bitcoin transactions.

Mr. Robot (source : myself, undetailed)
This one was the most down to earth. If I remember well, the only thing that was said there about Bitcoin was by Philip Price, E-Corp's CEO, and it was basically that governments didn't have control over it and that if they didn't let him issue his own crypto, called Ecoin, they'd lose the war with Bitcoin because it was getting increasingly important and they wouldn't make it disappear just by closing their eyes on it. Philip Price also has a marketing strategy for Ecoin that consists in giving discounts (10% if I remember well) to whoever uses Ecoin for payment, in order to counter Bitcoin's spreading.
The truth: What the man said. There's nothing more to say here. Mr. Robot is usually rather down to earth regarding this sort of technical stuff, anyway.

Startup (source : myself, undetailed)
Now there was a lot of bullshit in this one. Not only regarding Bitcoin and cryptos but also regarding computer stuff (cryptography itself, hacking, etc). I've forgotten most of it, but one thing comes back to mind when I think about it: there's this Taiwanese hacker, Daewon, who's considered the world's best hacker. He manages to hack the bank accounts where the fundings of Gencoin are stored, the coin promoted by the main character, Izzy Morales, which causes one of her friends and co-owners (Gencoin is a private, centralized coin) to get angry and say: "You told me your code was secure", to which Izzy replies "Well, not from Daewon".
The truth: It makes no sense to say that something is safe "but not from one hacker in particular". Such an affirmation not only makes her own fictional crypto, but also Bitcoin and all the other cryptos, look like some magical stuff that you can always hack with more powerful magic while the truth is that you are responsible for your own security. There's nothing such as "100% safety" in the first place (not even for the money you put in the bank or put under the mattress, if you're a bank-enthusiast or a mattress-enthusiast xD ).

Also, they're funding their coin like a company: the code is already there, written, but for some reason they're raising funds in order to publish it.
The truth: It doesn't make sense. If the code is already written you just have to release the coin and let the market do the rest.

Really, I'd have to watch it again and write down every piece of bullshit bit by bit, though.

Recurring misconceptions
1) A lot of series like to insist on the commonly admited fact that Bitcoin is untraceable.
The truth: Bitcoin is not really untraceable. All the transactions are recorded on a public ledger called the Blockchain, and, through the use of various tools, it's actually pretty easy to trace back a transaction, as well as putting an ID on whoever made it. The network in itself doesn't provide you with anonymity but with pseudonymity. It's not completely impossible to use the network in a relatively anonymous way, to a certain extent, but it requires a lot of caution. Regular uses are actually perfectly transparent.

Any feedback? Want to add other series to the list/complete those already listed by giving more detail? The more detail you can give, the more the information can be considered reliable for other people. You're welcome to do so by leaving a message here. Anyone with sources to confirm the debunking is also welcome.
One thing you should know, though, is that this is a self-moderated topic. I will warmly welcome people who disagree with me (or think I'm wrong in this case, since I'm mostly talking about facts) but I won't tolerate paid signature one-line out-of-subject bullshit.

Changelog: