BTC Sessions - Capital Controls in Egypt, Bitcoin Recovery Continues WITHOUT Stimulus, Coinjoin Day EP036

Episode Date: March 31, 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: Egypt enacts capital controls to avoid bank runs https://decrypt.co/23960/egypt-controlling-cash-flow-makes-case-for-bitcoin US Unemployment could reach as high as 32% or 47 million people https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-job-losses-could-total-47-million-unemployment-rate-of-32percent-fed-says.html Fed tries to fix economy buying mortgage backed securities, ends up triggering margin calls by those companies hedging https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/29/mortgage-bankers-warn-fed-purchases-of-mortgages-unbalanced-market-forcing-margin-calls.html Bitcoin has rallied 80% since its bottom – all WITHOUT a stimulus package https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-rallied-80-without-any-govt-bailout-time-to-get-bullish Bitcoin core now available on the dark web via Tor browser https://decrypt.co/23936/bitcoin-core-shifts-to-dark-web-to-resist-censorship Swan Bitcoin’s “presidential” promo video https://twitter.com/SwanBitcoin/status/1244695336104251392 Coinjoin Day is coming on April 5th! Start learning so you can partake! Wasabi Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQHAzSckK0 Samourai Wallet https://samouraiwallet.com/

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Hottle their Bitcoin. Before we dive into the news of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.i.o, this is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've got their Bitcoin savings accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin backed loans. This is where you can use your Bitcoin. backed loans. This is where you use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar

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you're buying with Bitcoin I've seen stuff as low as so Amazon gift cards Walmart gift cards for like 20 30 40% off it's pretty wild and outside of that you can check out their built with Bitcoin mission to build a hundred schools entirely paid for with Bitcoin really cool initiative put forth by Paxful so great to see them doing some good in the Bitcoin space and with that was a dive into the news. So we're going to start off today's show. Oh, I should say I'm not at home right now. I'm at the in-laws cabin out of town. I thought some extreme social distancing would be nice for a little bit. So yes, I'm working out of town for a portion of this week at least.

Anyways, I wanted to start today with a little bit of news in the realm of why we Bitcoin. Why are we using Bitcoin? And the first of which is Egypt is now controlling cash flow. Because a lot of people are panicking, going to banks and taking out cash. Well, now they're clamping down on that. So what we see here, this article on decrypt I'm looking at, they say Egypt has temporarily limited, and I like the temporarily, who knows how long, Egypt has temporarily limited daily withdrawals in a strategy to suppress hoarding amid the COVID-19 crisis. It's also not the first country to worry about its banking system. On Sunday, Egypt's central bank ordered banks to provisionally limit daily withdrawals.

These thresholds are 10,000 Egyptian pounds, which is around 635 US dollars, for individuals, and 50,000 pounds, which is around 3175 US, for individuals. businesses. Meanwhile, the daily ATM withdrawals, so this is different, the first, uh, the first numbers were for going directly into the bank. This is for ATM. ATM withdrawals are capped at just 5,000 pounds, which is around 317 US dollars. Now, as I said, Egypt is not the first country to start doing stuff like that and to be worrying about this. We've seen, I previously talked about an article that was on CNN, more or less just begging people not to do a bank run and reassuring them of what was going on. And then outside of that, and then outside of that, we also

saw the FDIC put out a very odd video, again, reassuring people that there is absolutely no need to take your money out of the banks and that everything's insured and everything is hunky-dory. But a lot of Bitcoiners saw that as a little bit of a red flag and you've definitely seen people taking out more cash from the banks lately there's been some banks that have limited withdrawals especially in particular particular areas and we did see a bit of a run on cash in and around the new york area earlier in the last couple of weeks where especially wealthier people were trying to take out tens of thousands of dollars and found very quickly that they were not able to do so in as far as those numbers go now moving on to some of the other craziness that's how

happening in the markets and in relation to job losses. So we have a report from the Fed. They said that coronavirus economic freeze could cost 47 million jobs and send the unemployment rate past 32%. That's according to the St. Louis Fed projections. There are nearly 67 million Americans working in jobs that are at high risk of layoffs, according to the analysis. Now, the Fed President James Bullard said last week that the initial estimates are grim, but the plunge should be short-lived I mean hopefully, but I don't know. I mean The Fed everything that they've come out with initially has been backpedaled and rescinded because they keep on needing to print more money to deal with how much more of a steamroll effect this whole virus has had

So we will see, but the insane thing looking at this, obviously when you shut down the economy like this, there's going to be major consequences and having potentially 32% of people out of work is huge. But then you go and you look at the stock markets and they rally again today and why? Because the Fed is printing money and where's that money going? Yes, there's some money going into the hands of Americans, but by and large, it's actually going to banks and and larger corporations that are then buying up equities and you're seeing rallies like this. And the interesting thing about this is the fact that when you go and you try to tell people that this money printing is making the economy better, but they're out of work and they've got a measly $1,200 check and they can't afford anything because they have no income.

It's and all you're doing is just kind of putting off their loans for a little bit That's not They're not gonna have the wool pulled over their eyes for too long Because it it doesn't matter to them that equities are soaring back to previous levels I mean not yet, but if they did it wouldn't matter to the average American that the stock market is performing well if they don't have any friggin money to buy any sort of external assets in their living paycheck to paycheck as is the case for a lot of people The average American can't afford a $400 surprise expense. So what happens when you have potentially 32% of people

that were working out of work? The other thing to think about this is, yes, people may get a $1,200 check, but that's not nearly gonna cover it because all of those people that on average cannot handle a $400 surprise expense, they have rent coming up. They're gonna have it in a couple days here.

year, they're going to have it again next month. And if you're out of work, even for the month, well, that's going to make it very difficult to pay that rent. I'm willing to wager that most people that get that $1,200 check are not going to blow it on rent if they know they can't be evicted or taken out of their homes. And they're going to spend it on food and other necessities, I would imagine is the smart thing to do. And then what happens when those real estate companies that we're expecting that rent to come in are not getting it. It does start to have a domino effect. So we will see what happens with this.

But again, you see this weird catering to the corporations that needed to be bailed out last time. And you see the American people that are kind of just left. I mean, they are getting some money directly. But it's this perversion of capitalism where you have, companies that privatize the gains and socialize the losses where they get to make all the money on the way up and then as soon as shit hits the fan because they're leveraged to the tits and they don't save money for a rainy day and well they turn

to the government and the government says well I mean you're too big to fail so we'll just print a bunch of money and give it to you we saw this in 2008 through 2014 and we're seeing it again now and will it be successful Will it temporarily bail out the stock market? Maybe, I mean, the Fed's pretty good at kicking the can down the road. But the interesting thing this time around is even injecting just a little bit of that money into Main Street, into regular citizens. It benefits them in the short term and maybe that's what's needed, but it will contribute to inflation because it's no longer just funneled towards equities. It's now out in the regular day-to-day economy as people buy goods and services.

So deflation followed by inflation, perhaps. Time will tell. Now, the funny thing about the Fed trying to hodgepodge things together and fix everything all at once, assuming that it can fix the market is it's also making mistakes in the process. I mean, I would argue that printing trillions of dollars is already a mistake in and of itself. But a funny thing that happened here is the Fed went in and they're purchasing, purchasing, mortgage-backed securities. And this is the asset that was largely contributing to the bailouts or rather the assets that were contributing to the problems last time that required

QE. Well, this time, a lot of these companies have hedged their bets. And when the Fed swooped in and bought up all of these mortgage-backed securities, it triggered the opposite side of the deal where you have companies that hold these securities and then they're also holding an inverse of that where if if the mortgage-backed securities drop then they actually make money on that as well just in case that happens well when the Fed swooped in and overdid that buying it triggered a bunch of margin calls on the other hand and so a lot of these companies are now facing margin calls and have no liquidity to meet them and so shit is kind of hitting the fan because the Fed isn't even properly balancing what it's doing and what it's buying. So it's just funny to see them

try and go, oh, we'll buy this to fix it and then they cause a whole other shit storm to happen on the opposite side of the spectrum. So we'll see. We'll see how the Fed handles this moving forward. But again, this is why we Bitcoin. And in the face of all this, Bitcoin has since the bottom of the sell-off has rallied 80% with with no government bailouts. So, so I just wanted to highlight this. This was Peter Schiff sent out a tweet a little while ago. He said, congratulations Bitcoin Hodlars. It looks like Bitcoin may actually be living up to its status as a non-correlated asset after all. Every asset class is rallying today except for Bitcoin and he neglects to mention the fact that Bitcoin has of course rallied 80% since the bottom of that mass sell-off.

It's important to note that in a crisis like this, correlation all tends to trend to zero because if you need cash and you need to buy day-to-day goods, you're going to sell off any liquid asset that you have in order to obtain that. And so that's what we saw. We saw stocks, we saw we saw gold and we saw Bitcoin. There was no holds barred in what was being sold off. And so yes, Bitcoin dropped. But there was no stimulus offered to Bitcoin and it has recovered 80% since then, or has rallied 80% since then, which is very interesting to see when the stock market has, you know,

it went from 30K for the Dow all the way down to 18. It's back up around 22 with trillions of dollars. printed and injected into the market, whereas Bitcoin didn't require that. It's starting to come back up. At the time of recording this video, I mean, we're in and around the 6,500 range. The big drop happened around kind of the 8K range and then just dumped to four. So it cut in half, but we've regained a fair amount of that ground. We will see if that holds up.

But again, the beauty of Bitcoin is that it's not at the whims of, of a central bank trying to play with monetary policy to fix it, it lets the market handle it on its own. And if it dips down, it dips down, but I would rather have a set in monetary policy that can't be tinkered with than what the Fed is trying to do right now. We don't need bailouts in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin clears out the people that were over leveraged or the people that weren't confident in it and the people that remain are the ones that actually see value in the asset itself. So with that said, we're going to move on a little bit. Actually, I did want to touch on, sorry, considering that Peter Schiff tweet. This article on CoinTalograph goes on to say, unknowingly to Schiff, he just made the most fundamentally bullish case for Bitcoin, as the global markets rising last week was the direct result in,

trillions of dollars being printed out of thin air. Bitcoin, however, doesn't need stimulus packages, quantitative easing, or bailouts. Bitcoin bounced back 80% from its recent bottom, showing that Bitcoin has something a lot more powerful than these things. It has believers in its value proposition. So basically what I just reiterated there. Anyways, let's move on. I just wanted to highlight this, that Bitcoin Core, the website, has now been ported to the dark web, meaning that you can, can access it on the dark web using Tor browser, which is excellent. I'm actually kind of, I didn't realize

that it was not on the dark web already, but good to see. So a little bit from this decrypt article. After frequent requests, bickoing.org is now available and reachable as a Tor hidden service through an onion address. As well as adding another means of censorship resistance,

a hidden service gives an alternative trust path that doesn't rely on certificate authorities nor DNS infrastructure. Certificate authorities check that websites are genuine while DNS infrastructure is what connects IP addresses to domain names such as Bitcoincore.org. By making the site accessible via the dark web, it becomes less reliant on these technologies. So good for the decentralization and censorship resistance of Bitcoin in that you can reach it even if you're not going through approved search engines, it is reachable and you can download and verify the software on your own. So kudos to the Bitcoin core team for making that possible.

Now I wanted to give a shout out to Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin, if you haven't heard, new startup in the States and you can buy dollar cost average Bitcoin using their service. Anyways, they dropped a video on their social media today with a fake Barack Obama talking about getting into Bitcoin and how he's believing in Bitcoin. I thought it was pretty funny. Anyways, I will link to that tweet and that video down below. I also like all the references that he does to Tales from the Crypt and Udi Weathermer's VR Bitcoin meetup, all of that stuff.

I thought it was pretty fun. So be sure to check that out. And then finally, this is coming up and I will touch on it in the coming week as we approach, but April 5th, Sunday, April 5th, is going to be Coin Join Day. This was spurred on because some companies, finance and some others, were starting to flag UTXOs that after leaving their service were used in CoinJoin. And so what do Bitcoins do when they see some sort of a pushback on behalf of anyone? Well, they basically flip the bird and say, we're going to do it anyways.

And so Coin Join Day is happening on April 5th. And what this means is just if you haven't coin join, then coin join. If you have coin join, coin join again. Mix your coins. Make every spend a coin join. So I encourage you guys to check out and learn how to do coin join. I use Wasabi on my desktop. I use Samurai wallet on my mobile, although that is only for Android.

And then I have not yet tried Join Market, but it is another coin join implementation that you can check out. Essentially all it is is it breaks the links between yourself and your Bitcoins. It puts them into larger transactions and makes it indescipherable whose Bitcoin is whose. While never losing control of your coins, I should note that you do not give up control of your coins at any point during this process. they stay in your control and are entirely within your wallet. So I will link to Wassabi down below, also link to Samurai. I do not unfortunately yet have a tutorial on how to use Samurai as far as Whirlpool and Coin Join are concerned, but I will work on that over time.

And with that, I'm going to wrap up. Thank you guys very much for watching. As always, please do hit like, subscribe and share if you're on YouTube. If you're listening to this on the pod on audio only, of course, subscribe wherever you are, share it on your social media and if you can, please do drop a review on whatever platform you're listening because it really helps with visibility and would be great. Now if you want to help with the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors I mentioned before that was leaden and packsful as well as wasabi wallet.

And you can also check out NordVPN. helps hide your IP address, it encrypts your browsing data, and allows you to unlock geo-blocked content. I use it on my computer and my phone, and there's a deal if you use the link down below where you can get a pretty good deal. It ends up being $3.49 a month. I think it's like 80% off or something like that if you do that deal. But anyways, links down below, and if you do use that link, it will, of course, help the show. And with that, I am out. Have a wonderful evening, and I will see you guys next time for your daily session.