Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, June 4th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly

slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, welcome back to another long read Sunday.

This week, we are focusing in on the work of a radically under-heralded writer.

That is Byron Gilliam.

Or Gilliam, if I pronounced it wrong, Byron, I apologize.

Byron is the primary newsletter writer for Blockworks, and pretty consistently

combines Bitcoin crypto and macro in a way that is extremely enjoyable to read. Today, to give

you a little taste of Byron's writing, we're going to do a piece that looks backwards and a piece

that looks forward. We start, of course, with the backwards. The piece is from a newsletter called

Crypto's Family Tree on May 30th, and it kicks off with a Chinese proverb. To forget

one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root. The good news of

crypto's long ancestry. Newsletter readers I've learned are a savvy bunch. So if I were to ask what the first

blockchain was, I'm confident you'd immediately suss it out as a trick question and decline to

answer. Unless that is, you've heard of surety, which offered a blockchain-based timestamping

service for digital documents starting way back in 1995. If, like everyone else, you associate blockchains

with the distributed computing systems that are Bitcoin and Ethereum, you might question how

surety could classify as such. Running algorithms on a decentralized set of computers would have been

...