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 Friday, February 14th, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. 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, back with another Friday 5.

Milker is back this week, so we had our normal customary Friday morning conversation.

And it's a little weird in the sense that a lot of these stories are not big banner

headline stories.

They're much more B-level kind of in-between stories.

But what is interesting is that all of this stuff is sort of showing off

what the next few months I think are going to be like. We're getting a feel and a flavor for what

the policy discussions are going to look like. We're getting a sense of where institutions' heads

are at. So there's a lot of tea leaves to read here, even if they're more subtle than some of our

normal stories. So with that,

let's dive in. This was a bit of a strange week in crypto, as NLW said to me right before the show,

a lot of B-level stories. But I would make the argument that these would have been A-level stories like a year ago. But now we're so used to huge stories every week that

we're pretty indifferent. Absolutely. I think the other thing is a lot of its in-between

type of things, right? A little hearing that kind of lets us know how partisan lines might be

forming, an introduction of legislation, which is sort of the opening salvo of a fight,

right? Like, nothing big and conclusive. There are some, I think, you know, stories that

are maybe contradictory of the sentiment and the feeling out there, which is maybe the most

interesting part of this week. But we'll get into all that, I'm sure. Yeah, we will. I mean,

you take a quick look at the market, and I think we have this just utterly flat, boring, sideways situation that's once again driving people nuts. Bitcoin is flat on seven days, and you would think it was at zero, right? And altcoins largely, some of these are even up over the last seven days, and you would think that they

were zero. So I think that people are just looking for a catalyst to get excited about.

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