The Market Reacts to Square’s $50M Bitcoin Buy

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 786 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2020

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A special breaking edition of The Breakdown follows the market’s reaction to Square’s surprise $50 million bitcoin investment. NLW breaks down the foundations for the investment, including: 2020’s alignment between the bitcoin narrative and structural economic realities An increase in bitcoin’s perceived resilience The precedent set by MicroStrategy He also discusses the market’s reaction, from the (potential) connection to Coinbase’s “apolitical” stance from last week to the notion of Square intentionally setting a framework others can follow.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.
0:09.2	It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.
0:15.2	The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, nexo.io, an elliptic, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.
0:23.2	What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, October 8th, and we have a special one today.
0:30.1	I was all set to drop what is going to be an extremely exciting interview on you, but I had to
0:35.3	push it one day so that we could talk the big news this
0:39.3	morning. Square has bought 50 million Bitcoin for long-term treasury. This is 1% of its cash. It's a big
0:48.2	deal. Let's get into it. As I said, this is a special breaking edition of the breakdown,
0:53.4	so no brief today, because really what else do you guys want to talk about? As I mentioned, this is a special breaking edition of the breakdown, so no brief today, because really
0:55.1	what else do you guys want to talk about?
0:57.0	As I mentioned, first, the news.
0:59.3	Square is buying $50 million worth of Bitcoin.
1:03.6	This went out over all the wires, and people started noticing it about an hour ago just
1:08.0	after 9 a.m.
1:09.5	We're going to dig into the reactions and my interpretation
1:12.2	of it, but first, let's set the context. I believe that there are three key foundations for this
1:19.2	move. The first is that the 2020 narrative around Bitcoin has met the structural reality of the
1:26.2	economy. There's a growing sense that stimulus is here to stay.
1:31.1	As Chow Wang said yesterday on the show, the base case isn't if stimulus, it's when stimulus.
1:38.7	The Democrats want the sort of checks that we've seen this year to be permanent, and frankly,
1:43.8	the Republicans sort of want
1:45.2	it to be permanent as well. There isn't really a debate anymore about whether there's going
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Blockworks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Blockworks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.