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 Thursday, January 29th, and today is the last episode of The Breakdown with me ever.

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.L.Y slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, yes, it is the end of an era. The breakdown will continue, but my watch

has ended. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the show, but as a way to celebrate

the end of this story period, I thought it would be fun to go back and talk about the biggest story

from each of the years of this show, going dangerously close to a decade, all the storied period, I thought it would be fun to go back and talk about the biggest story from

each of the years of this show, going dangerously close to a decade all the way back to

2018.

This was the first year that the proto things that would go on to become the show first started

happening.

In around May of 2018, I started doing a Twitter thread on Sundays called Long Read Sunday,

because at that time, all of the conversation in crypto was happening on Twitter, and it was happening in the form

of threads. That led to me starting to mess around with media, and to eventually a very short-lived

around-the-horn-style interview version of the show that quickly got temporarily put on hold

after the birth of my daughter at the beginning of November.

Now, meanwhile, what was going on with Bitcoin then?

The end of 2017 had, of course, been the first big cycle with mainstream attention.

We had the first pop culture references, the first Bloomberg articles, the first Lambo's with Bitcoin license plates,

and of course the ICO boom, which had everyone's attention.

That Thanksgiving of 2017,

...