Ever buy a used car only to realize later that you’ve purchased a lemon? That scenario occurs because of information asymmetry between the seller—who knows the car is a lemon—and the buyer who doesn’t. Without transparency, the market assumed that any used car for sale is a lemon, so that drove down the price of good used cars. The good news is that thanks to the Internet, buyers now have access to data that can help them determine if a car is a lemon or a good buy.

In the multibillion-dollar world of cryptocurrencies, information asymmetry is an inescapable and unchecked phenomenon and, unlike in the market for used cars, there is little consumers can currently do about it.

Crypto is founded on information asymmetry to the point that the founder of the cryptocurrency concept, Satoshi Nakamoto, is a fictional character. The anonymous blockchain, the underlying public/private ledger mechanism upon which most cryptocurrencies are based, is kludgy, starkly inefficient, and poorly understood by most people using it.

Crypto mining, the façade upon which the legitimacy of the value of crypto is based, is even less understood by the market and an energy sink to the point where the Chinese government outlawed it. This ban led mining centers to move to libertarian regions of the U.S. such as Texas, Wyoming, and Florida.

That the U.S. should be the epicenter of this economy jives with Stephen Mihm’s thesis that the U.S. evolved thanks to it being a nation of counterfeiters. In essence, the pervasive presence of counterfeit currency in nineteenth-century America was synergistic with the emergence of a capitalist market economy. In Mihm’s thesis, it was “the ghost in the machine” and would not be exorcised until the federal treasury standardized a national currency.

Counterfeit currency reflects information asymmetry in its purest form. At its origin, a creator knows the specie is fake, has no value. The creator’s goal is to convince others that it has value, thus creating the asymmetry of information upon which their source of revenue is based. Mihm posits that we would not have the U.S. economy without that asymmetry. Clearly, we would not have cryptocurrency without that asymmetry.

Just as people without adequate information accept something resembling currency as having value, people without adequate information accept crypto as having value. Lots of people. Intelligent people. So many that an economy has grown around this fictional tale that has borne theoretical value of more than $3 trillion at times. Of course, this asymmetry helps make crypto ideal for obfuscating the finances behind any nefarious or illegal activity in the dictionary and some that haven’t even been defined yet.

With value on that scale comes power. A population of people, both on the creator side and on the holder side, have, in theory, become very wealthy based on this economy. As the New Yorker vividly portrayed recently, they learned early to flex that wealth as political power, representing half of all corporate political contributions this election cycle. The dominant quid pro quo of all that political money is very simply: no regulation, no consumer protection, no problem.

The pro-crypto stakeholders believe that the value of crypto is, in the eyes of the buyer, a way of viewing the concept of supply and demand as if crypto were like any commodity. But what would happen if tomorrow there were a CarFax and Consumer Reports for crypto just like for cars? What would happen if crypto consumers suddenly had access to all the data, the fact-based, objective data that reflect the actual value of any given currency? Would consumers learn if they were buying crypto from convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, fictitious bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto, or Elmer Fudd?

Even a decentralized currency must be based on some accepted market value. If that value is the fantasy of crypto mining, then that value should be translatable into other standards that are comparable to mining platinum or selling iPhones. Some would say that crypto markets reflect that value, but information asymmetry drives those markets. What if the cost of electricity burned by crypto mining represents the only translatable value of a crypto currency? Transparency of data allows investors to decide their respective value for Apple, Inc. stock. Where are those transparent data for crypto?

In that scenario of reduced information asymmetry, would crypto be revealed to be a new economy or not be worth the paper it isn’t printed on? Crypto should welcome sunlight into their business in the form of oversight and regulation, not tilt the political balance in favor of obscurity. Otherwise, they are tacitly admitting their entire market is a lemon.