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

April 3, 20200 comments♥ 0
00:01Wasabi 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.
00:32to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan, and it was actually the first service I ever usedaround a year ago. I was in a pinch, and I needed to get my hands on dollars, but I really didn'twant to sell my Bitcoin because I felt it was a bad time. So what I was able to do was put myBitcoin into a dedicated address that I could audit 24-7. I received a loan within 24 hours,and upon repayment, I got all of my Bitcoin back. And finally, they've got their B2X offering.this uses the same loan platform to immediately buy you more Bitcoin, doubling your Bitcoin on the spot.So you Bitcoin Bulls out there might enjoy that.If you want to check out any of this, there's a link in the show notes down below.
01:11And 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, althoughit can vary.
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02:08So 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 dropsin 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.
02:43You know, not your keys, not your coins.But, you know, maybe for some of the boomers out there that just want some exposure to Bitcoinand 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.
03:14And 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 is10 million U.S. dollars. Yes, it's in U.S. dollars. Maximum size of the offering is 50 millionU.S. The closing date of the offering is anticipated to be April 9th, 2020. The fund's investmentobjectives are to provide holders of units with exposure to the digital currency Bitcoinand the daily price movements of the U.S. dollar price of Bitcoin and the opportunity for long-termcapital appreciation.3 IQ Corp will act as the investment manager and portfolio manager of the fund.
03:59Yeah, so they do have, they already do have digital asset private funds, but this will bethe 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.
04:30Moving 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.
05:00The lightning part of it, again, with the fixes that they made, you have the option ofcustodial 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.
05:30It'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 supportspeer-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 astrading. So yeah, really cool. Again, peer-to-peer, non-custodial. You can actually trade
06:20digital assets from within the actual app. So again, kudos to Blue Wallet and Hottle-Hottlefor 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
07:01has once again reiterated his bullish stance to the biggest cryptocurrency, predicting that Bitcoinshould retest its $20,000 highs by the end of 2020.In an April 2nd interview with CNBC's closing battle, Novagrads also expressed his confidencethat Bitcoin's price should at least double before October 2020.While Novogratz delivered yet another bullish prediction for Bitcoin, this time, the prominentcrypto 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
07:45reiterate here is this is not the first time that Mike has made sizable predictions. He actuallypredicted the exact same price point for the end of last year too. So, you know, take it with agrain 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 yearwe're going to see above 20K Bitcoin.Maybe early next year,but there's some reasoning behind that,
08:17and we're going to get into that in a second.But, yeah, I'm not so confidentthat 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 willhave impact over time. We discussed this on the show the other day about mining cell pressure and
08:43so and so forth. But yeah, I think this is great optimism, but high time preference. He seemsrelatively impatient. These things take time. If we look at the chart here, you cansee, 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 theground that we lost with that massive dump. And so, and I mean more so than the stock markets withtrillions of dollars being printed. That said, we are still low. We are still down for the year.
09:41And if you look over at the crypto fear and greed index, we're still heavily into the extremefear realm. So we're at a 14. Just to put that in its perspective, last month, we were at a 38. And theway that this index works is if it's extreme fear, then people may be overly fearful and it couldbe a buying opportunity. If it's extreme greed, then that could indicate irrational exuberancebeing over-exuberant about it and there may be a retracement in the cards or a bear market in thecards depending on when you're looking at it. So yeah, we've been in extreme fear for like a solidmonth now, especially since that huge dump. And we're seeing a bit of a resurgence, but people are stillfearful. They're still worried that it's going to dip. I'm, I mean, it wasn't nice to see it drop to 4K,
10:41but I, at no point during that, was I freaking out. So now let's touch on havings and havingstheir 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 ofnewly created Bitcoin gets cut in half. The existing supply of Bitcoin still exists at thatpoint, 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 to12 and a half. Sorry, four years after that, it got to cut to 25. In 2016, it got cut to 12 and a halfcoins every 10 minutes, which we're currently at, but that changes in May, it will drop to 6.25
11:31Bitcoin every 10 minutes. And this is baked in to the code. It cannot be changed. And so in the faceof the craziness that's happening with the Fed printing, you know, the Bitcoin monetary policyis 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.
12:11After 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 pricedecline from $1,100, the price had stabilized around $600. The price then started to see a strongrally in May 2017, exactly 11 months after the halving occurred, just like in 2012. So the pasttwo halings show that Bitcoin's price tends to see a vertical rally 10 to 11 months after the
13:07havings took place, but not immediately after. And so, as I said, it's not immediate, and that's becausea lot of, like all of the existing Bitcoin are still out there on the market and still beingopenly traded, but every 10 minutes, there's a little bit less Bitcoin that the market is accustomedto kind of swallowing up. And when you start to throw miners into the mix, it starts to make a lotmore sense. So miners make their revenue on newly created Bitcoin that they essentially mint themselvesby 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.
13:56And 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 topay to stay in that place and they may want to try and ride out the volatility and hope thatthe price goes up. But the selling pressure is mostly coming, or not mostly, but a lot ofthe 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.
14:43and 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 rewardedto 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.
15:13Bitcoin 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 startto 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 notforced to sell, which means that sell pressure starts to lift and there's less Bitcoin coming intothe 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
16:01a notable pull on the price to the upside. And if people notice that and you start to grab somemainstream media articles, then that FOMO can pile in, just like we saw in 2017, and you seethese 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-timehigh 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,
16:56the macro outlook on the global economy right now. If we just look to the Fed, again, the Fed increasedits 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 outbreakas 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. economybefore the crisis struck and will certainly grow larger in the weeks ahead as the Fed keeps piling onassets 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
17:47of mortgage-backed securities increased to $1.46 trillion from $1.38 trillion. The treasuryholdings rose from $3.34 trillion from $2.98 trillion. So again, this is money being created out ofand pumped into markets and is looking like the Fed is increasingly helping out other centralbanks 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?
18:43It'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 lessthan 40 days out. And nothing can affect the monetary policy of Bitcoin. And it's crazy
19:34because in the face of unprecedented money printing,we are doing something called a lot of people I've heard lately calling itquantitative hardening instead of quantitative easing.We are restricting the supply of new moneyand 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
20:19it in 39 days, and excited to witness the effects of it as it plays out over the year to a yearand 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 watchingthis 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 reallyhelps with visibility and get more people listening. Other than that, if you want to helpwith the show, you can hit up with the sponsors I mentioned down below. That was Ledden and Coinberry. Bothof those have some pretty smoking deals. And you can check out Wasabi Wallet as well to get your
20:59Bitcoin 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.