The Breakdown - The Top 5 Times Bitcoin Was Supposed to Die, With Dan McArdle

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, Circle and Kraken. Today, NLW is joined by Dan McArdle, a bitcoin OG who co-founded Messari, built Case for Bitcoin and more. In this episode, they discuss the top five times bitcoin was supposed to die.    Find our guest online: https://twitter.com/robustus   - Nexo Pro allows you to trade on the spot and futures markets with a 50% discount on fees. You always get the best possible prices from all the available liquidity sources and can earn interest or borrow funds as you wait for your next trade. Get started today on pro.nexo.io. - Circle, the sole issuer of the trusted and reliable stablecoin USDC, is our sponsor for today’s show. USDC is a fast, cost-effective solution for global payments at internet speeds. Learn how businesses are taking advantage of these opportunities at Circle’s USDC Hub for Businesses. - Kraken, the secure, trusted digital asset exchange, is our sponsor for today’s show. Kraken makes it easy to instantly buy 185+ cryptocurrencies with fast, flexible funding options. You’re covered by industry-leading security and award-winning Client Engagement, available 24/7. Sign up and trade today at kraken.com. - “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Michele Musso and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsors today is "Back To The End" by Strength To Last. Image credit: Takoyaki Tech/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.  

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 nexus.com, circle, and crack it, and produced and distributed by CoinDess. What's going on, guys? It is Monday, November 21st, and today we are kicking off Grateful for Bitcoin with Dan McArdle. Before we dive 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 want to 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 slash breakdown pod. All right, folks, well, it is Monday, and as I record the intro, the rumor mill is swirling

around DCG. You can tell that there has been a big mental shift post-FTX, where people are assuming that silence is tantamount to confirmation of rumor. This weekend, a lot of the debate was around proof of reserves and reserve attestations, with specific regard to the grayscale trusts. It's a rough moment to have to consider the possibility of problems with grayscale and DCG coming off of FTXO recently, but it's encouraging that the debate around reserve attestations is becoming more normalized. However, for now, as of recording, we're still just in rumor world, and really, that is not

what we're here to do this week. This week is grateful for Bitcoin Week. Now, this is the second year I've used Thanksgiving as a chance to check in on the state of the thing that started at all, and which remains at the epicenter of the big-picture power shifts of this industry. Bitcoin. This year, I have excellent partner in Crackin. Crackin are supporting not only the grateful for Bitcoin series, but the entire Back to Basics theme between now and New Year's. As one of the oldest exchanges in the world and one who has always stood firm on the principles that make Bitcoin what it is, I can't think of a better partner for the series. Between now and Sunday, you're going to hear five interviews, skipping Thanksgiving and Black Friday, which are coined as holidays,

from some super interesting bitcoins, including a lightning entrepreneur, a gas flare miner, a Bitcoin politics thinker, and more. But since everyone right now is very, sky is falling, it made sense to start with a historical episode, focused on a very important topic. The top five times Bitcoin was supposed to die. For this, I have, I believe, the perfect guest. A man who has been around Bitcoin so long that he always has a tweet from about five years ago saying a thing that I just thought was a novel thought that I just had. Join me in welcoming Dan McArdle, co-founder of Masari, creator of case for Bitcoin, and much more. All right, Dan, welcome to the breakdown. How you doing, sir?

Good. How are you? I am great. I'm super, super excited for this one. I think it should be a really, a really good time, kind of a combination of some first person or witness to history type of stuff with a little bit of levity in this moment. And I probably introed you already in the show as the person who anytime I have an interesting thought on Twitter, you have a tweet from at least four or five years ago saying the same thing, which is one of my favorite things about you. But for people who don't know who you are or what you do, just give us a little bit of background. Sure. So, I mean, I guess relevant background. I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 was kind of obsessed with it for a while. Well,

really since then. I was a co-founder of a company called Digital Currency Council in 2014 that really did not survive the subsequent bear market. And in 2017, early 2018, co-founded Masari with Ryan Selkis. Amazing. So you have this sort of deep historical knowledge of the space. You've been engaged in it for a long time. One of the things that's happening right now, of course, is for really the first time this cycle, even after 3AC, we didn't really get the crypto is dead, Bitcoin is dead type of articles. But now, not only are we getting the Bitcoin is dead articles, we're getting the Bitcoin is dead and maybe we should let it die articles, which is, I think, a particular subsection that is in some ways deserved and

only to be expected. But I thought what would be fun today is to go through five previous moments in history that Bitcoin was supposed to have died and where it felt. felt, if not exactly like it does now, that there were these big questions. And you had actually thought a bunch about this. You did a threat about this. I think closer to the Luna and Three Arrow's Capitol collapse earlier this year. But let's go through these in linear fashion. And I think what I'd love to do is first talk about what happened and what was maybe the catalyst for these discussions and then just kind of your recollections on how it felt living through it, you know, how you were seeing kind of, you know, other people in the community responding. And then we'll bring it up to

now and talk about what is the same and different this time around. Sounds good. Okay, so late 2011, the Bitcoin was a one-time bubble. Let's talk about this one a little bit. Yeah. So Bitcoin had its first kind of big bubble in spring and early summer of 2011. It went from like $1 to $32 in something like two months. And there was a Bitcoin community at the time.

It wasn't huge, of course. It was probably something like 30,000 people on Bitcoin talk and probably the extent of people in the world who cared about it. But yeah, that bubble was fast and large. Then price came down and then the first Mount Gox hack happened in June of 2011. So this is not the one that, well, it's thought that it's not the one that eventually took it down years later. But anyway, the hacker got control of most coins on Mount Gox. Market dumped them.

Price went literally to a penny from, you know, I think it was trading in the high 20s when that hack happened. But it was all within Mount Gox. Eventually, you know, the operators got control of the site back. Reversed the trades, open trading back up, and things kind of carried on. Obviously, that looked ridiculous to the outside that, you know, there had been a bunch of articles that started to get written, you know, in more mainstream pieces, more mainstream outlets about this thing called Bitcoin and what it was and what the price was doing. So then this hack and collapse and thing happened and just kind of took the air out of the

ecosystem, it felt like. And price just kind of bled down for the next six months, just relentlessly. We went from that $32 high in June to a low of under $2 in November. So that's a 94% drop. And all along the way, we're getting snarky, dismissive, even aggressive headlines from mainstream media. Because it was seen as like a libertarian thing and Paul Krugman came out with like one of his typical snarky articles as I think his first public commentary in September 2011 and

wrote some piece in the New York Times. We had other stuff in Forbes. we had like a long article in Wired that like kind of read like an obituary. So like nothing is new here, right? At that time, it was my first bear market. I think everyone in retrospect thinks their first bear market was like the worst bare market Bitcoin's ever had. But it kind of really did feel like Bitcoin could just evaporate then.

Like I said, only like, you know, a few tens of thousands of people cared about it. And there was like no one with any mainstream connections, credibility, you know, whatever you want to call it. It was like talking about Bitcoin positively. So it did feel like the world. could forget about it for like 10 or 20 years. You know, people who are in the ecosystem, like, we're believers in the ultimate potential and what it could be, but it kind of felt like it might take quite a long time.

Well, and I think what's interesting about that one, too, is for the sake of argument and the conversation and being fair to critics, Bitcoin, it didn't have a pattern of resilience. And if you look through past big financial bubbles, right, the tulip mania or whatever things that people like to associate with us, they have one time and then it goes away. And so for people who are trying to kind of draw those patterns, they're like, okay, cool, that was its one time. Right. And so I imagine being in the community at that time, even if you have long-term conviction about the underlying idea, you don't have that pattern of resilience to kind of buffer you against that commentary. And, you know, the thing about the financial side of Bitcoin is that it's always been surprising, I think even to people on the inside to some extent, when it has these kind of moments of inflection. where all of a sudden it's worth so much more than it was before.

So, you know, you have this kind of different dynamic of, okay, there's this financial aspect of this that's kind of really popping off and then it's gone. And what does that actually mean? Who knows? I think obviously you can't really ultimately, we can't really ultimately say this time was worse than that time or whatever. But I do think that it makes sense that that first one would have felt more acute or worrisome or painful by virtue of the fact that it was the first time. Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe I'm biased.

But like, yeah, to your point, there was no price chart to point to to see that it had recovered, right? And I think that's what gives everyone confidence in the end is that they go through a cycle. They, you know, they see the highs, then they see the lows, and then they see it recover. That's when people really get their conviction for the long term, it seems like. And yeah, there was zero experience of that at the time. Okay. So next on this list that you had previously curated was April 2013. So what was happening then? We're a couple of years, is a year and a half or so later. Yeah, so 2012 was kind of a rebuilding year.

Price crept up to about 10, 11 bucks by the end of the year. And then 2013, we really started to get much more mainstream attention and specifically attention from Silicon Valley people. And there was a lot going on in the post-financial crisis world. So there were sovereign debt fears. There was all the stuff with the euro area. There was the Cyprus bail-in, where the government shut down the banks in Cyprus overnight. and like took lots of money from debt depositors.

So anyway, this all fed into like a Bitcoin narrative. Bitcoin users not affected by that sort of thing. Like can't be affected if you're holding your own keys, right? You know, we went from early in the year, about early 2013, about $10 to a high on April 9th of 266. So there was a lot of excitement. There are a ton of mainstream media news articles about this, as well as tons of people on Twitter,

journalists, people in finance who were scoffing at Bitcoin again, like look how ridiculous this bubble is, blah, blah, blah. And then due to some issues in Mount Cox, surprise, surprise, the price crashed from 266 to 50 in about 48 hours. So, you know, I think Bitcoin's volatile now. I do the math on that one. Of course, everyone looking at Bitcoin from mainstream just like looked at this as like, ha ha, we told you this was going to happen. What a ridiculous bubble that was. What a one-time tulips kind of thing that was. And it's like, okay, wait, you're saying one time again? Like, that happened two years ago. That was basically that. Like, people had thought it was absurd, wrote it off. There had been a lot more eyeballs on it in the mainstream. And yeah,

that people kind of like gleefully left us for dead. Okay. So we have a couple new things going on. Obviously, folks in the Bitcoin community had now been through one of these. It's another financial kind of crash. But you're starting to see not just sort of like the, oh, that was interesting, but now it's gone kind of commentary. But would you characterize as like the more gleeful, more kind of like vitriolic, the sort of, was there more dancing on the grave rather than just pronouncing the grave or something like that? Yeah, I think there was kind of what's interesting is if you look at people who are saying mean things about Bitcoin now or did, you know, in 2018-19 bear market, if they've been on Twitter a while, it's pretty

good chance that you'll find tweets from them in spring 2013 dancing on Bitcoin's grave, despite the fact that now we're 10,000 percent higher than then. So yeah, it really was. And I think it was because that was the first bubble that really occurred on Twitter in the circles of people who comment on this stuff all day. I think that's actually an interesting part of this is talking about where the discussion happens, right? Because as Twitter picks up as a medium for this stuff, you have inherently, it's easier for it to kind of permeate over into mainstream discourse, too. You know, Finn Twits a couple steps away from Bitcoin Twitter. And so those streams can cross much more easily. Yeah, totally. Totally agree.

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And award-winning client engagement teams are available for support 24-7. Buy crypto instantly with fast, flexible funding options on Cracken. Download the Cracken app on Google Play or the Apple App Store, or visit crackin.com to join. Okay, so next up, we have February 2014, which is, I think, a pretty big one. Yeah, the Mount Cox bankruptcy. So that was coming off the late 2013 bubble. So, you know, after this spring 2013 thing I just described, price was like, you know, down 80% and flat for six months.

But then, you know, we had another, you know, massive run up in at the end of 2013, which broke. Price was bleeding down a bit, but not horrifically. until February 2014 when Mount Gox declared bankruptcy. Now, there'd been writing on the wall for months. Gox had been having public problems since May of 2013, I would say. People weren't nearly as surprised by this or shocked, you know, as with FTX. But the magnitude of the coins that were missing and like the hole that got created in the ecosystem by this bankruptcy was, it was an order of magnitude more as a percent of total market cap than it is with FTX.

I think with Gox, the missing coins were something like 6.5% of total ecosystem market cap. And with FTCS, it's more like 0.8%. I guess we don't fully know the numbers there yet, but if it's $8 billion, that's what it works out to. So then, you know, the same people who were hating on Bitcoin in the 2013 bubble really came out with pitchforks in 2014, but it was less vitriolic because it was just like so dismissive. They're like, okay, well, then it's done. Like, finally, it's gone, over.

Mount Cox was the whole thing. It was 80% of trading. Everyone had their coins there and it's gone. There were some articles written and then like, then everybody just forgot about Bitcoin for a long time. So 2014, price just kept bleeding, you know, went to a new low in January 2015 and then just was like flat until November that year before we really started to rebuild into a new bull market. We're going to come back to January 2015 in just a moment. But for people who are living through that, do you think that one, Gox felt different than the previous two,

which had been sort of more like price fluctuations and, you know, versus this sort of catastrophic gap and crush that was, it wasn't just about the price being down. It was something fundamental had failed in the system. Yeah. So, you know, to people who deeply understood Bitcoin, you know, of course, we were all just kind of like, okay, well, you know, Mount Gox is a centralized company that was built on top of Bitcoin. So why are you all commenting on Bitcoin? But yes, to the outward-facing world, it definitely looked and felt different. It did feel like the ecosystem as a whole took a huge hit as opposed to a bubble, you know, if I just like a price up and down kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so to January 2015, this is the next one you have on this top five list, the mining death spiral. So speak a little bit about that. Yeah, this actually comes up every bear market, probably not coincidentally near the lows in hindsight. So January 2015 finally, you know, hit. You know, there's like a day when the price just whicked down to like, you know, $155

bucks after the 2013, December 2013 high was 1163. So I was down like 87 percent. I think that works out too. So we started getting all this fud about, well, if the price is down this much, you know, what happens to miners? They're not profitable, which means they're going to turn off their machines, which means that block times will get, you know, higher, which means nobody will be able to confirm transactions, which means people freak out more.

and dump everything on exchanges and price will go down more and therefore more miners will turn off. And people were like literally predicting a death spiral where confirmations would never happen, where like block times would go to months or years and the system would just die. So obviously that didn't happen. It's just like an example of the worst kind of fud just like comes out at the lows. Like, you know, that is what makes the lows people talking about the worst possible fears and like coming up with all these justifications about how things come. could get worse. Eventually, it's just all the people who are scared by that kind of thing,

you know, sell and are gone and we put in the low and rebuild. Yeah, I think obviously right now we're in a moment where people have a really close eye trained on Bitcoin mining. And I think maybe for a slightly different reason, some of the same dynamics of the death spiral conversation, but also there's a new dynamic of business structure considerations for firms that took on debt during the last cycle when money was cheap. But as you see the similarities and patterns in the discourse that go all the way back. Yeah, totally. We had the mining debt spiral stuff in late 2011. We had it again in early 2019, and we're having it again now. Yeah. Okay. So when we were talking about this,

we had this idea and then, you know, we started talking about maybe we do this as kind of like a top five just because it's a fun way to contextualize it. And you actually jump your first top five from aside from right now, we're going to talk about where now might fit and how it feels. You jump from that 2015 January low to COVID. So we're going to talk about the COVID crash in just a minute. But maybe first, let's talk about why you don't think there's, you know, there's a bunch of stuff happened in between that, right? We had Ethereum Dow hack.

We had, you know, the crash coming off of ICOs. Why are those kind of rank lower for you compared to some of these other things? Yeah, good question. So the Ethereum Dow hack, that was an existential thing for the Ethereum ecosystem. It's just like as a percentage of crypto overall, it was small and, you know, Bitcoin was still like much bigger. It was really the whole ecosystem. So just as the thing from a whole, the Dow hack was less important. As far as the late 2018, early 2019 bear market, there were no like catastrophic events that triggered that.

Like that really was just price coming off this crazy high we had in 2017 where, you know, Bitcoin went up 2,000 percent. You know, obviously we're going to pull back and it took a year and a half to do that. But that just felt more like a, again, a price up down kind of thing. You know, there's less of a story to it. It's like, all right, well, ecosystem is still here. Yeah, it sucks. It's hard to go through, you know, price drawdowns. It's never easy, but there was like a lack of bigger systemic issues that time around, I felt like.

Yeah, I would also argue that the discourse coming off of ICOs was largely about the excesses of ICOs, these obvious patterns of how the market infrastructure around them had been built, which was very different than not dissimilar to this moment right now, where a lot of people revisited Bitcoin fundamentals after having kind of gotten swept up in things that hold aside even the intention of the projects, just the entire kind of cascade of money around them, was so sort of fundamentally different. And so I agree that I don't think there was,

it wasn't like one moment in 2018, you know, on the way down where it was like, oh, this is sort of like the catalyst for this big shift, right? We didn't see any of that 266 to 50 in a day. You know, no big hack or anything like that. That was sort of the main catalytic event. It was just the bleed of a party that had died. And in fact, I remember being at consensus in New York in 2018 and the weird, really weird disconnect between the ICO projects that were still trying to kind of squeeze the last blood from that stone. remember that, yeah. The other half of the people who like knew it was done and, and didn't think there was a lot of ICOs on Neo kind of value to be derived anymore or anything. It was a very, it was a

strange, strange environment. But that's, you know, I pointed out as sort of like a, it wasn't clear to everyone. It was sort of just like a slow bleed until there finally were just no more ICOs. Yeah, for sure. Okay. So top five, the last one you have on this list before we get to today was the the COVID crash. So talk a little bit about your perception of that. So obviously that was an acute event and markets as a whole were roiling that was like far from a Bitcoin specific thing. But I think the narrative that was with us for months and people have forgotten this already, but the narrative that was with us for months after that was Bitcoin fell 50% in a day. You're never going to get over that stigma. You're never going to like, you know,

regain any credibility as a store of value or an investable asset after that. But people have forgotten that already. That narrative was probably persistent mid-2020, but by late 2020, when we were taking out the all-time highs, that narrative was just gone. Like, people had forgotten. And people do forget times a factor. Yeah. I mean, I remember I was recording with Preston Pish the night that Bitcoin crashed all the way under 4,000 very temporarily and Bitmex through the, basically, the stop. And it was gut churning to watch it. I think watching the asset crashed that way in sort of, you know, compounded by market structure sort of thing, while also living in this context of no one really having any friggin idea what was going on

more broadly and how bad this disease was going to be and what the implications for the world were. Like, it wasn't just Bitcoin in isolation. It was actually worse that that sort of like this gut churning crash was happening in the context of larger not knowing. Yeah, totally. And it's funny because Bitcoin bounced back pretty fast. It was only a week. Really, really quickly. Yeah, that it was like, it was only under 4,000 for hours. And then, it was like a week under 5K or 6K or whatever. But yeah, the narrative kind of stuck with Bitcoin specifically for months that like, while you can't drop 50% in a day and have any, you know, investability after that, while other markets were also off to the races and, you know, people didn't care so much

that the S&P was down 20% like pretty fast in that either. It's interesting. I think that that store of value type asset can't fall 50% in a day. misclaim, let's call it. My instinct is that zoom far enough out and a lot of the same things that you're seeing and have been seeing over the last year around Bitcoin was supposed to be an inflation hedge. How could it go down this much over the course of a year kind of a thing when inflation has been going up? I think it will be a similar kind of misunderstanding. Almost reveals the lack of clarity around the words that we're using when we're describing you know, sort of long-term store of value and inflation hedge by viewing it strictly from the

standpoint of financial asset versus a different type of sort of long-duration money. But I do think it's interesting just kind of to compare those, you know, because X, it can never be Y kind of, you know, like analyses. They're very sort of surface level. If I could jump in on a related point, the Bitcoin is not an inflation hedge thing annoys me because I think the right way to view it is, you know, Bitcoin is a debasement hedge. Right. When people are worried about central banks, when people are worried about fiat sustainability, that's when Bitcoin shines. It's exactly what was happening in 2020 and 2021. The Fed was being reckless.

Everybody knew it. Bitcoin was off to the races and quote, Paul Tudor Jones was the fastest horse. Went up the most. Even to this day, it's retained the most upside since the QE started in 2020, despite the fact that everything was up and down, like Bitcoin has retained more upside than anything else had. So I think this like narrow kind of looking at it as, oh, the CPI number. are coming out hot, why isn't Bitcoin performing? That misses the point. Like right now, the Fed is

actually being disciplined and raising rates and taking M2 down and not being reckless. So, of course, like people aren't worried about, you know, Fiat sustainability in the same way right now. But, you know, we flip back to QE or politicians spending too much money and I'll bet things change. Yeah, 100%. Can't agree more. Okay, so this gets us to now. And so what, I guess the kind of place to leave this and sort of put the exclamation point on the conversation is how you feel what has happened this year, obviously culminating in the collapse of FTX. Where would this sort of rank on your list? I guess I would tie it with Mount Cox. So, you know, as noted, like the dollar values we're talking about as a percent of the total ecosystem are an order of magnitude

less than Mount Cox, but this is an order of magnitude more shocking than Mount Cox. So I think those two kind of equal out, like emotionally, it feels like Mount Cox, but, but, you know, the numbers aren't as bad, but like, you know, this isn't like a crypto specific story, right? Like, this is, you know, potentially the biggest fraud since Madoff, maybe even bigger. We don't know yet. And it's tied to, you know, political donations and just like all this, all this stuff. So it's, uh, it's definitely on that level for me. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the damnable things about this, and obviously I've been, I've been living in this for a while is it's hard to start from square, again as relates to trying to explain this wasn't actually an issue of Bitcoin or anything like

that. It was an issue of fraud, a very classic traditional financial fraud perpetrated with new tools and in new ways. To some extent, it's not even just starting from square one again. It's more like we had just gotten started to get over the crypto is for crime. Bitcoin is for crime kind of narrative. And this just rips it back. So even someone who says, sure, I get that it wasn't a failure of Bitcoin as a failure of a centralized institution. But why does your thing attract such criminals? You know, why does your thing attract such fraudsters? It's just these layers of frustration that I think we're going to be dealing with for a while, unfortunately. Yeah, I think we will too. You know, like the, you know, a couple of years after Mount Cox,

I think, you know, we all just need to remember exactly why we're here, exactly what this technology is, why it's different than TradFi, what assurance is it gives when used properly, advocate for using it properly and engage with people who are misunderstanding the ecosystem, right? Like, don't let them say that, you know, FTX was a failure of Bitcoin or failure of crypto or anything like that. Point out, it was the traditional finance model. It was a, as you say, a financial fraud similar to many, many, many throughout history.

Scale was bigger, but the mechanisms were very similar. This has nothing to do with, you know, Bitcoin as money or core protocols. and on-chain activity. I think it's just getting back to that focus. And it's going to feel a little futile, like trying to say all these things to people who are just flat out dismissive or even happy about what's going on. I think it's still valuable to engage and not let up on the message.

And that's ultimately how we rebuilt. Well, Dan, it's been awesome. I super appreciate you coming on to kind of give this historical context. I guess I will leave with just the key question. Do you think this time, finally, the critics are right and that Bitcoin is dead. No, and I'll be here on Twitter in five years pointing that out. Awesome. All right, thanks so much, Dan. It's a really great conversation. Thanks for having me.

All right, back to NLW here. Look, I don't want to minimize the pain of what everyone in the Bitcoin in crypto space is experiencing right now. But I hope that this show was a reminder that there have been lots of moments where things seemed existential and where instead of failing, block by block, Bitcoin kept chugging along. I want to say thanks again to Dan for joining the show. Thanks to my sponsors, Nexto.com.com, Circle and Cracken, for making the show possible, and thanks to you guys for listening. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.