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? Welcome back to another breakdown end of year episode.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe

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All right, friends, well, for this last LRS of the year, I thought it would be fun to, instead of just picking a single article,

actually go back through and look at five articles that defined this year.

These articles shaped the way that we think about Bitcoin and formed a cultural touchpoint

from the industry.

There were some that even rattled the halls of power.

In a year filled with paradigm shifting events, big changes in the industry, and

countless words published, these were the five articles that really moved the needle.

I want to kick it off with a three-parter. It started in February, part two came in March,

and part three came all the way in September. No one captured the mood of this year quite like

Travis Kling. The Ikega founder kicked off his three-part market thesis in February with an essay called A Lack of Pretense that any of this shit does anything

or will ever do anything. After observing the nonsense projects that dominated the crypto winter,

Kling realized that we are a long way away from the era where white papers and roadmaps matter.

Crypto at that moment was about attention, air drops, and nascentine degenrecy. Kling wrote, so the thesis is the market is going to shi-coin hard.

Schi-coin prices will rip, and that setup doesn't have the prerequisite of actual use cases

or actual growth in the end-user demand. Looking at the way Long Dead Altz rallied over the past

...