The Breakdown

A daily analysis of macroeconomics, bitcoin, geopolitics and big picture power shifts, hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore @nlw. The Breakdown is part of Blockworks.

Business
Investing
1501
Bitcoin vs. QE Infinity: The 4 Archetypes Of Th...
The bitcoin halving is just two weeks away. While the COVID-19 crisis pushed attention off the momentous event for a while, the discussion is coming back fast and strong. Google searches for the bitcoin halving already exceeding the 2016 peak, despite...
17 min
1502
The Breakdown Weekly Recap | April 25
The full week's content in a single convenient long-run episode. Monday | Bearish or Bullish? What Oil, DeFi Hacks and Cash Hoarding Tell Us About Markets Tuesday | From Proof of Health to UBI: How Everything Changes Post COVID-19, Feat. Joe McCann...
237 min
1503
Why Bitcoin Is Freedom Money, Feat. Yan Pritzker
Yan Pritzker is the CTO and cofounder of Swan Bitcoin, an automated bitcoin only investing app aiming to be the best onramp to bitcoin. He is also the author of Inventing Bitcoin.  On this episode, he and NLW discuss: How immigrating from the...
52 min
1504
We Don’t Need Big Brother To Beat This Virus
One of the key aspects of most plans to reopen the economy is digital contact tracing. This would be an apparatus whereby mobile phones kept track of the other mobile phones they had been physically proximate to, so that if someone were diagnosed with...
19 min
1505
The History of the Dollar System From Bretton W...
QE infinity. Corporate bailouts. Nudging UBI. The incredible economic phenomena going on now didn’t happen out of the blue. They are the byproducts of a key events spread across the 70 year history of the US dollar led global monetary system. ...
76 min
1506
From Proof of Health to UBI: How Everything Cha...
Joe McCann currently works in cloud and AI at Microsoft and has spent decades in tech, crypto, and open source communities. He recently wrote a piece called all about the second and third order effects of Covid-19.  In this conversation, Joe and...
62 min
1507
Bearish or Bullish? What Oil, DeFi Hacks and Ca...
It’s hard to look at recent news from both crypto and traditional markets and not feel like we’re getting pretty mixed signals. Stocks have been recovering, but oil is hitting historic lows. DeFi suffers a major hack over the weekend, but Coinbase...
22 min
1508
The Breakdown Weekly Recap | April 18 2020
The entire week's shows in one convenient episode  Monday | Off Tuesday | The $20,000 Human IPO & 5 Other Stories That Have Nothing to Do With COVID-19 Wednesday | What the Economy Will Look Like 6 Months From Now, Feat. Ryan Selkis Thursday...
135 min
1509
Why Money Is Losing Its Meaning, feat. Jared Di...
Bitcoiners are particularly sensitive to Fed intervention in markets, but the degree to which the Fed is willing to print to backstop basically all risk is drawing the attention of even normal market participants.  On this episode of The...
41 min
1510
Libra vs. China's DCEP? The Battle for the Futu...
This week saw the latest salvos in the battle for the future of money.  Libra announced that it would be moving away from a single currency that was backed by a basket of national currency to a model of numerous individual fiat-pegged currencies....
18 min
1511
What the Economy Will Look Like 6 Months From N...
As week (one million, it seems) of the COVID-19 lockdown plods on, many are wondering what the economy will look like on the other side. Ryan Selkis is the CEO and founder of Messari. He was one of the earliest voices in crypto to sound the alarm on...
49 min
1512
The $20,000 Human IPO & 5 Other Stories That Ha...
Even as the market tries to make sense of everything happen (or ignores it, depending on your perspective), crypto keeps on plugging along.  Today on The Breakdown @NLW looks at 5 recent crypto stories that are representative of larger trends,...
21 min
1513
The Breakdown Weekly Recap | April 11 2020
The full week's episodes in one convenient file: Monday | How Covid-19's Second Order Effects Could Make Humanity Stronger, feat. Emerson Spartz Tuesday | Exit Plans, Premature Rallies and Frontline Heroes feat. Ben Hunt Wednesday | The Questions...
233 min
1514
Quantitative Tightening and 5 Key Questions for...
As we wrap up another crazy week - 6.6m more jobless claims, $2.3T more in stimulus - this episode offers a few key themes and questions for bitcoiners and the crypto-minded to think about over the long Easter weekend: Crypto-dollarization: why money...
16 min
1515
Rebuilding the Resilience Economy feat. Anthony...
As host of the Pomp Podcast, author of the daily Off The Chain newsletter, and founder partner at Morgan Creek Digital Assets, Anthony Pompliano is one of the best known media personalities and investors in the crypto industry.  In this episode,...
53 min
1516
The Questions We're Not Allowed to Ask, Feat. H...
Demetri Kofinas is the host of Hidden Forces, a popular podcast that examines markets through the lens of large patterns of change.    On this episode, Demetri and @NLW discuss: How the politicization of the Coronavirus crisis has...
67 min
1517
Exit Plans, Premature Rallies and Frontline Her...
Epsilon Theory’s Ben Hunt joins for a follow up to our pre-lockdown Covid-19 conversation in early March. In the month since, the markets finally started to take Covid-19 seriously, elected officials stopped calling it just the flu, and big chunks...
36 min
1518
How Covid-19's Second Order Effects Could Make ...
Second order effects are things that happen as unexpected outcomes of something else happening. These effects can create surprising causal chains.  Take this for example: A pandemic makes everyone need to work from home leads to an increase in...
56 min
1519
The Breakdown Weekly Recap | April 4 2020
The full week's episode, in one convenient file. Monday | Bitcoin, Stablecoins, DeFi and Privacy: How COVID-19 is Changing Key Crypto Narratives Tuesday | ‘If You’re Not Radicalized, You’re Not Paying Attention’ Feat. Nic Carter Wednesday |...
177 min
1520
Will DeFi Even Matter In A Post-Corona World? F...
Matt Luongo got his start in bitcoin in 2013. In 2016, he watched a pivotal moment where the sound money, digital gold narrative subsumed the payments use case for bitcoin. While he agreed, ultimately, with the important of bitcoin as a new reserve...
35 min
1521
5 Reasons For Cautious Optimism In Crypto
The economic outlook is grim. The jobless claims keep piling up and even the most intransigent states are shutting down business. There isn’t - yet - a realistic plan - for returning to any sort of economic normalcy.  Yet in this bleak view,...
23 min
1522
How Coronavirus Is Accelerating the End of Glob...
“Some countries just aren’t going to emerge from the Coronavirus.” Peter Zeihan is one of the world’s foremost geopolitical experts. In his new book “Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World,” Zeihan argues that...
50 min
1523
‘If You’re Not Radicalized, You’re Not Paying A...
In this wide-ranging discussion, Castle Island Ventures founding partner and Coin Metrics co-founder Nic Carter joins @NLW to discuss: Why corporations weren’t adequately prepared for any serious economic trouble, much less a global pandemic ...
42 min
1524
Bitcoin, Stablecoins, DeFi and Privacy: How COV...
On January 28th, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal tweeted “Notable overlap on here between the most alarmist people tweeting about the virus and those who are obsessed with the size of the Fed balance sheet.”  There is no doubt that the bitcoin...
21 min
1525
The Breakdown Weekly Recap | March 28 2020
The full week's episode, in one convenient file.  Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | From Corporate Socialism to Dying for the Dow: 7 Themes That Defined the Week  
206 min