Ben Armstrong is one of a handful of influencers who have gained huge followings by offering advice on cryptocurrency. Critics say it’s a profession riddled with ignorance, conflict and moral hazards.
When the bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius began foundering last month, Ben Armstrong was among the industry personalities leading the online charge against the firm.
Whatever the validity of BitBoy’s advice, there is certainly a lot of it. Armstrong’s daily news show on his YouTube channel is a dizzying list of tokens and jargon-filled tech-speak — “layer-2 rollups on the ethereum blockchain” — all undergirded by the cheerful supposition that there are just so many darn ways to make money out there.
Armstrong describes a dramatic backstory. He was addicted to meth for several years, he said, when one day in 2007 he walked straight into traffic while high and ended up in an altercation with police. After a stay in the hospital, he entered a rehab program for 10 months, eventually getting sober, starting a family and finding work as an addiction counselor.
“I think it’s easy to say, ‘Why would you listen to some stranger on the internet tell you where to put your money?’” said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale University sociologist and physician who wrote “Connected,” a seminal book on the scientific underpinnings of online influence, when asked why so many have flocked to BitBoy.
Armstrong admits he took so-called sponsored content for years but, concluding it eroded his credibility, stopped in January and has not taken a penny since. He estimated that his total haul was “maybe close to a million.” Asked about the investigation, Armstrong pointed to a Twitter thread responding to details on each of the projects. “I answered every single question — I’ve never been involved in a scam,” he said in the interview. But he also sent out a thread later in which he acknowledged that he should have scrutinized some of the projects more closely. He’s learned from his mistakes, he said.
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