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 Sunday, December 3rd, and that means it's time, or we are back, better put, with Long Reads Sunday.

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, friends, well, after a few weeks off, we are back with Longreed Sunday.

And today's piece, I think, is a pretty appropriate one, given the time of year and the inherent

reflection kind of period that it represents, as well as in the larger context of the industry.

Of course, 2023 has been, if not a cleanup year, a year to reflect on the excesses and challenges

and outright frauds of 21 and 22, and to think about what we might do differently going

forward. Now, on the flip side, it has been a bananza for regulators and politicians who seek to make their name

by going after this industry. And chief among those is, of course, the SEC's Gary Gensler. However,

Gensler and the administration that he's a part of are coming back up for election. And just as the

end of the year serves as a good time to reflect on everything that has transpired

in the months before, so too is a coming election year a good time to review just how our

elected and unelected leaders have performed. With that in mind, we are reading Ben Schiller's

piece, a politician masquerading as a regulator. Three takeaways from Fortune's Gary Gensler

profile. Ben writes,

It's strange to think now how crypto received Gary Gensler as he became Securities and Exchange

Commission chair in 2021. At the time, he was a breath of fresh air for an industry that badly

needed change. His SEC predecessor, Jay Clayton, had seemed largely disinterested in digital assets,

whereas Gensler had taught courses on blockchain at MIT.

He was supposed to get it.

...