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 Saturday, May 20th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

A quick note before we dive in, you should, if you are not yet subscribed, subscribe to the breakdown newsletter.

Yes, we have finally resuscitated this thing. It has had fits and starts in the past, but now we are doing something we call first five every weekday

morning. It comes out with the five most interesting, confusing, enraging, or otherwise important

stories in Bitcoin macro and beyond. You can check it out at breakdown.b-be-E-H-I-I-V-com,

and I think you'll enjoy it. Now, every Saturday, I ask what the week before

will be remembered for when it comes to crypto and the larger economy. And to me, there are two

big things that stand out this week. The first is, of course, Ledger. For those of you who

haven't listened to the Ledger episode from earlier this week, the TLDR is that on Tuesday they announced a feature called Ledger Recovery.

Now, Ledger Recovery was a way for people who were maybe new to the space or who were just generally insecure about keeping their own seed phrase on a piece of paper, which is how Ledger normally does things.

This new feature, Ledgerger recover would allow them to effectively

have a backup. And the way that it would work is that the Ledger device would send out a copy of

the Seed phrase split into three parts. It would go to Ledger and two other companies, and the person

would have to use ID verification services to request to have it come back. Now, you might already have spotted some of the issues

here. All of a sudden, a hardware wallet, which is supposed to be a self-sovereign device and totally

outside of the realm of tamperability, has introduced a whole slew of new weaknesses. There's a KYC

and identity verification process. There's these three companies that are involved. But the biggest

thing that had people upset was that in the past, Ledger had made it seem like there was no way

for the device to ever send out a seed phrase, however that seemed to be changing. Because of the

device could copy that seed phrase and then encrypt it to send it out in these three parts,

...