B
en McKenzie began the pandemic like many men in their mid-40s: hunched over a computer screen, late at night, regressing to behaviors that they thought they had left behind in college. While other men rediscovered a love for first-person shooters or map-based strategy games, McKenzie, veteran actor and mainstay on both critically acclaimed and globally famous TV shows, found a vice far more perverse and confusing: he stayed up late thinking about the economy.

Specifically, McKenzie had become obsessed with cryptocurrency — the online infrastructure of alternative forms of money backed by a system of computer code that promised to revolutionize the world, or, failing that, make a lot of people very rich. For months,…