BTC Sessions - Bitcoin and Equities Pump As Stimulus Bill Nears, FDIC Discourages Bank Runs, Mass Surveillance Programs EP 033

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

SUPPORT THE SHOW: Visit LEDN to check out getting a bitcoin-backed loan https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 Paxful online Bitcoin marketplace: http://bit.ly/2HYQnOG Paxful Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyKJvjzLmag Built With Bitcoin: https://builtwithbitcoin.org/ Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Wasabi Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQHAzSckK0 Get NORDVPN to protect your online privacy. 75% off a 3 year https://nordvpn.org/btcsessions Check out my website for private bookings: http://btcsessions.ca/ Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions SHOW RESOURCES: Bitcoin and Equities both pump as stimulus package deal nears https://decrypt.co/23429/stocks-crypto-soar-congress-nears-stimulus-package-deal?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=auto US Digital Dollar section removed from stimulus bill https://decrypt.co/23423/us-digital-dollar-shelved-in-coronavirus-fight-back China’s CBDC is getting closer to seeing the light https://decrypt.co/23406/chinas-digital-yuan-is-running-out-of-time-say-insiders FDIC releases awkward video telling people to keep their money in the banks https://twitter.com/FDICgov/status/1242455082551164934 Examples of new mass surveillance measures abound https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-okays-mass-surveillance-of-israelis-phones-to-curb-coronavirus/ https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252480387/UK-Cornoavirus-Bill-relaxes-restrictions-on-mass-surveillance-powers https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/california-police-to-use-chinese-made-patrol-drones-with-night-vision-cameras-during-coronavirus-lockdown

Wasabi wallet. I'm fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive into the news, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.com. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've got Bitcoin savings accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin-backed loans, which is one of the first things that I ever see. use them for. Essentially what happens is you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. So in my case, it was around this time last year. I needed to get my hands on dollars. I was in a pinch, but I really didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because I was worried. I wouldn't be able to buy it back at the same price later that the price might go up. Well,

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and with that can experience the price fluctuations that come with holding double the Bitcoin. And secondly, of course, oh, I should mention that there's a show notes, a link in the show notes, and if you opt to get a Bitcoin back loan, they'll actually credit you with an additional 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin via that link.

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So the stocks are on a tear today as well as Bitcoin itself. And we'll get into that in a moment. But the main reason behind this is that a stimulus package deal is pretty much almost a done deal. Now, this had been pushed off because the Democrats and the Republicans couldn't agree on a number of things. They seem to have come to terms here and kind of fix. figured out what they're looking to do. But the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Treasury Secretary Steve Meduchin commented that they're looking to have a deal secured by the end of the day today, which may have already happened by the time this airs. There's still a few little differences,

though they don't believe they'll get in the way. So the deal stalled yesterday as Democrats sought concessions, and it now includes provisions for four months of federal unemployment payments for freelancers and gig economy workers. Schumer described it as unemployment on steroids, as workers will obtain whatever funds their state provides as long as an additional $600 each. Democrats also suggested $25 billion in funding for hospitals. One remaining sticking point is $500 billion, is the $500 trillion, not trillion, billion dollar treasury fund to assist failing companies. The Democrats want to to put in some oversight regarding how the money can be used, I imagine that has to do with stock buybacks, which happened a lot with the last bailouts where companies would get a huge bailout

and they would just buy the stocks of their own company and pump up the value of their stock artificially. So they're looking to avoid that. So when you look to the stock market, it's pretty wild. And I'm wondering if this will last. because we've seen insane drops. I've heard some buzz on Twitter people saying that this is nothing more than a dead cat bounce. Although the Fed is exceedingly efficient at kicking the can down the road.

So can they do it again this time? And what are the repercussions given that they're pumping money not just into the stock market this time, but into the hands of everyday people, which will likely have a more immediate effect on day-to-day inflation on consumer products. So the Dow is up 2100 points at the time of this video, which is more than 11%. S&P is up 207 points, which is more than 9%. Nasdaq is up 8%. It's pretty wild across the board. It everything is up. Now, of course, you know, Dow is still shy of 21,000, whereas its all-time high was close to 30,000, but that's coming off lows where they were in the 18,000s, just as recent as yesterday. When we look at Bitcoin in relation to this, it's up considerably from just a day ago.

We were dipping down low into kind of the high 5,000s, like the 5,800 range I saw at some points yesterday, whereas now we're around 6750. at the time we're recording this and seem to be looking up from here, but time will tell even just a few hours not too long ago, like earlier kind of in the middle of the night, we saw highs near 6840. So, I mean, that's not that far off. We could be surpassing that any time. What will be interesting to see is if Bitcoin continues down that road,

will it mirror equities? because it did seem to break away from them a little bit in the last week where equities were hitting new lows and Bitcoin was rebounding quite strongly off of the bottom around 4K. We'll see if that continues. Now, in the relief effort here to fix the broken as hell economy, in the bill put forward by the Democrats for this relief bill, they actually snuck in some stuff about a digital dollar, an early version of the bill proposed at,

but that was stripped out because the bill that they put forward was like 1,400 pages, which is insane when they're trying to get through something quick. They had a lot, you know, I can only imagine what kind of crap that they snucked into the bill. Obviously, it was shot down, and they had to strip out a ton of stuff. Now, there was a provision to use a digital dollar

to speed up emergency funds to businesses, and individuals, and that was what it was now omitted. So the new measures, they proposed a U.S., basically they proposed a means of providing stimulus payments to businesses and individuals. It introduced a system of digital wallets maintained and operated by the Federal Reserve System banks. Now, again, there is comments online, which I think were quite justified just. in the sense of why the hell shove this into this type of bill.

John Paul Coning said, Ridiculous, using a healthcare crisis to sneak in a payment system. By the time they've built this platform, it could take years. The virus will have already passed, which, yeah, 100%. Like, why try to shoehorn this in here? But there's a longstanding precedent where this always happens during crises. They'll try to shove a bunch of crap into a bill that has nothing to do with what they're actually trying to achieve. They just try to get a bunch of kind of sweetheart backdoor deals done in this time.

Now, another country that is also using this opportunity to try and figure out what they're doing with their digital currency is the Chinese yuan. They're trying to get a digital version of this. Now, I think out of this story on decrypt that I'm looking at right now, It not only points out the end game of what China is trying to do, but probably what they're trying to or going to try to do with the U.S. dollar version of a digital central bank digital currency. So it says the People's Bank of China has reportedly finished the first technical step of developing its sovereign digital currency. Yet the launch date is still vague. Now the central bank needs to come up with the relevant laws for its circulation that can take even more time. An anonymous insider close to the situation told the global times that digital currency is seen as the most convenient way for the People's Bank of China to translate zero and negative interest rate policy to commercial banks.

So essentially if a commercial bank is holding money issued by their central bank, instead of having to collect after the fact, they can literally just scrape back. the money themselves and I have a feeling that the US would really love to be doing that as well being the World Reserve currency that makes negative interest rates easily enforceable to anyone so not just a commercial bank holding as Central Bank to issue digital currency but if you're a citizen holding Fed coin on your own personal wallet well if Fed coin issues it and they control the wallets, then if you're holding onto your money too long and they don't want that and they want to encourage you to spend and boost the economy by doing so like a good

little consumer, then feasibly they could scrape away your savings if you're not actively spending and or investing them and encourage the behavior they want to see, essentially punishing those who want to just save. Yeah, and I think that's, this is the worry, right? Of, of getting digital dollars in place if there was no alternative like Bitcoin. But we will see. And another thing coming out, we saw just recently where there was an article on CNN saying, oh, don't, don't do a bank run.

Please don't do a bank run. No need to do a bank run. Plenty of money. don't take your money out please. If we see the FDIC tweeting this out, they had this super awkward video and it says, forget the mattress

keeping large sums of cash at home is risky. The best place to protect your money is an FDIC insured bank where it's safe and sound. Learn how the FDIC safeguards your money at FDIC.gov slash

deposit and there's this video an awkward video of this woman at the FDIC chairman, Jelano McWilliams, and she's talking about how it's a terrible idea to take out money from the bank and you don't need to do it and there's never been, you know, a depositor has never not been able to take out their money since the inception of the FDIC. Well, not entirely true. the dollars are not an issue, but what about depositing gold when the money was actually

backed by something a little bit different? And I mean, there's a lot of nuance to this. I mean, when the money was backed by gold, people were, at least nations were expecting to be able to redeem it for gold in the future. And what ended up happening was they tried to do that in the late 60s, early 70s. And that led to, you know, late 60s, early 70s. And that led to, to the dissolution of the gold standard by Nixon in 1971. So, yeah, I mean, I just have a healthy distrust of anyone holding my money, more or less, and in times like this, it becomes more pronounced. So I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I will link to this video down below,

and I'm sure you'll get a kick out of it. The other last thing that I wanted to touch on here that is scary kind of coming out of this craziness around the world is surveillance, mass surveillance. And so we're starting to see this come out in droves. And so it's tough to avoid it, but if you can at least be aware, then it's good. And maybe you can take precautions if you so choose. but examples here you have Israel where they are approving mass surveillance of people using their cell phone data. So essentially they're able to track anyone and any, uh, everyone and anyone without permission now to see where people have gone. And it's, it's the goal here or what's stated as the goal is

to be able to see where people have gone to track the spread of the virus. The problem is when you flick this switch on, it's very difficult to flick this switch back off. Who is going to, they're not going to curtail these measures afterwards. They're probably going to remain in place. And once you open this door, you're not going to close it. And so essentially you will, anyway, the Israeli citizens will now be, I imagine, indefinitely tracked via their cell phone at any point in time. Now, this is overtly. who knows what's happening covertly whether or not everything is being tracked. My guess is that most governments already have access to this kind of thing if they want to get it.

It's just maybe there's a few more hoops to jump through to get it. Now, same thing we're seeing in the UK. A new bill based on the virus is relaxing restrictions on mass surveillance powers and essentially just taking away some of the hoops that they have to jump through in order to get approval to surveil all of their citizens. And this one is wild. California police to use Chinese-made patrol drones with night vision cameras during coronavirus lockdown.

And so what they say is that they are looking to having a fleet of drones purchased from a Chinese company called DJI, which is already raising eyebrows there because there's been a lot of issues with privacy around Huawei and other companies out of China being used as technology in the States and the rollout of 5G again by Huawei. Well, anyways, what they're trying to do is they're mounting speakers to their drones. So if they need to cover a large area and get an announcement out, or if there's a crowd somewhere and they need to disperse, we could do it without getting police officers around.

So they could have night vision drones with loudspeakers. surveying the streets and dispersing crowds if they want people to get the hell out or telling them to put on masks. Now, what they saw in China, and what you're probably going to see around the world, is using drones with cameras and loudspeakers to fly around and see if people are gathering where they shouldn't be telling them to go home. This is from who is this. And they're saying that it may seem a little Orwellian, but this could save lives. Now, yeah, this is, it is Orwellian. And the best of intentions tend to be used by other people down the line for negative intentions, I find anyways. And don't get me wrong, I want this whole situation to be dealt with and over with.

And I want people to be safe and healthy. but at the same time it's very, very scary to set the president of allowing all this stuff now and it's very hard to claw back those types of rights and liberties after the fact. My hope is that technology will allow us to avoid these type of things anyways, and I do see a lot of promising things happening in that realm, but I don't know, man, scary times. uncertain times. And I don't mean to end on an Orwellian note, but what do you do? What do you do? I'm going to wrap it there, guys. As always, if you're watching this on YouTube, again, thanks for

watching, first off, and do hit like, subscribe, and share. If you're listening to this via the pod, of course, share that on your social media. And of course, drop a review on whatever platform you're listening on because it really does help with metrics and getting it viewed by more people. Now, if you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the mentioned sponsors from before down below. That was Leden and Paxful. And also check out Wasabi because it's one of the things that you can do to help with your privacy on your Bitcoin, breaking the links between you and your coins. Finally, if you really like what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip at my tibbin.combe. page. That's tippin.comme slash at BTC 7.com.com.

And thanks to you that have been, thanks to those of you that have been dropping Satoshi's. It's always nice to see, you know, some sats pop in there. Very nice token of appreciation from anybody that does. Anyways, guys, thanks a lot. Have a wonderful evening. And I will see you next time for your daily session.