CoinDesk Podcast Network

Guests from the crypto investor Ari Paul to Harvard prof Dr. Vikram Mansharamani discuss bitcoin, the economy and social unrest.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

June 2020 will go down in the history books as an extremely chaotic and confusing period. 

In this “Best of the Month” retrospective, we look at some of the best guest conversations from The Breakdown, including:

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As states shutter economic activity because of preventable COVID-19 outbreaks, it’s deja vu all over again. 

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

This is a movie we’ve seen before:

Rinse, repeat, economy!

This week on The Breakdown:

Monday | Macro Investors Sound Off! Featuring Ari Paul, Spencer Bogart and David Nage

• Some of the smartest investors in the crypto space share how they think the larger macro context is shaping interest in bitcoin and digital assets.

Tuesday | Oil 101: How Easy Money Enabled the Shale Revolution, Feat. Tracy Shuchart

• An oil and commodities expert breaks down how the shale revolution reshaped global energy power and why oil went below $0 earlier this year.

Wednesday | Bull vs. Bear: Who Has the Economy Right?

• From markets to real estate to the dollar to retail, the data on whether the market is recovering or not is hella confused.

Thursday | Is Scam Selling Suppressing the Price of Bitcoin?

• Scam selling, a big win for privacy from Apple, new jobless claims in the “whack-a-mole” economy and the biggest BTC options expiry ever.

Friday | How Monopolies Sow the Seeds of Their Own Destruction, Feat. Tuur Demeester

• The managing partner of Adamant Capital joins for a conversation about what the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution can teach us about bitcoin.

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Today on the Brief:

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Our main discussion: 

Tuur Demeester is the managing partner of Adamant Capital, a bitcoin investment firm that earlier this year published “The Bitcoin Reformation.” 

In this conversation, he and NLW discuss:

Find our guest online:

Twitter: @TuurDemeester

On the web: Adamant Capital

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Today we also look at a big win for privacy from Apple, new jobless claims in the “whack-a-mole” economy and the biggest BTC options expiry ever.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Today’s edition of The Breakdown is an extended version of the Brief, this time covering five topics.

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The economy is nothing if not confounding right now. 

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Across every domain, from real estate to oil to retail, there are bull signals and bear signals. 

In this episode, NLW looks at those signals in the following areas:

What’s the answer? Is this just a narrative mirage recovery? Listen and find out.

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An oil and commodities expert breaks down how the shale revolution reshaped global energy power and why oil went below $0 earlier this year.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Today on the Brief:

Our main conversation:

Tracy Shuchart is an oil- and commodities-focused trader in the private equity space known for her wide-ranging insights on financial Twitter (FinTwit). 

In this conversation, she and NLW discuss:

Find our guest online:

Twitter: @chigrl

On the web: chigrl.com

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Some of the smartest investors in the crypto space share how they think the larger macro context is shaping interest in bitcoin and digital assets.

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Today on the Brief:

Our main conversation:

Earlier this month, Messari hosted the Mainnet virtual summit. At that event, NLW moderated a session called “Macro Investors Sound Off!” featuring BlockTower Capital’s Ari Paul, Blockchain Capital’s Spencer Bogart and Arca’s David Nage. 

The discussion included:

Find our guests online:

Ari Paul: @AriDavidPaul

Spencer Bogart: @CremeDeLaCrypto

David Nage: @DavidJNage

Watch the rest of Messari’s Mainnet 2020 sessions.

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The best Sundays are for long reads and deep conversations. Recently the hosts of the Let's Talk Bitcoin! Show gathered to discuss the big picture problems facing our world which make things like Bitcoin distinctly appealing despite many inefficiencies when compared to traditional, centralized systems.

The episode is sponsored by eToro.com and The Internet of Money Vol. 3

On today's show we're going back to basics. While bitcoin and digital bearer assets in general are an incredibly important technology, the reason they're likely to be important to the future has little to do with the token and everything to do with the context surrounding them: The world we live in every day, where government controlled money is abused for the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the many.  

* * *

"Bitcoin is a way of achieving consensus. And consensus is a way for a bunch of people who may disagree on things to agree to a singular fact that they then execute, so imagine if Congress actually had bipartisan support to unilaterally pass a bill every ten minutes... That's basically what's occurring in Bitcoin.

There's nothing more political than money because money affects everything else, and yet Bitcoin works. I think there's a lot of people looking at trying to reform the governance structures of the places that they're in, what they really should be doing is looking at things like Bitcoin and frameworks using blockchains to say "OK, how can we come to consensus over this or that governance issue of which money would be one... But I think the most transformative and phenomenal thing it'll do is, Nakamoto Consensus and then just blockchain governance writ large is a phenomenal way to have self governance.

We see these breakdowns and these desires to federate cities and the way decisions are made, [but] maybe rather than turning to a government based political solution, a community based solution using something like a blockchain would be something with a lot greater staying power and impact." - Jonathan Mohan

Topics:

Selected excerpts from this week's discussion:

"Money, because it's central to markets, which are central to the ways we organize societies is on of the most powerful technological tools that exists. If you then put the control of that technological tool in the hands of a monopolistic entity of any kind, whether that's facebook libra or the US dollar under the federal reserve or whatever else it is, what happens is that that tool can be used to exert power on the way society is governed and on the way resources are allocated in a non-transparent way that is not subject to political correction or adjustment by democratic means.

And when you take a tool that's that powerful and take it out of the oversight and control of democratic institutions, then it attracts the kinds of sociopaths who want to control that lever of power and they use it to distort the market in their favor. And that's the really dangerous aspect of money, because it's not simply neutral fuel for an economy or some forms of it are not neutral fuel for the economy. I've talked about this in the past as 'Money is a system of control in addition to its function of medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.

And when it can be used more effectively as a system of control, then it starts losing it's utility as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value because it's power as a system of control is so intoxicating and so overpowering that it erases all other uses of it.

And that's exactly what we see. Centralized money is no longer offering useful signaling of value, no longe offering using unit of account measurement, it's not serving as a good store of value and increasingly not as an open, free, highly liquid medium of exchange because it's use as a system of control has overridden all those considerations." - Andreas M. Antonopoulos

* * *

It seems like the past hundred years and the statements made publicly now and in perpetuity is that dollars will always go down and stocks will always go up. So there are fundamentally two types of Americans, those who have their life savings in dollars and those who have it in stocks. And the crazy thing with stocks, unless you're part of the racket every now and then they completely collapse. So even that's a rigged game.

What I like about Bitcoin is it's a way to be a part of neither game. I don't get to insider trade like a congressman, and I also don't have all of my life savings stolen from me because that 3% raise I get every year is completely wiped out by money manipulation. - Jonathan Mohan

* * *

"This entire experiment and civilization [was] founded on the idea that we have a ladder with rungs on it and a reset button. So you fall down the ladder, you hit the reset button and you can start climbing back up it. And every time the government massively overcorrects or disproportionately gives money out into the ecosystem, they're pulling out a rung from the ladder..." - Jonathan Mohan

* * *

"Capitalism without the risk of failure, isn't..." - Andreas M. Antonopoulos

* * *

"One of the most phenomenal things that America did was the idea of bankruptcy. This idea that you could fail and that your family wouldn't be debt slaves to try to repay it. This idea of a serial entrepreneur was kind of invented here because the economic concept of a reset button existed here, and what we're seeing is the death of the reset button and the way they're accomplishing that is by pulling up the rungs of the ladder. So it's a failure on two sides at the same time..." - Jonathan Mohan

Credits

This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine and Jonathan Mohan. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.

Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

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An economic comparison of where boomers were at the same age as millennials leads to only one conclusion: Millennials are screwed. 

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

The big narrative in financial media for the last few weeks has been the insurgent Robinhood rally, led by the AC/DC-blaring Pied Piper Dave Portnoy, owner of Davey Day Trader Global Global (DDTG Global). 

As people try to make sense of the strange retail trading phenomenon, one perspective is the participants (average age of 31 on Robinhood) are reacting to a market that has left them behind. In this view, they are assaulting the market with otherwise outrageous and ludicrous strategies because, otherwise, how will they get their piece? 

This week’s Breakdown Weekly Recap looks at this in the context of some surprising (and frankly depressing) stats about the millennial generation’s current wealth, as compared to where boomers were at the same time in their careers. 

This week on The Breakdown:

Monday | Sorry, Bloomberg: Here Are 6 Reasons Why 2020 Is a Great Year for Bitcoin

• A Bloomberg senior editor today argued there were six reasons why 2020 was bad for bitcoin. Here’s the opposite case.

Tuesday | From Moral Hazard to Business as Usual, Feat. Jesse Felder

• A leading independent financial analysis shares thoughts on the “Robinhood rally,” Fed policy and why Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is already here.

Wednesday | What Satoshi Understood: Nobody Knows You’re a Dog on Social Media, Feat. The Crypto Dog

• A conversation about pseudo-anonymity, global digital nomadism and the trader’s mindset.

Thursday | 6 Things Jobless Claims Tell Us About the State of the Real Economy

• Persistent unemployment and fears of further layoffs are the real economic counterpoint to the financial market’s unbridled enthusiasm.

Friday | Why Monetary Debasement Is Here to Stay, Feat. Dr. Vikram Mansharamani 

• From technology to aging demographics, some of the most important trends shaping the economy have been deflationary. What happens when that rapidly changes?

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From technology to aging demographics, some of the most important trends shaping the economy have been deflationary. What happens when that rapidly changes?

This episode is sponsored by Bitstamp and Ciphertrace.

Today on the Brief:

Our main topic: 

Dr. Vikram Mansharamani is a lecturer at Harvard and author of “Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst” as well as the just released “Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence.” 

In this wide-ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss:

Find our guest online:

Twitter: @mansharamani

Website: Vikram Mansharamani | “THINK FOR YOURSELF”

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