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.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, December 19th, and that means that tomorrow starts my

end-of-year extravaganza, a set of interviews with a huge array of really interesting people,

tons of fun looking back at the year that was and predictions

about the year to come. But since it's the last Long Read Sunday of the year, I asked

Coindesk's editors to put together a list of some of their most popular op-eds from this year,

and picked out one that I think, while specifically written during a period in time that has

passed, will be a part of the way that we reflect on 2021 going forward, at least in terms of

this wild part of the crypto industry. That piece is by Michael Casey Coindesk's chief content

officer and is called Dogecoin and the New Meaning of Money. It was published on April 23, 2021.

In an ugly week for markets, it's striking the crypto news that caught even more attention

in the mainstream media was not Bitcoin's whopping 24% drop from its peak early Saturday

morning, but Dogecoin's spectacular rally earlier in the week.

This week's column dives into why that phenomenon, while literally built on a joke concept, is not something to be

laughed at. The surprising clout of the Dogecoin mob speaks volumes about how power is being

redrawn in the digital age. The Doge Age. Part of me worried I was giving into temptation by writing this column.

There's an understandable concern within the Coin desk newsroom that covering Dogecoin could signal

that we favor easy clicks from fanatics over the risk of encouraging bubble-fueled investments in a

coin with no inherent technical advantages. But then I read Max Reed's excellent piece on the future of

money from last week, which inspired

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