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.

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It is Sunday, February 19th, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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breakdown pod. All right, friends, well today we are really picking up on the theme of 2023 so far,

which is, as it turns out, not just fallout from FTX, but specifically the emergence of a

dramatic regulatory battle around crypto in the United States.

I think many of us felt that this was inevitable coming off of the events of last year,

but it is playing out in very specific ways which I think demand specific responses.

We're going to read one essay and a couple of threads today,

and we start with a piece by Michael Casey from Coindesk called Regulating Crypto

By Enforcement and Stealth will set the U.S. back. Michael writes,

Call me naive, but I've always resisted the conspiracy theory that the anti-cryptostance adopted

by certain U.S. regulators is meant to strangle this industry and protect the financial

establishment it seeks to disrupt. I've preferred

to see it as a wrong-headed but well-intended effort to protect consumers. Recent events have me

wondering if something more sinister isn't afoot, and that maybe I am naive. First, all indications

...