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 Sunday, August 3rd, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you're 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.com slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, we have a few rules here on this show.

One of them is when Nick Carter writes something, we find a way to read it, sort of, or at least

reference it. Nick is not only a great writer, he is a very thorough writer, and what he gifted

us this week was a piece that he called the last word on stable coins

and free banking. Subtitle, if you're going to compare the two, at least get the history right.

Nick's inspiration for this was how frequently these past periods of banking are compared to

stable coins and used as justification for while stable coins are problematic.

Except a story isn't quite as clear as people make it.

Now, Nick's version of this, which I will, of course, include in the show notes in which you should

absolutely go take the time to read, is 27 pages long. It's basically a short book. I had a few

different thoughts on how to do a summary version for you. The first was to use Notebook L.M's audio

overviews, but one, I think some of the

novelty has faded off of that, and two, when I did put it in, it was 53 minutes, so not exactly

shorter. So what I did instead was I shared the entire piece with Claude and had it rewrite it

as a roughly 2,000-word essay instead. The piece it came back with was titled The Misunderstood History of Free Banking and Why It Matters for Stable Coins, and I think it does a pretty good job of giving you the basic ideas of this piece, although again, as I said, to get the full impact you really have to go read Nix. So what we're going to do is we're going to turn it over to the 11 Labs version of myself to read not Nick's original tome,

but Claude's shortened down version of it. Big thanks to Nick for his piece and always taking

the time to write these sort of things. And thanks to you guys for listening. Again, I hope you

enjoy this piece, the misunderstood history of free banking and why it matters for stable coins.

Picture this. You walk into a coffee shop in 1850s America

and pull out a banknote to pay. The barista squints at it suspiciously, pulls out a thick

...