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, July 21st, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday.

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. Hello, friends. It will have escaped the attention of exactly none of you that the discourse in the

crypto space right now is absolutely dominated by considerations of politics.

In many ways, it's been this way since former President Trump decided to put this issue on his

political map. And one could argue that it's really been this way since former President Trump decided to put this issue on his political map. And one could

argue that it's really been this way ever since Operation Chokepoint 2.0 came along, and parts of the

Biden administration got increasingly hostile towards the space. Indeed, one could look at the last

couple years of crypto as really just one big long political fight, with occasional interludes of price

often based on political changes, like the court decisions that effectively forced the SEC's hand

to allow a Bitcoin spot ETF. Now, of course, the conversation has gotten a lot more intense

recently, as it has with all politics in America. This week, Vitalik weighed in on that conversation with an essay

called Against Choosing Your Political Allegiances based on who is pro-crypto. The piece echoes

in many ways the discussion that's been happening about whether it is appropriate for people to be

single-issue crypto voters. Vitalik's main thesis is this. He writes, I argue that making decisions

in this way carries a high risk of going against the values

that brought you into the crypto space in the first place. So let's read the piece, or rather

turn it over to AI-NLW from 11 Labs to read the piece, and then we'll come back and discuss it.

...