Long Reads Sunday #92
Excitement returns to bitcoin in advance of the halving
Happy Sunday from the Hudson Valley,
For the first time in what feels like a very long time, this week wasn’t (totally) dominated by the COVID conversation. That has less to do with a big shift in the fight against COVID and more to do with the bitcoin halving being right around the corner. On this LRS, we look at that halving excitement.
I’m also thrilled to share the launch of The Breakdown: Money Reimagined. It’s a 4-part narrative documentary style podcast exploring the battle for the future of money. The first episode - “Why The Dollar Has Never Been Stronger Or More Set Up To Fail” - came out Friday.
Happy Long Reads
-NLW
This Week’s Top Bitcoin & Crypto News
A first for Uniswap with the UMA token sale
Ooooops. 87% drop in XRP sales for Ripple in Q1
A16Z announces second massive $515m crypto fund
Tezos is now working with Chainlink for decentralized pricing oracles
Under pressure from the SEC, Telegram offers to return $1.2B in token sales to investors
Binance is launching a mining pool
The Libra Association gets a new member in Checkout.com
Genesis has a massive Q1 with $2B in new loan issuance
Data analytics and trading platform Skew announces $5m venture round
Bummer. Pro-crypto CFTC commissioner Brian Quintenz will not seek another term
Samsung adds Tron dapps to the Galaxy Store.
This week on The Breakdown podcast
Monday | Bitcoin vs. QE Infinity: The 4 Archetypes Of The Halving Debate
Wednesday | When Currencies Fail: A Primer on the Crisis in Lebanon
Thursday | From Corrupt To Broken: An Insider’s Analysis Of The Fed, feat. Danielle DiMartino Booth
Friday | Why The Dollar Has Never Been Stronger Or More Set Up To Fail [Money Reimagined Pt. 1]
As I mentioned above, Friday’s episode kicked off a new documentary microseries. It features contributions from Matthew Graham, Caitlin Long, Scott Melker, Kevin Kelly, Ben Hunt, Luke Gromen, Travis Kling, Mark Yusko, Anthony Pompliano, Jared Dillian, Dave Portnoy, Michael Casey, Preston Pysh, Peter Zeihan.
Our Main Theme: Excitement Returns Around The Halving
When it comes to bitcoin, the last couple months have seen at least as much narrative volatility as actual price volatility.
When bitcoin crashed in early March alongside equities markets, some were quick to call the death of the digital gold or store of value narrative. Even the “uncorrelated” narrative had a hard time passing the sniff test as bitcoin found itself in one of its most correlated periods ever.
Yet as the eye-poppingly sized stimulus bills started to pass, a new (old) narrative started to settle in.
In a nutshell, the contrast between bitcoin and its hard capped supply and fiat and its “unlimited” printing has never been greater.
Interestingly, one of the standard-bearers for the mainstreaming of questions around unlimited money printing is the founder of Barstool Sports.
At the beginning of the week, we also got the latest from Plan B - a third in his series of essays on the Stock-to-Flow model focused on a cross asset analysis.
By the way, here’s a simple tweet storm version of it.
But of course, the real excitement came when the markets started to run. After starting the week hovering around $7700, bitcoin smashed up all the way to $9400 before retracing slightly and hanging out around $8700-$8800. Importantly, this move broke it out of its correlated pattern with the stock market.
Anecdotally, bitcoin Twitter is posting a lot of messages like these suggesting that friends and family are starting to pay attention again.
This should only increase as more mainstream media attention turns back to the bitcoin space.
Check out Mark Yusko’s mic drop moment on the fundamentals
And finish it up with this clip where both the S2F model and the “quantitative hardening” term make it to CNBC.
We know what happens next. The right narrative + number go up brings FOMO and new people. And everytime those people discover that bitcoin hasn’t died again, it gets even more intense.
I’m reminded of these immortal words:
