BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Fund On Toronto Stock Exchange, Blue Wallet Integrates Hodl Hodl, Mike Novogratz Eyes $20K in 2020 EP039

Starting point is 00:00:01 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Hold on their Bitcoin. Before we dive in, of course, 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 Sigma's accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin back loans. This is where you can use your Bitcoin as collaboration.

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Starting point is 00:01:11 And if you opt to use that link to get a Bitcoin back loan, they'll actually give you 50 bucks of free Bitcoin into your account. And secondly, we've got CoinBerry, new partner of the show. This has been my go-to, especially as of late to buy Bitcoin. It's super easy. It's got a paired mobile app for Android or iPhone. It's super fast in funding. I've honestly only ever waited 20 minutes in my experience max to get my account funded, although it can vary.

Starting point is 00:01:39 They are very speedy. And they've also got some great options when it comes to dollar cost averaging and just putting it on autopilot. So if you want to check them out, they've also got a deal where if you sign up using the link down below, after your first $100 purchase, they'll actually give you $20 extra So probably one of the best sign-up links I've seen out there as far as what you get back. So be sure to check them out, coinberry.com, and there's a link in the show notes. With that, let's dive into the news.

Starting point is 00:02:08 So I really wanted to touch on this. This is here in Canada, 3 IQ. These guys are launching a Bitcoin fund on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and it literally drops in six days now on the 9th of April. So just a little bit about this. They are doing an IPO, so basically accredited investors can get in on the fund early. But all it does is it gives you exposure to Bitcoin without having to custody it yourself. Now, I know for you hardcore bitcoins out there, like myself, you want that custody.

Starting point is 00:02:43 You know, not your keys, not your coins. But, you know, maybe for some of the boomers out there that just want some exposure to Bitcoin and they're worried about custody it themselves and they don't want to take the time, maybe that's an option for them. And if so, be it, then great. That can get them off zero at least. But regardless, pretty cool to see because, you know, even just a couple of years back, a few years back, this was not even close to being on the table. Even though there were people trying to do it, it just wasn't there.

Starting point is 00:03:14 And yeah, very cool to see it here in Canada for myself as well. So a little bit about the fund and the IPO, they say minimum size of the IPO offering is 10 million U.S. dollars. Yes, it's in U.S. dollars. Maximum size of the offering is 50 million U.S. The closing date of the offering is anticipated to be April 9th, 2020. The fund's investment objectives are to provide holders of units with exposure to the digital currency Bitcoin and the daily price movements of the U.S. dollar price of Bitcoin and the opportunity for long-term capital appreciation. 3 IQ Corp will act as the investment manager and portfolio manager of the fund.

Starting point is 00:03:59 Yeah, so they do have, they already do have digital asset private funds, but this will be the first public fund in Canada that gets you exposure to Bitcoin. So cool, congrats to the guys at 3 IQ. Fred Pye is one of them, and I got to meet him. He was integral actually in getting gold listed on the stock markets. So this is a familiar realm to him. So again, tip my hat to Fred. Good job, you guys.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Moving on, hoddle, hoddle, peer-to-peer Bitcoin Marketplace, just got integrated into Blue Wallet. Now, Blue Wallet I did a video on before. It was very early days when they were just kind of getting started. and I did encounter some issues with the custodial lightning wallet in it. Those have since been resolved. And I've got to say these guys keep on pumping out some crazy upgrades to the wallet itself. The wallet itself is pretty solid, especially as far as a regular Bitcoin wallet.

Starting point is 00:05:00 The lightning part of it, again, with the fixes that they made, you have the option of custodial and non-custodial. And that was the case back then too. But you can now connect it to your node and open your own channels and all of that, which is great. But this integration allows peer-to-peer trading within the app, which is really cool. So I'll just read a bit from the Medium blog here. It says, by the way, this is an alpha. So it's not fully, fully integrated yet.

Starting point is 00:05:30 It's still tinkering around, but I'll read on anyways. Once integration is complete, hoddle-hoddle will become the first non-custodio Bitcoin trading. platform available via mobile application. Blue Wallet will be the first mobile app that fully supports peer-to-peer trading. Say goodbye to old-fashioned peer-to-peer trading available only via web browsers. This alpha release with some basic features, these include search for offers, filter by country, filter by offer type, filter by payment option, and filter by currency. In the near future, Blue Wallet will introduce more features, which will include in-app contract creations as well as trading. So yeah, really cool. Again, peer-to-peer, non-custodial. You can actually trade

Starting point is 00:06:20 digital assets from within the actual app. So again, kudos to Blue Wallet and Hottle-Hottle for putting this together. Great to see some innovation coming out of these guys. Moving on, Mike Novagrats is making some big calls for the rest of 2020. He's saying that it could hit 20K by the end of the year. And if it doesn't, he may quote unquote hang his spurs or get out of the space. So what did he say? So Mike Novagrats, I'll read this from Coin Telegraph here. Mike Novigratz, CEO of Crypto Merchant Bank Galaxy Digital and well-known Bitcoin Bull

Starting point is 00:07:01 has once again reiterated his bullish stance to the biggest cryptocurrency, predicting that Bitcoin should retest its $20,000 highs by the end of 2020. In an April 2nd interview with CNBC's closing battle, Novagrads also expressed his confidence that Bitcoin's price should at least double before October 2020. While Novogratz delivered yet another bullish prediction for Bitcoin, this time, the prominent crypto advocate admitted he might give up on Bitcoin if price does not hit an online. all-time high in 2020. This is the year for Bitcoin. This is quote. This is the year for Bitcoin. And if it doesn't go up now by the end of the year, I might just hang my spurs. So one thing we should

Starting point is 00:07:45 reiterate here is this is not the first time that Mike has made sizable predictions. He actually predicted the exact same price point for the end of last year too. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. Now, as far as him saying that this is the year for Bitcoin, and has to hit new all-time highs this year. I'm not so confident that the end of this year we're going to see above 20K Bitcoin. Maybe early next year, but there's some reasoning behind that,

Starting point is 00:08:17 and we're going to get into that in a second. But, yeah, I'm not so confident that we're going to see it this quickly. And to double by October, I mean, it's possible, but is it for sure? No. And do I think that it's not bullish if it doesn't? No, not that either. I do think that having will have impact over time. We discussed this on the show the other day about mining cell pressure and

Starting point is 00:08:43 so and so forth. But yeah, I think this is great optimism, but high time preference. He seems relatively impatient. These things take time. If we look at the chart here, you can see, I mean, there's the big dump back around the 13th of March. We went all the way down to 4K. We're already back up pretty close to 7K. We did go over 7K the other day. We got into the 7,300 range, but we did, obviously, we whicked back down and kind of retraced a lot of that. Anyway, still, we're up there, right? We're still, you know, 6,700. We've regained a lot of the ground that we lost with that massive dump. And so, and I mean more so than the stock markets with trillions of dollars being printed. That said, we are still low. We are still down for the year.

Starting point is 00:09:41 And if you look over at the crypto fear and greed index, we're still heavily into the extreme fear realm. So we're at a 14. Just to put that in its perspective, last month, we were at a 38. And the way that this index works is if it's extreme fear, then people may be overly fearful and it could be a buying opportunity. If it's extreme greed, then that could indicate irrational exuberance being over-exuberant about it and there may be a retracement in the cards or a bear market in the cards depending on when you're looking at it. So yeah, we've been in extreme fear for like a solid month now, especially since that huge dump. And we're seeing a bit of a resurgence, but people are still fearful. They're still worried that it's going to dip. I'm, I mean, it wasn't nice to see it drop to 4K,

Starting point is 00:10:41 but I, at no point during that, was I freaking out. So now let's touch on havings and havings their effect on price and kind of what has happened in the past. So again, those, of you that are maybe watching this for the first time, having refers to when the issuance of newly created Bitcoin gets cut in half. The existing supply of Bitcoin still exists at that point, but the new coins coming out of the market every 10 minutes roughly get cut in half. So originally it was 50 coins every 10 minutes were created. Four years after that, it got cut to 12 and a half. Sorry, four years after that, it got to cut to 25. In 2016, it got cut to 12 and a half coins every 10 minutes, which we're currently at, but that changes in May, it will drop to 6.25

Starting point is 00:11:31 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. And this is baked in to the code. It cannot be changed. And so in the face of the craziness that's happening with the Fed printing, you know, the Bitcoin monetary policy is untouched. And so previously, let's take a look at prior halvings. Um, The previous halvings have had delayed but notable effect on price. Now, some people will debate that and say it wasn't the halving. It was something else. But, I mean, when you look historically, it does have quite an effect, in my opinion. So take a listen to this.

Starting point is 00:12:11 After the first halving in 2012, the price of Bitcoin took about 11 months to enter a parabolic rally, securing extended upward momentum. In November 2012, the price was hovering. at around $12. In November, 2013, Bitcoin had climbed to as high as $1,100, recording a 7,562% increase. The second halving of the Bitcoin network occurred in July of 2016. Coming off a sharp price decline from $1,100, the price had stabilized around $600. The price then started to see a strong rally in May 2017, exactly 11 months after the halving occurred, just like in 2012. So the past two halings show that Bitcoin's price tends to see a vertical rally 10 to 11 months after the

Starting point is 00:13:07 havings took place, but not immediately after. And so, as I said, it's not immediate, and that's because a lot of, like all of the existing Bitcoin are still out there on the market and still being openly traded, but every 10 minutes, there's a little bit less Bitcoin that the market is accustomed to kind of swallowing up. And when you start to throw miners into the mix, it starts to make a lot more sense. So miners make their revenue on newly created Bitcoin that they essentially mint themselves by securing the network. And that revenue gets cut in half in a bit overall month here, but it gets cut in half roughly every four years. And some miners are much more profitable than others and have much better margins than others.

Starting point is 00:13:56 And those that are very, very tight, running on tight margins and don't have a lot of wiggle room, when that gets slashed, they don't go out of business right away. A lot of them will have power contracts or contracts where they're actually stationed, so they may have a whatever their site, wherever their site is placed, they may still have to pay to stay in that place and they may want to try and ride out the volatility and hope that the price goes up. But the selling pressure is mostly coming, or not mostly, but a lot of the selling pressure is coming from those miners with very thin margins. They have to sell most, if not all of the Bitcoin that they are mining in order just to keep up with operations.

Starting point is 00:14:43 and I'm talking about right now. So a lot of miners are running old equipment or running on expensive power. And so every 10 minutes when those 12 and a half Bitcoin get minted and get created and rewarded to the miners, well, they're selling it immediately onto the market. A lot of them are. And so when that having hits, they're basically on borrowed time. They're going to have a treasury, likely. Hopefully they'll have some big.

Starting point is 00:15:13 Bitcoin put away to continue to pay for their operations if they need to, otherwise they turn on, or turn their machines off. And so what happens when these smaller or less efficient miners start to fold is their rewards have to go somewhere and it ends up going to the more efficient miners. So the more efficient miners already did not have to sell all of their Bitcoin. But on top of that, they're now getting more of the Bitcoin. And so they're able to hold more of it and not forced to sell, which means that sell pressure starts to lift and there's less Bitcoin coming into the marketplace. So not only is there less people selling, but there's less being created. And it's kind of this double whammy. And even if demand just stays the same, it has a notable

Starting point is 00:16:01 a notable pull on the price to the upside. And if people notice that and you start to grab some mainstream media articles, then that FOMO can pile in, just like we saw in 2017, and you see these parabolic rises where people are trying to scoop up as much as possible. And eventually, it gets unsustainable and you see the cycle continues. So we'll see if that plays out again, this having. I feel like it will, maybe not in the exact timeframes that people expect. Like Mr. Novograd's here, I don't think that the end of the year will see a new all-time high yet, but again, maybe early next year. We'll see. Either way, I'm still super bullish on Bitcoin. How about you? Especially, especially in light of how things are going with the regular macro,

Starting point is 00:16:56 the macro outlook on the global economy right now. If we just look to the Fed, again, the Fed increased its balance sheet to a record $5.86 trillion. dollars. So in the three weeks since the Fed's effort to limit the economic damage from the outbreak as the outbreak kicked into overdrive, the central bank's balance sheet has mushroomed by roughly $1.5 trillion. It is now the equivalent of a quarter or more the size of the U.S. economy before the crisis struck and will certainly grow larger in the weeks ahead as the Fed keeps piling on assets and the economy likely shrinks. The central bank continued to snap up treasury securities, mortgage bonds, and other assets according to the data released on Thursday. The Fed's holdings

Starting point is 00:17:47 of mortgage-backed securities increased to $1.46 trillion from $1.38 trillion. The treasury holdings rose from $3.34 trillion from $2.98 trillion. So again, this is money being created out of and pumped into markets and is looking like the Fed is increasingly helping out other central banks as well and stopping at really nothing to prevent this crash from happening. And again, what else are they to do? Their job is to try and prop this thing up. But it's a result of just years and years of bad calls and negligence. and poor monetary policy built on top of a terrible money, right?

Starting point is 00:18:43 It's built on top of an unsound money that can be printed as much as possible. And when you start to feel pain, when the economy starts to feel a little bit of pain, the Fed increasingly keeps jumping in and trying to fix it when really had it just from the get-go, let things kind of self-correct. it wouldn't have snowballed like this, but this is the mess we're in. And at this point, they've really got no choice but to try and do this. And I don't know how this ends, but I do know that the Bitcoin block reward having continues to chug along. It's now less than 40 days out. And nothing can affect the monetary policy of Bitcoin. And it's crazy

Starting point is 00:19:34 because in the face of unprecedented money printing, we are doing something called a lot of people I've heard lately calling it quantitative hardening instead of quantitative easing. We are restricting the supply of new money and Bitcoin is quickly becoming one of the most scarce assets in the world. This having marks the point where it will be below. the target inflation rate by most central banks, and it will also be below the inflation rate, the stock to flow rate of gold. So a pretty notable having to witness, and I'm excited to witness

Starting point is 00:20:19 it in 39 days, and excited to witness the effects of it as it plays out over the year to a year and a half following that. And I hope you'll be there with me. So I'm going to wrap it up there, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Please do hit like, subscribe, and share if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening audio only on the podcast, of course, like that, share it, subscribe. And please do take the time to drop a review and leave some stars because that really helps with visibility and get more people listening. Other than that, if you want to help with the show, you can hit up with the sponsors I mentioned down below. That was Ledden and Coinberry. Both of those have some pretty smoking deals. And you can check out Wasabi Wallet as well to get your

Starting point is 00:20:59 Bitcoin privacy. If you really loved what you saw, you can drop me a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip at my tibbin.combe page. That's tippin.comme slash at BTC sessions. With that, I'm out. Have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you guys next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Fund On Toronto Stock Exchange, Blue Wallet Integrates Hodl Hodl, Mike Novogratz Eyes $20K in 2020 EP039

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