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 another breakdown end of your episode.

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, this year for our end of the year episodes as we are off for the holidays and doing these

preloads, I thought it would be a fun idea to reflect on the year that was and what's

to come using the convention of my favorite story, A Christmas Carol.

None of this is particularly innovative, of course, as a conceit, but I do think it's a pretty

good fit for this year, given that so much of the story of 2024 is about an inflection point between

different eras of Bitcoin's life. And so, as you might have already guessed, we're going to do

three episodes, The Ghost of Bitcoin's Past, The Ghost of Bitcoin's Present, and The Ghost of

Bitcoin's Future. As we look at Bitcoin's past,

just like it was for Scrooge, some of it is long past, some of it is near past, but all of it

is our past. And with that in mind, we kick off with a very near past, in fact, something

that's not past enough for most of us yet, which is the soon-to-be-ended reign of Gary Gensler. It's not too long ago that few in the

crypto industry knew the name of the SEC chair. Previous cycles saw the odd SEC action which

nudged the industry in a particular direction, like the Dow Report and the Hinman speech,

but no regulator made themselves a main character quite as much as Gary Gensler. At this stage,

there's very little left and said about the outgoing

...