Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.

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Welcome back to The Breakdown.

It is Wednesday, March 18th, and yesterday, as we discussed on my show with Dan Tapiero,

was a huge day in terms of government announcing stimulus.

President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin basically said that they wanted to go big. And that

meant huge amounts of direct intervention in terms of both saving businesses as well as in terms of

getting money into the hands of regular people. Now, this has had a fascinating effect of blurring

previously unholy alliances when it comes to political positions.

There has been huge blowbacks in terms of the idea of bailing out companies that spent a huge

amount of their cash over the last few years on corporate buybacks. And for a lot of Bitcoiners,

this validates a prophecy that when times got tough, we were going to turn to the government money printing machine to hopefully help.

Now, there are a huge variety of perspectives on what the government should be doing and how.

But on this show, I wanted to have a conversation that wasn't just about the hot takes on that,

although there's plenty of that in the next coming few minutes, but also about what alternatives

are. I asked Bruce Fenton to join as someone who has been both sounding the alarm on coronavirus

for a while, as well as someone who is taking action through open source networks

to address specific problems in the larger context. In his non-corona life, Bruce is the CEO of

Chainstone Labs. He's the founder of the Satoshi Roundtable. But in his corona life, he is leading

the ventilator subgroup of the N-Coronavirus.org

organization, which is an effort of the New England Complex Systems Institute.

So an open source network of scientists and thinkers and lots of different folks from lots of

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