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 Friday, August 1st, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. 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. All right, friends, back with another Friday 5.

And boy, if last week was a little slow for summer, this week was absolutely not.

We had a ton to talk about, but by far the most significant part of this.

And you'll see it's kind of the main thing we talk about, even though there's four or five other things as well, is this speech from the new SEC chair about not only

crypto, but the security system in America more broadly. It's a really good one, so without any

further ado, let's dive in. Price action may be muted at the moment, but the news cycle certainly

isn't. We have another Friday 5 or we could do Friday 12. I like it. Yeah,

I think last week I said it was the first one that felt like summer and the week responded in

kind. Yeah, they came right back at you with like 15 stories to parse. But we're going to start

with, I think, all things, U.S. government as usual.

I almost forgot this even happened this week.

By the time we got Project Crypto, I forgot about the White House report we were waiting for for 180 days.

But obviously we did get that report, 160 pages of, I'll go ahead and say, word salad,

reaffirming a lot of things that we already knew, but still good to see on paper.

But I think the most notable part of that was what wasn't there. And that was an accounting

of how much Bitcoin, the United States government holds. Bo Hines, of course, did follow up in an

interview saying, hey, man, that's coming and you're going to love it. But it wasn't in the report. What's going on here? I don't know. I mean, I'm kind of in the camp of lull at us just finding something new to complain about. Like, first of all, at what point did it become completely consensus that the U.S. government had to own Bitcoin for it to be good for us? Like, zoom back five years, and this was not on anyone's agenda. Like, it was symbolic for a while of the engagement that this particular administration was going to have with the U.S. government. But, like, we don't need the U.S. government to buy our backs. The whole point is to have a system of money that's outside the system. We're already dealing with a bunch of system overlap. So one, there are still people out there who are sort of screaming in the wilderness about whether to even care about this or not. It sort of feels to me at this point, like, any time this becomes the thing that we're complaining about, it's just because everything else is going well. So you've got to fixate on the next thing. I don't know, man I don't think it matters, even a little bit. I don't care if the U.S. government sold all

its damn Bitcoin. Who cares? There are plenty of people out there who want it. Anyone who doesn't

want it sucks for them. It's kind of my feeling. Now, I don't think that there was anything

huge in here. So to some extent, like, I don't think it's unreasonable for people to focus on what wasn't there just because there wasn't, frankly,

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