The Breakdown

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 almost no mainstream media coverage. 

In this episode, NLW breaks down 4 archetypes of people within the larger debates around the bitcoin halving:

• Speculators - those who flock to Twitter to engage in endless rounds of debate around the efficient market hypothesis and whether the halving is priced in or not
• Fundamentals - those who believe that what matters about the halving isn’t the short-term price movement but the fundamental decrease in supply
• Miners - those who have to actually figure out how to make their business model work in the context of reduced issuance
• Symbologists - those who are focusing on the significance of bitcoin’s issuance reduction coinciding with QE infinity 

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
• Wednesday | The History of the Dollar System From Bretton Woods to QE Infinity, Feat. Luke Gromen
• Thursday | We Don’t Need Big Brother To Beat This Virus
• Friday | 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 Soviet Union taught Yan about capital controls 
• Buying bitcoin at $30 in 2011 
• Why the type of capital available shapes what type of startups entrepreneurs found
• Why venture capitals focused investments away from bitcoin 
• The emergence of a bitcoin only startup scene 
• Starting a startup during the COVID-19 crisis 
• Why bitcoin’s scarcity is its most important property

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 COVID-19, the at-risk people they had been in contact with could be notified. Apple and Google have proposed one plan while a European consortium is working on another. 

At the center of the issue is whether contact tracing can be done in a way that doesn’t violate privacy and doesn’t open a Pandora’s box of new issues around the data governments have on their citizens. 

Today’s episode of The Breakdown explores the crypto community’s response to contact tracing and why we don’t need big brother to beat the virus.

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. 

Luke Gromen is the founder of Forest From The Trees, a macro/thematic research firm. In this episode, Luke provides a TL;DR on those key events that got us to where we are today, including: 

• Bretton Woods and why the world went on a USD-based system rather than Keynes idea for a non-sovereign ‘bancor’ world reserve currency
• The move to the Petrodollar in the 1970s
• The financialization of commodities that started in the 1980s
• The monetary policy vacuum after the Cold War ended
• How a shift in executive compensation rules led to many of today’s problems with Wall Street
• The export of Treasury Bills as a business model
• The fallout of 2008 globally and domestically
• The end of Treasury Bill buying in 2014
• Why the Fed is the only sugar daddy left