2024-07-03
THE BREAK DOWN #451
- Hoskinson's biweekly THE BREAK DOWN interview, opening on the Biden debate as confirmation of the dementia he recognized from his own grandparents' decline.
- He explains the Supreme Court gutting the Chevron doctrine as a nuclear bomb across the administrative state that weakens the SEC and helps crypto's court wins.
- He argues politics came to crypto unprovoked, and warns BlackRock and Fidelity are commoditizing Bitcoin into a custody-banned, surveilled Tether-edition asset.
- He reframes Bitcoin as digital gold whose network and asset can be separated via wrapped Bitcoin, while a real technological revolution in ZK and cross-chain accelerates.
- He makes an extended case for Argentina under Milei becoming the first fully blockchain nation by convening the whole industry rather than picking a winner. The second half is the host's solo segment.
27 entries
On THE BREAK DOWN, calls the Biden debate a confirmation of years of dementia signs, the bradykinesia, sundowning, memory loss, and vacant stare, that every doctor could see.
Shares that three of his four grandparents had neurodegenerative disorders, Alzheimer's and Lewy body Parkinson's, so he recognizes the week-by-week decline he sees in Biden.
CNN and MSNBC turned on Biden in full panic as donors demanded he step down, marveling at how fast the media and Democrats switched after covering for him.
Objects that Kraken had to give a million dollars to Trump to sit down with the candidate, calling pay-to-play politics rotten, and hopes Polymarket proves right over the media.
Reaffirms backing RFK, and argues age itself is not the issue, citing Nobel laureate John Goodenough writing battery-research papers sharp into his 90s, though the probability of decline rises past a threshold.
Government should learn from failure and improve like any organization, and if it cannot, new people with that mentality must replace it.
The Supreme Court overturning the Chevron doctrine, which had deferred to agency rulemaking, so courts now decide ambiguity across the EPA, FCC, FDA, and SEC, a nuclear bomb on the administrative state.
Overturning the Chevron doctrine unleashes a tsunami of litigation but helps crypto, noting courts upheld the Ripple ruling and a Binance judge finding secondary-market sales are not securities, repudiating the SEC's embodiment theory.
Predicts the SEC, unlikely to win the Coinbase case, must eventually support legislation like FIT21, and that the next administration only needs to be neutral to crypto, which is all the industry asks.
Insists politics came to crypto unprovoked, since the industry was growing fine and asked only to be left alone like an Amish colony building its own system without government subsidy.
Washington horse-trading as choosing which of your three children to murder or sell, and mocks handing consumer protection to the same banks behind 2008, the S&L crisis, and the Great Depression.
He was willing to let the ecosystem grow another decade without institutions, since Satoshi's vision was to escape banks, yet Bitcoin maximalists cheered when BlackRock and Fidelity arrived.
Concedes BlackRock and Fidelity will out-market Bitcoin to grandparents through Jim Kramer and CNBC, since they own half of mainstream media that flipped from crypto-bad to crypto-great.
Warns the ETF crowd will deliver a Tether-edition Bitcoin, banning self-custody, forcing regulated channels with no audit trail, and vetting mined coins, extending the BSA financial panopticon.
Commoditizing Bitcoin as a financial product strips its philosophy and self-custody roots, leaving buyers who only care whether the number goes up, which is what Wall Street does best.
BlackRock could try to fork Bitcoin by controlling mining, a race to the bottom decided by ASIC access, data centers, and cheap electricity, not mom-and-pop GPU miners.
Cites a seven-to-ten-figure mining data center next to his Gillette warehouse to show miners are trapped by capital, so a consolidating cartel of a few actors could control the canonical KYC Bitcoin chain.
Says exchanges and liquidity providers could delist a problematic fork like Bitcoin Cash, and notes everything good about Bitcoin, layer twos and wrapped Bitcoin, happens outside Bitcoin itself.
He has no problem with Bitcoin as digital gold, and that the protocol and the asset can be separated so wrapped Bitcoin honored on Ethereum or Cardano could persist for centuries even if the Bitcoin network shut down.
Setting the noise aside, zero-knowledge, cross-chain, and layer-two technology is growing exponentially toward replicating world-scale payment and banking systems, prompting small nations to embrace crypto.
Argentina is a dark horse under Milei's chainsaw, but after purging government you must rebuild, and it could become the first country to embrace blockchain across voting, identity, banking, land, and education.
He is going to Argentina in July 2024 for the Constitutional Convention and to pitch open protocols and local developers like Globant, arguing self-sovereign identity creates jobs, removes corruption, and restores economic integrity.
A blockchain makes contracts enforceable and defaults impossible by design, and advocates a public-private partnership where the whole industry, too big for any one player, builds out a 100-million-person economy.
Calls El Salvador's Bitcoin-first Chivo wallet a mistake for not bringing the whole industry, and says Argentina should be a neutral all-you-can-eat buffet of Cardano, Hedera, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Algorand, and more.
Argues Argentina, having fired half its government, faces a 1950s-Japan-style rebuild that could leapfrog to a 20-percent-growth blockchain economy the world envies, telling Milei he is a kingmaker who can make everyone a winner.
Such a case study proves crypto is bigger than money, like the internet is bigger than email, killing the BlackRock and Goldman Sachs nepotism and enabling a 10 trillion dollar market.
Closes the interview segment saying Nike the pig is great, with a 3D scan and high-def video planned to put him in video games as a celebrity to draw people to Cardano.