BTC Sessions - Ecoinometrics: $41K BTC This Year, Bithumb Exchange Raided, DeFi Circus Continues EP092

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN offers Bitcoin backed loans – Sign up and get $50 free https://bit.ly/31QduW7 Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Buy a Cobo Vault to secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH Crypto Cloaks: Get the BEST Bitcoin swag out there https://www.cryptocloaks.com/shop/ If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions SHOW RESOURCES: Ecoinometrics projects $41K bitcoin by the end of the year https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-mirrors-gains-of-past-halvings-suggesting-41k-price-in-2020 Korean Exchange Bithumb raided by police https://www.coindesk.com/police-raid-headquarters-for-bithumb-koreas-largest-exchange European stock exchange adds first Bitcoin product https://decrypt.co/40517/major-european-stock-exchange-lists-first-bitcoin-product $500M in BTC now tokenized for DeFi projects https://cointelegraph.com/news/messari-500m-in-btc-tokenized-for-defi-is-just-the-beginning The DeFi circus continues with massive misallocation of capital https://cointelegraph.com/news/27m-of-sushi-funds-could-disappear-at-the-drop-of-a-chef-s-hat https://decrypt.co/40526/new-defi-protocol-locks-in-500m-in-hours Everyone’s fav adult site now accepts Bitcoin https://decrypt.co/40591/pornhub-adds-bitcoin-proving-satoshi-nakamoto-right Bcash set to fork… yet again! https://cointelegraph.com/news/roger-ver-to-bitcoin-abc-stick-a-fork-in-it-you-re-done

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is 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.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services, and I've been using and working with these guys for well over a year.

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Honey Badger. I guess it's a statue, but it also has a shelving unit or a like a little drawer in it it and you can store your hardware wallets in there for easy access. So I'm very excited to get going with that. Check them out and follow them on Twitter. They're awesome on Twitter at CryptoCloaks. CryptoCloak guys, thank you for joining the show. And finally, of course, we have the Kobo Vault. I have done an in-depth tutorial on the cobo vault, it is 100% air-gapped, meaning you never plug it into your computer, which means that your private keys are not at risk. The keys to your money are not at risk because they're never connected to the internet. You communicate entirely through QR codes, just scanning and approving. And the other thing that I really love about these guys other than

the secure element is that they have interoperability with some of my face. favorite wallets. You can do Bitcoin Core, you can do Electrum on desktop, you can do Wasabi Wallet. Obviously I love Wasabi Wallet and Blue Wallet on mobile. It's beautiful. My favorite interfaces. Of course they've got their own dedicated app, but for me, I love my wallets that I'm using and using the Kobo with it has been an absolute dream. So do check them out. And they're doing a giveaway. So heads up, free shit coming your way, okay? For every show, every show for the next three months, they will be giving away one of these bad boys, the Kobo Tablet Plus. So this is, I'll just read a little bit of it. Compared to the Kobo Tablet,

the Kobo Tablet Plus is redesigned with a slot for each letter tile for your backup phrase, so your backup of your wallet, as opposed to a slot for every four. Even the 304 grade steel, even if the 304 grade steel that it's made of gets warped, the lettered tiles won't budge from their frame. And they built this product specifically because James and Lop tested out a lot of these seed storage devices out there and they found that the old version not as secure from warping and stuff like that. The letters could come loose.

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Let's move into the news. So Bitcoin price has dropped. We were skirting around the 12K range. We went up a little bit above it the other day, but we had like a drop of 4%, or more at this point. We actually dropped like $800-something. We were around the $11,100 something range. But we've come back up since then. In fact, while recording this, we're around $11.3.

and close to 114. So we have bounced off this. And when you zoom out, really not that scary, guys. It's Bitcoin being Bitcoin. It's going to oscillate quite a bit. But let's look a little bit deeper here. Again, there is a rejection at 12K resistance. It's going to take a little bit to get above that. Once we clear that, it could be a sizable move. So just buy a hat and hold on for that moment. Anyways, just a few points about that. Bitcoin is facing selling pressure at press time, having failed to move above a long-held resistance level on Tuesday, previously. The leading cryptocurrency is currently trading at around 11390. Again, I just see it's now over 114, representing roughly a 4% decline. The sell-off coincided with a report that South Korean

authorities have seized Bit Hum, one of the country's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume. It says here, we are seeing a significant unwinding of leverage positions in Bitcoin and major alt coins on the Bithum news. That's from Matthew Dib, co-founder of Stack, a provider of cryptocurrency trackers and index funds. Now, the other thing here is there's also been some strength in the US dollar and Bitcoin has been kind of like an inverse correlation relationship with the strength of the US dollar as of late. But I, I, I wouldn't give too much credence to that. I've re-said that it was correlating with the S&P,

and that was a narrative for a while. Bitcoin is being Bitcoin. At some point, it's going to correlate with everything. That doesn't mean there's an actual causation there. So I would zoom out and look at the bigger picture here. As we said, again, police reportedly rate the headquarters of BitHom, South Korea's largest exchange. Just a few points here.

Newspaper in Seoul reported Wednesday that officers from the... the sole Metropolitan Police Agency's intelligent crime investigation unit had raided BitHum's headquarters located in the capital's central Gangnam District. The police action was apparently linked to a $25 million token sale hosted by BitHum and a proposed acquisition by a Singapore platform that never materialized. Per a report from the news, some investors said they lost millions participating in the sale. So not great for Bit Hum. But again, these exchange failures are going to continue to happen

and the market will continue to shrug them off. I'm again skeptical that this is actually a cause of the Bitcoin cell, maybe partly localized there. But honestly, does the market really care if stuff like this happens? people know that a single exchange in a single country is not Bitcoin failing. So I'm kind of dismissive of the causality linked here in the previous article. Anyways, let's move on here. Now, Bitcoin, I guess we're not really moving on.

This is just more positive price move. Bitcoin is mirroring gains of past halvings, which is suggesting a $41,000 price within this year, like before year end. There's a lot of people that are very bullish. I just listened to a podcast from The Swan Signal, Swan Bitcoin. Excellent with Andy Edstrom, author of Why Buy Bitcoin, and with Preston Pish. And if you haven't heard it yet, listen to it. These guys are bullish as hell.

And Preston, who's a genius when it comes to this kind of thing, is saying he would be very surprised not to see Bitcoin going above previous all-time highs by Christmas. That would be very exciting. Again, anything can happen, but, man, I'm feeling the fomo. I've got to say. Anyways, let's read a little bit further on. Performance remains on track. The stock-to-flow model shows, as creator plan B tells investors,

patience is a virtue. Bitcoin is charting its way directly between the previous two block subsidy halvings that sent its price an order of magnitude higher. In a tweet on September 2nd Plan B, creator of the Stock to Flow model, told investors to be patient when it comes to price appreciation. Despite bouncing near $11,000 support today, Bitcoin has performed exactly as expected on monthly timeframes since the last having event in May.

Reluctance to break the 12,000 level has characterized price action since, but progress on the monthly chart is plain to see. And plan B, I'm going to just go to his tweet here. Bring it up. Sorry, my browser is slow because I have so many tabs going. Here we go. Reminder, we are still early. Only four months after Bitcoin 2020 having nicely between the 2012 and 2016 paths.

Patience is a virtue. This from Plan B. And so what we see charting here. and the various colors, we see the halving would be the starting point of this chart that I'm looking at. We see a sharp incline from the 2012 to 2016 kind of Bitcoin epoch between those cuts and issuance. Now, 2012 had two massive rallies. They had one from single digits up to around $200-something, and they had one from, again, double digits all the way up to around $1,200, at the absolute peak, which represented like a 9,000% increase.

Now, the percentage increase was not as crazy in the 2016 to 2020 period, but, but, but, but dollar-wise, it represented a massive increase from around at the time of the halving, I think it was around six or seven hundred dollars to around $20,000, which was, I'm gonna say, eyeballing it here. I mean, it was over 2,000% from the having, but I think probably 22, 2,300%, which is insane in a matter of around 18 months. Okay. Now, furthermore to this article,

there was somebody else who chimed in here. So over the weekend, meanwhile, another chart painted an even more bullish outlook for Bitcoin, taking Miggs having as a a starting point, data analysis resources, ecoinometrics produced a price target of $41,000 for the end of this year. They just said simply looking solid and added this chart. Let me bring it up. Let's hope my browser isn't slow as hell. Damn you, Chrome.

Okay, here we go. Okay, so this, what they're doing here is they're charting using averages from the last couple halvings, average price move. So the tweet here says Bitcoin after the having August 31st, 2020, 111 days after the third halving is at 11732. Of course, we're down from that a little bit. But average growth after the previous halings, that's what the kind of the middle line here is.

And then it shows our current trajectory so far. So it says third having, we are here at 117 roughly. And they plot out a few points. One is December 31st, 2020. They're projecting somewhere in the ballpark of $41,000. By mid-April, 2021, they're projecting $100,000. And by mid-May, 2021, they're projecting $387,000. Now, this is a lot.

It does also somewhat line up with what Plan B was projecting, where he says, my kind of baseline for this half, should it kind of fall into his stock to flow cross-asset model that he put together. If that model holds relatively well, 288,000 would be kind of like the baseline, and then it could overshoot that by up to double, which would kind of fall in line to their projections here on this from the E-Coenometrics projections that they've got going. Now, will this happen? Again, take it with a grain of salt. I'm super excited for this next year, but I'm also trying not to get so excited and plan my life around it.

So take it with a grain of salt. If you're bullish on Bitcoin, then tread carefully. I'm excited about it. I'm trying to maintain some degree of being humble. But yeah, it could be a very big year. but just know that all of this could go out the window at the drop of a hat. So just be cautious. Either way, exciting times ahead.

We'll see what happens. Let's move on. A major European stock exchange lists the first Bitcoin product. So a little bit from here. I'm going to butcher this name. Winer Bors. I want to say Wiener, but I think it's Winer. Winer Bors, one of the largest central European-based stock exchanges today,

listed its first cryptocurrency product. While this appears like a strong adoption signal, the article here makes the argument, these exchange-traded products might also be the latest event in a growing trend that ultimately devalues cryptocurrency, some regional experts say. So moving on here, it says, issued by Swiss-based fintech firm 21 shares AG, this single asset product will trade under the ticker symbol ABTC.

It seeks to track both the investment, results of Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and the second place contender, Ethereum. So they will, the clients of Weiner Bors, will now be able to get exposure to cryptocurrency from a regulated trading platform without having to directly buy the cryptocurrency on their own. Now, I wanted to highlight something said further down in the article. It says basically it's a security product to own non-custodial in brackets Coinbase. They'd be the custodian Bitcoin. That means that you now have three intermediaries, although the basic idea is to empower the individual, to eliminate intermediaries and all those financial constructs that led to the banking crisis in 2008.

Now, the point is that the creation of ETPs could potentially lead cryptocurrency into the same, traditional finance mismanagement that Bitcoin was purportedly created to prevent. Now, I have a bit of a pushback to this idea. Now, could it lead to the same mismanagement? 100% traditional finance isn't going to behave any differently, at least in my view, in the short term, regarding whether it be Bitcoin and actual hard money that can't be created or can't be inflated. However, this time around, if somebody does something irresponsible and it doesn't go their way, there is no lender of last resort to get them out of it. You can't print more Bitcoin just because you made a bad call and over leveraged yourself to hell. And so while Bitcoin doesn't

prevent these derivative products and rehypublication built on top of it, what it does do is it holds people accountable when they over leverage themselves and make a bad call. If you make that bad call, too bad, there's only a certain amount of Bitcoin. And I think we're going to see Bitcoin as more of like a Trojan horse in the traditional finance industry where people that are used to getting away with bloody murder will now be held accountable and they won't realize it until their time has come. And I'm excited for that moment. I don't know about you. Speaking of craziness and traditional finance being insane, what else is insane is DFI. I'm going to keep talking about DFI because I think it's going to be like the absolute

center for my popcorn consumption this next 18 months because it is so irrational. It's insane. So this article from Masari is talking about tokenized Bitcoin. And so what is tokenized Bitcoin? It's basically Bitcoin held with a custodian and a token issued representing that Bitcoin. So it's not actual Bitcoin. It's a promise of getting Bitcoin later. So reading a little bit here, Cryptoanalytic's firm Misari estimates that $500 million worth of Bitcoin has been tokenized on the Ethereum network for use in decentralized finance protocols.

The firm's latest report points out, however, that, this figure represents just 0.3% of Bitcoin's $216 billion market cap, meaning there is ample opportunity for projects that facilitate the migration of Bitcoin onto Ethereum to capture significant value. And again, the term migrate Bitcoin onto Ethereum, nothing is actually migrating onto Ethereum. Somebody's holding that Bitcoin and then giving you a token, okay? Just to be clear. Anyways, according to DefiPulse, popular Bitcoin tokenization protocols wrapped Bitcoin, or WBTC and WBTC and REN VM are the 9th and 10th largest DFI project by locked funds with 453 million and 234.4 million respectively. WBTC has seen an explosion in use over the past month with value of funds locked in the protocol

gaining nearly 470% from 40.9 million at the start of August. WBTC also absorbed 274 million in capital in the last month, increasing the value of its locked funds by 157%. During August, the number of Bitcoin being tokenized via WBTC briefly exceeded the rate at which new Bitcoin are mine, signposting booming demand for Bitcoin in the DFI space. And again, as I was talking about traditional finance and people allocating funds and being irresponsible with them,

the same fallout will come to people in DFI that put Bitcoin into it and maybe are trusting either a centralized entity to hold those funds or some sort of a smart contract to lock them up. If either of those fail, there's no extra Bitcoin coming your way to make you whole. So please, please beware. And we're going to keep talking about this craziness because this is more than just Bitcoin tokenized on Ethereum. There is yield farming going on, which is essentially locking up some sort of capital, whether it be Bitcoin or Ether, and being paid out interest in some sort of a newly issued token, which supposedly has value, but has Dick All for liquidity.

One such one is called sushi. Yes. Okay, so what happened here? Apparently, $27 million worth of sushi funds could disappear at the drop of a hat, or specifically a chef's hat, and we'll see what that means in a minute. Reading here it says from CoinTelegraph, data analysts and partner at cinnamon, oh man, cinnamon chain, oh God, ventures, sorry for that. Adam Cochran took a deep dive into the administrative wallet of sushi swap, a protocol that has gained a lot of traction and $1 billion of liquidity in the past few days, a billion dollars in a few days of existence. Moving on. The analysis of Uniswap clone, the Unisop clone, emerged from a revelation by Twitter that user Sasa,

that the deployer wallet, or the person issuing the tokens, has around $27 million of sushi tokens, which could be dumped into the pool at a moment's notice. Cochran said that he first looked at the smart contract. He assumed that the developer fund was going to a wallet that was locked by guy. Governance vote or time lock or something like that. Definitely not the case. His analysis revealed that it actually is just a generic wallet that the anonymous Sushi Swap Administrator,

or the person named as Chef Nomi, as he's known on Twitter, or she, I don't know, has the cryptographic keys for. This means that investors could potentially be dumped on without warning. So again, like a lot of these protocols are launching with almost no audit and people are just dumping millions of dollars into them. It is so much like the ICO craze of 2017. I can't believe my eyes. And furthermore, there's another one called, what is it called?

It's kimchi. People are just slapping stupid names on these things and people are buying them. They're like forking the protocols. It's like when Bitcoin Cash forked and people thought it was valuable and then Bitcoin gold forked and people thought it was valuable. And then eventually the fad faded. And everybody realized none of it was valuable. So anyways, reading here, if you haven't heard of kimchi, the DFI farming token,

that's because it didn't exist yesterday. Today, it reportedly locked in $500 million in value from staking before tumbling down to a mere $150 million or so. Its growth trajectory mirrors other recent DFI projects, notably Yam, the token that searched passed $150 in just a couple of days before crashing down to zero in a not-so-sweet potato within 24 hours. Yeah. So something that didn't exist yesterday briefly had half a billion dollars pumped into it worth of liquidity in a 24-hour period and then dropped by two-thirds.

Again, if you play stupid games, you're going to win stupid prizes. Again, if you're dabbling in Defi, sweet Lord, just please be careful. Okay, those of you, I'm going to, please listen, let me cradle your hands, your head in my hands for a second. Please listen, if you're dabbling in this stuff and you must, if this is like, it's eating away at you to not be involved in this, I beg of you, take a certain amount of Bitcoin,

hopefully a sizable amount of the cryptocurrency that you own, sit it in Bitcoin and just dollar cost average into that and ignore the noise with those funds. Those never leave this pre-allocated long-term set of funds, set of sets that you just hold on to for a long time, decades possibly. And then you have your other money that goes into crap like this. Again, I'm not touching this shit.

But if you are, please treat it as gambling because that is what it is. I know people see other people making stupid amounts of money. But it can just as easily burn you incredibly, incredibly bad. So exercise caution and realize that it is indeed gambling. And if you do it, treat it like a slot. machine. You're not expecting much out of it and you definitely wouldn't be putting your life savings into it. Last couple things to touch on. Adult content platform Pornhub announced today that it

began accepting Bitcoin and Likecoin as payment methods for its premium subscription service. Quote here, to further expand our cryptocurrency options for Pornhub premium, we're excited to announce that we accept Bitcoin and Likecoin as payment methods, the platform tweeted. This is not the first time Pornhub penetrated. Oh, man, this writer. The first time Pornhub has penetrated the crypto space. Back in April 2018, the platform began accepting Verge, a rebranded version of Dogecoin's hard fork, Dogecoin Dark,

announcing that the future has come. Let's move on. Roger Bear to Bitcoin ABC. Stick a fork in it. You're done. Bitcoin Cash, if you didn't know, it's forking again. so history lesson Bitcoin was Bitcoin for a long time

some people a small number of people wanted bigger blocks and didn't see the problem inherent in constantly bumping up block size in that you wouldn't be able to run a node eventually it would become prohibitively difficult to do so because of latency issues and and upload and download times and so and so forth

besides the fact what resulted in that is a group of people essentially created an alt coin called Bitcoin Cash. They took the existing user balances and duplicated them and said, if you have Bitcoin, you have the same number of Bitcoin Cash, which they said was the real Bitcoin. The market has since decided it was indeed not the real Bitcoin.

I think it's around 3% of a Bitcoin now. But also throughout that, there was more infighting, I guess it's just in the blood of people, that were following this forth. There was more infighting, and another split was caused, and Bitcoin Cash was, again, duplicated into something called Bitcoin SV, which was spearheaded by Roger Ver.

No, what am I saying? Roger Verre, one and the same, whatever. Roger Verre is the Bitcoin Cash Cap, and you had Craig Wright, the imposter, Satoshi Nakamoto, that was heading up Bitcoin SV or Satoshi's Vision. Well, now, Bitcoin Cash, the one with Roger Verre, is once again forking, and this is around the idea that they want to fund developers, not Roger Verr himself, but the other people that are forking off to create another coin, they want to fund developers by every time a miner mines a block,

8% of that revenue would go to a developer fund, which sounds a lot to me like tax. So I'm actually kind of with Roger on this one in that that sounds like a terrible idea. So anyways, here's what it says a little bit in this article. So Bitcoin ABC, the dispute over ABC's Coinbase rule would divert 8% of all newly mined Bitcoin cash to a development fund come November. Various tweet came in response to Bitcoin ABC uploading its latest 0.22.1 release, which will activate the Coinbase rule on November 15th. what, November 15th, there's going to be two different coins here. Now, again, people were saying, yeah, again, Roger's tweet said Bitcoin, ABC and Dedelnix, anyways, he's a developer with them,

have announced that they're forking away from Bitcoin cash on November 15th. We wish them good luck, and with their new coin, and thank them for the free air drop to all BCH holders. Now, Roger here is assuming that he's going to maintain the mantle of the name Bitcoin Cash, whereas Bitcoin ABC people are forking off are saying that they're the real Bitcoin Cash, it's a mess. Anyways, it'll be interesting. And again, I guess another source of my soon-to-be popcorn dependency. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you're here on YouTube, please do remember to hit like, subscribe, and share. Those things really, really do help. So please do them. I can't stress it enough. Now, if you want to help the show in another way, you can

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Have yourselves a wonderful evening, a wonderful day, wherever you are, and I will see you next time for your daily session.