NLW's Last Breakdown

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 Thursday, January 29, and today is the last episode of the breakdown with me ever. 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 wanna 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/breakdownpod. Well, friends, yes, it is the end of an era. The breakdown will continue, but my watch has ended. I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the show. But as a way to celebrate the end of this storied period, I thought it would be fun to go back and talk about the biggest story from each of the years of this show, going dangerously close to a decade all the way back to 2018. This was the first year that the proto things that would go on to become the show first started happening. In around May 2018, I started doing a Twitter thread on Sundays called Long Read Sunday because at that time, all of the conversation in crypto was happening on Twitter, and it was happening in the form of threads. That led to me starting to mess around with media and to eventually a very short lived around the horn style interview version of the show that quickly got temporarily put on hold after the birth of my daughter at the November. Now meanwhile, what was going on with Bitcoin then? The 2017 had, of course, been the first big cycle with mainstream attention. We had the first pop culture references, the first Bloomberg articles, the first Lambos with Bitcoin license plates, and, of course, the ICO boom which had everyone's attention. That Thanksgiving of twenty seventeen, everyone went home and got their friends and family to buy Bitcoin, but by the December, the market had started to collapse. The first part of 2018 was super weird, with a lot of altcoins and ICOs still pretending that the party was on even though it distinctly wasn't. CoinDesk's consensus conference that year in New York was a super strange combination of people who absolutely knew that the bear market was here and we were pretty deeply heading into it, and folks who were still trying to hold out for one more bite at the ICO apple. Overall, Bitcoin was down nine out of the twelve months in 2018, with the largest drawdown coming at the end of the year with a 37% drop in November. At the same time, it was still a big year for building. It was one of the first moments of validation for Bitcoin where it was no longer just weird Internet money, and we got the first glimmers …