The Breakdown

A single long-form episode with all the week's content + a TL;DR. This week was all about macro frame-setting coming out of Davos. 

• Monday - 4 Reasons Crypto Should Care About Davos
• Tuesday - Gitcoin's Kevin Owocki on Controversy and the Future of Open Source Funding
• Wednesday - Why Vodafone’s Defection Won't Matter For Libra
• Thursday - Will Mass Adoption Be More PayPal or Pornhub?
• Friday - Davos Takeaways, CBDCs & the Rise of Bitcoin Art featuring Brekkie von Bitcoin

A single long-form episode with all the week's content + a TL;DR. This week was all about macro frame-setting coming out of Davos. 

Monday - 4 Reasons Crypto Should Care About Davos

Tuesday - Gitcoin's Kevin Owocki on Controversy and the Future of Open Source Funding

Wednesday - Why Vodafone’s Defection Won't Matter For Libra

Thursday - Will Mass Adoption Be More PayPal or Pornhub?

Friday - Davos Takeaways, CBDCs & the Rise of Bitcoin Art featuring Brekkie von Bitcoin

That’s a wrap! The World Economic Forum is over, and the key ideas coming out of Davos for our industry are: 1) a continued ‘blockchain, not crypto’ narrative; 2) a believe in the inevitability of cashless futures (without much concern about the negative implications); and 3) the rise of CBDCs. 

On the CBDC front, the WEF put out a toolkit for governments that are considering their own currency; Japan announced a project to explore a digital currency as a counterweight to the influence a digital yuan might bring China; and a BIS study says 1 in 10 governments anticipate having a digital currency within 3 years. 

Finally, we close asking prolific bitcoiner and artist Brekkie von Bitcoin about the state of bitcoin art and why even the hardcore financially-minded folks in the space should care.

The word from Davos is blockchain not crypto, cashless futures, and CBDCs, while Brekkie von Bitcoin gives us his take on the emergent field of bitcoin art.

There is an ongoing debate in the crypto community about where mainstream adoption. One point of view is that it will be the slow steady acceptance of digital assets. On that front, Bakkt president Adam White said in Davos yesterday that the company is on track to launch their app this year. 

Another perspective is that the main use case of crypto is to enable otherwise censored transactions. Lending credence to this perspective is the case of Pornhub, which saw payouts to its more than 100,000 performers blocked unexpectedly by PayPal in November, and which announced cash outs via Tether (USDT) today. 

In this episode, @nlw breaks down these two arguments and asks whether they’re mutually exclusive. 

Also discussed is the new BCH mining group (cartel?) insisting on a 12.5% block reward dev fund, as well as interesting insights and data from research from CoinDesk and The Block today.

Bakkt preps consumer app for 2020 launch while Pornhub starts performer payouts in Tether, plus a controversial, obligatory new dev fund in BCH.

News broke yesterday that the Libra Association had seen it’s 8th high profile defection, this time from the telecom giant Vodafone. In today’s episode of the breakdown, @nlw argues that Association members are far less of a factor in Libra’s success than key regulatory questions around domiciling, the value peg, and the US’s fear of a Chinese digital currency. 

Also in this episode, Square Crypto announces its plans for a Lightning Development Kit while Square also announced a new patent that could make crypto easier to use. In regulatory battles, meanwhile, both the Blockchain Association and the Chamber of Digital Commerce have filed amicus briefs around the SEC-Telegram lawsuit.

News broke yesterday that the Libra Association had seen it’s 8th high profile defection, this time from the telecom giant Vodafone. In today’s episode of the breakdown, @nlw argues that Association members are far less of a factor in Libra’s success than key regulatory questions around domiciling, the value peg, and the US’s fear of a Chinese digital currency. Also Square & LN and Telegram gets support in court from blockchain advocacy groups.

Ever since announcing their fourth round of grants, Gitcoin has been a major subject of conversation across the Twittersphere. In addition to all the excited buzz from both technical projects and media creators vying for grants matched based on E. Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin’s quadratic funding model, there has been controversy. Some of that controversy has been from outside the Ethereum community, pointing to Consensys and Ethereum Foundation support as an example of centralization. Some of the controversy has come from within, as debates rage about what is or isn’t an acceptable use of “public” resources. 

No matter what one’s position, it’s hard to deny that Gitcoin is one of the most interesting experiments in open source funding to date. Listen as @nlw askes the projects founder Kevin Owocki about the history of the project, the controversy, and what makes this round of grants such a big jump forward.

The founder of one of crypto’s most buzzed about projects discusses the origins of Gitcoin, controversy, and why open source funding needs to evolve.