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 produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, June 1st. Welcome to Summer. And today we are revisiting one of the fuds that has been

with us throughout this year, the idea that governments will ban Bitcoin. And we're going to read

some tea leaves from the U.S. to see how

that might be playing out here. Before that, though, I'm not going to do a full brief, but I did

have one quick update that I wanted to share. Some number of weeks ago now, Marathon aroused the

ire of the Bitcoin community with their announcement of something they called OFAC compliant

Bitcoin mining.

OFAC is the Office of Foreign Assets Control. These are the folks that blacklist specific bank

accounts from U.S.-led global payment rails. They have also blacklisted certain Bitcoin

and crypto addresses known to them to be nefarious actors. Stable coins like Tether and

USDC often comply with OFAC blacklists. Marathon took it to another

level, however, with their notion of censoring certain transactions at a protocol level by not

processing transactions from those sanctioned addresses. It's not hard to see how this threatens

the censorship resistance that is one of the central attributes of Bitcoin.

At the time of this announcement, they said, quote, by excluding transactions between nefarious

actors, we can provide investors and regulators with the peace of mind that the Bitcoin we produce

is clean, ethical, and compliant with regulatory standards. Keep in mind, there were no regulatory

standards for this. They were going above and beyond,

if you want to call it that. Bitcoiners were worried about the balkanization and fracture of Bitcoin

...