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 February 18th, and that means it's time for Long Reads 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 at the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, back with another long reads.

And this week, it is all me, no AI for you.

We are going to do two quick essays, of course, both about Bitcoin, starting with a perfectly

well-suited declaratory piece.

Bitcoin is back, back, back, baby.

This is by Ben Schiller over at CoinDesk, and I think sets a perfect

tone for what everyone is experiencing right now. Ben writes, take a look at the front page of

CoinDesk today and you could be forgiven for thinking our site is all about Bitcoin. Just look at

the headlines. BTC is above 50k. Options traders are betting on 75,000. Bitcoin's market cap is back above a trillion.

Bitcoin ETFs have accumulated 11 billion since being approved in the U.S. in January.

The Fear and Greed Index, a measure of market sentiment, is in extreme greed territory.

It's frothiest moment since BTC's all-time high in September 2021. Bitcoin is even a campaign meme.

Bitcoin is dominating narratives, dominating

media coverage and dominating mindshare among investors, particularly the institutional kind.

To be sure, important projects like Solana and Chainlink are also rising in value. But this is very

much a Bitcoin-led market. Bitcoin dominance, a measure of BTC cap versus the rest of crypto,

remains about 50%, making claims that Bitcoin would reduce in relevance as crypto expanded seem ridiculous now.

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