BREAKDOWN: ‘America and Sound Money,’ the Most Important Bitcoin Essay of the Last Year
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2021
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A reading of the “Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholder Letter” by Ross Stevens.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
This week’s Long Reads Sunday is a reading of the “Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholder Letter” by Ross Stevens, CEO and co-founder of Stone Ridge Asset Management, discussing the history of America, sound money and Stevens’ bitcoin “aha” moment.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:09.0 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:15.9 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by coin desk. |
| 0:28.3 | What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, January 17th, and that means it's time for Long Reads Sunday, and this one is a doozy. If you're a regular listener, you will have heard me |
| 0:34.3 | talk about Stone Ridge. Stone Ridge is a $10 billion asset manager that in |
| 0:40.0 | 2013, 2014 started to find many of their team getting interested in Bitcoin. As they started exploring, |
| 0:47.5 | learning, and investing, they also saw their clients wanting to get in and get involved with them. |
| 0:52.8 | They found themselves without tools to really do that, |
| 0:55.5 | and so they started to build those tools, and eventually this led to them spinning out their |
| 0:59.2 | own division for Bitcoin custody and institutional investing that's called Nidig. |
| 1:05.0 | Nidig has become one of the quiet giants in the institutional Bitcoin space, with currently |
| 1:10.3 | more than 4 billion assets under |
| 1:12.1 | management. Nighting may best be known so far for facilitating the mass mutual purchase of $100 million |
| 1:18.1 | of Bitcoin, which is a huge indication to the world of how legitimate this asset had become. |
| 1:24.5 | This is a company that is moving extremely quickly. This week, they announced |
| 1:27.8 | the acquisition of digital assets data to build out their data capacity, as well as a partnership |
| 1:32.3 | with banking tech provider move in to power a new generation of banks offering white-labeled |
| 1:37.4 | crypto products. Anyway, their 2020 shareholder letter featured prominently a section on Bitcoin, and this letter has gotten |
| 1:45.7 | huge notice among the investment community. It discusses their journey with the asset and |
| 1:50.7 | arguments for it, and even though it's extremely long, I believe it's well worth it. This is |
| 1:55.8 | written by Stone Ridge CEO and co-founder Ross Stevens, and I hope you enjoy it. |
| 2:06.1 | Shortly before the genius David Foster Wallace died, he delivered a college commencement speech that opens with a beautiful critique of our default setting. |
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