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.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and neared.org and produced and distributed by CoinDest.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, May 2nd, and that means it's time for long read Sunday.

And this week, we have a real treat.

Friend of the show, Ben Hunt, has been on an intellectual journey with Bitcoin over the last

year, really longer, but he's been

especially forced to be because we're jerks and we talk to him all the time about it on Twitter,

and so he kind of had to be. But he's written a new provocative piece called In Praise of Bitcoin,

and rather than give it a bunch of intro, I'm just going to dive in. Thanks Ben for allowing us to

read this

on today's show, and I'll be back in a few minutes to discuss. In praise of Bitcoin.

One evening a few weeks ago, I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of academic think tank and Fed

economists for a Bitcoin discussion. A lot of names you'd know if you're familiar with those

circles, the most famous one being Paul Kroggman, who, by the way, I found to be charming, genuinely open-minded,

and surprisingly humble about the entire enterprise of academic economics. I had been invited to be

on the anti-Bitcoin side of the discussion, but they needn't have bothered, because there was no pro-Bitcoin side. Krugman led with a simple question.

What's the use case for Bitcoin?

Not a theoretical thing, but an actual use of Bitcoin to solve a problem in the real world.

Which led to an hour-long, extremely earnest and altogether unsatisfying conversation about financial transfers out of Venezuela, trade settlement and securitization on a blockchain,

and Taylor's responsibility to control the

scalper resale market for her concert tickets. All of which are real things, all of which are

...