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 Tuesday, August 20th, and today we are talking about the rumor that scared the crap out of the entire crypto-Twitter sphere yesterday.

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 at the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, you may have noticed yesterday that there was an absolute

S show all over crypto Twitter that started when the Washington reporter published an article with

the headline, Scoop, Kamala Harris likely to nominate Gary Gensler as Treasury Secretary,

if elected. Senate sources.

The few people who actually read the article came away with a sense that the story was

misleading at best. The anonymous source was actually talking about a convoluted plan to retain

a Democrat majority at the SEC in the event of a Trump election win. The theory goes that

Gensler should step down ahead of the

election, allowing the Biden administration to appoint a new chair. The source said, the only way I see

Gensler agreeing to that is if Harris promised if she wins, she'll give him Treasury Secretary.

That was the whole source. Now, there could definitely be additional gossip going on in Washington

that wasn't reported, but as far as the journalism goes, this was incredibly thin. This is particularly true when you

consider the headline suggesting that Gensler as Treasury Secretary is, quote-unquote, likely.

Leo Schwartz, one of the very capable cryptojournalists at Fortune, knew exactly how this

would play out, tweeting, this is going to be widely shared on crypto Twitter and should

not be taken seriously. Another Fortune crypto editor, Jeff John Roberts, scolded the denizens

of crypto Twitter for being so easily misled. He wrote,

lack of media literacy among otherwise smart crypto people is a problem. This quote-unquote

...