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, October 16th, and today we are discussing the SEC

deciding not to appeal the grayscale decision. Before we get into that, however, if you are

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to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends, happy Monday. Quite a Monday it was as well.

This morning, everyone was treated to a surprise when a coin telegraph tweet blared that BlackRock

had been approved for a Bitcoin spot ETF. Now, in spite of the Bloomberg

ETF analyst desperately responding asking for sourcing, hundreds of cloud-chasing accounts

retweeted the thing or shared it in their own version, trying, of course, to capture that

breaking news magic on Twitter slash X. Alongside all of these updates, again, all unsourced,

Bitcoin ripped all the way up to $30,000. Around 72 million in short positions was liquidated

along the way, but then Fox reported that BlackRock had officially denied the approval,

and Bitcoin came plummeting back down the other direction.

Now, it is still trading above 28K, which is up about 5% from yesterday, which was itself a

slightly green day, but still, on the way back down, another 31 million in longs was also

liquidated. So you're talking about $100 million of value evaporated in just a few short minutes.

There are so many interpretations of this, and probably many that we'll be talking about

throughout the week. First, how bad the incentives are on X slash Twitter, where you're

rewarded for being the fastest to breaking news, even when it's not real news. Second, how hungry

...