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 Monday, July 22nd, and today we are talking about Biden being

out for president. Doesn't mean anything for crypto at all. A little bit of a preview for the

Bitcoin conference. It's all happening. 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 slash breakdown pod. All right, so we're going to kick off today, guys, with the briefest

overview of the Biden news and move as fast as we can into whether it has any implications for

crypto. But TLDR, after weeks of speculation, President

Joe Biden has withdrawn his candidacy for this year's election. In a letter he tweeted out, he wrote,

I believe it is in the best interest of my party and my country for me to stand down and to focus

solely on my duties as president for the rest of my term. Now, the Democratic National Convention

will be held next month in Chicago, and at this stage, it seems a little up in the air how it will run. There were plans to hold an early vote among delegates appointing

the candidate before the convention begins. This plan seemed to be mostly about avoiding an open

convention to minimize the risk of a delegate revolt against Biden. With that consideration

no longer relevant, the prospects of an open convention are rising if no consensus forms in the

next few weeks. As the Washington Post wrote, the potential for chaos is high and the time is short.

This would be the first open Democratic convention since 1968, when the deeply unpopular

incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew his candidacy partway through the primaries.

Matthew Pines, the National Security Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy

Institute, pointed out how fraught this deviation from the usual process can be, tweeting,

...