Levine (assuming he is not being deliberately dishonest) clearly has no knowledge of history of currency because the thing he calls more impressive is a fairly routine failure mode (even when not a deliberate outcome of a planned scam) of privately-issued currencies, especially but not exclusively those pegged to national currencies, and a not infrequent failure mode of national currencies themselves which both the modern government taking a general monopoly on many forms of such currency and the common structure of independent central banks is designed to mitigate, as in part are securities regulations which affect many currency-like instruments that don't fall into the scope of prohibition of government monopolies.

It occurring in a currency affected by actors acting either outside of or in wilfully defiance of the regulations designed to mitigate it is about as impressive as an unlicensed, untrained, underage, blind, drunk driver managing to get into a collision.