BTC Sessions - Economy Shows Echoes of Weimar | Udemy Bitcoin Demand Up 300% | Phoenix Lightning Wallet Adds Tor EP041

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. Before we dive into the news, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.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 where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. This is actually the first service I ever used with them.

Starting point is 00:00:38 It was around March of last year. I was in a pinch. I needed to get my hands on dollars, but I really didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because I was worried I wouldn't be able to buy it back later. Luckily, with this program, I was able to put it in a dedicated address that I could audit 24-7.

Starting point is 00:00:53 I obtained a Canadian dollar loan within 24 hours, and when I was able to pay back that loan in dollars, I got all of my Bitcoin back. In fact, the exact same U-TX-O. So outside of that, they've also got their B2X offering, and this is using the same loan mechanism, except for when you get the loan, it ends up buying more Bitcoin for you on the spot, essentially doubling your Bitcoin as you need it. And so that gives you access to experience the price fluctuations that come along with it.

Starting point is 00:01:24 If you want to check out any of these, there's a link in the show notes down below, and if you opt to use that link to get a Bitcoin back loan, they will give you $50 worth. of Bitcoin. Secondly, we've got CoinBerry. This has been my go-to to buy Bitcoin as of late, especially the past few months here in particular, trying to buy that dip. And with it, it comes with it. It's a fantastic website, very easy to navigate. It also has a paired app, which makes it very convenient on the go. Now, this is just in Canada, so sorry you Americans or people across the pond that are watching this. But if you're in Canada, I highly, recommend you check them out. The thing that I really like, a couple of them, one of them is the

Starting point is 00:02:07 speed of the e-transfers when funding my account. In my experience, I've only ever had to wait around 20 minutes, which is pretty impressive, to be honest. And besides that, they've also got dollar cost averaging. It's called autopilot here, so you can fund your account and then set specific intervals at which you would like to buy and the amounts at which you would like to buy. So it kind takes the emotion out of stacking stats. So be sure to check that out. And And if you use the link in the show notes, you'll actually get $20 free after your first $100 purchase. With that, let's dive into this show.

Starting point is 00:02:43 So first thing I wanted to touch on was this fantastic post from Tales from the Crip, from Marty Bent. And this is his daily newsletter. Always gems here, but this one I found particularly interesting. He's talking about what's happening in the U.S. and around the world right now, with the economy and their response to the coronavirus and how it has very much echoes of what happened in the Weimar Republic after World War I. So those of you not familiar, essentially what happened is Germany went off the gold standard prior to the war to fund it, and they assumed

Starting point is 00:03:26 that upon winning the war, they would be able to easily pay themselves back. and not have to worry about it, but that's not what happened. They ended up losing the war, and then they were forced to pay reparations to the rest of the world. And so what ended up happening there is it was pretty thankless for people in the Weimar Republic. And so they ended up actually, as a show of resistance striking, they were encouraged by the government to step out of the workforce and essentially not work to repay this debt. at the same time the country was just printing tons of money to pay back the debt and plung it into the hands of everyday citizens. And what happened was hyperinflation. That was devastating for

Starting point is 00:04:14 everybody because, again, a limited amount of actual resources available and seemingly unlimited money. And so prices had to rise in the face of that. And while the U.S. is not exactly in the same position. They have basically racked up a ton of debt, a massive deficit that has to be paid back at some point, and essentially the economy is shut down. So again, echoes of this situation here, not exactly the same circumstances that led up to it, but nonetheless, you have a non-functioning economy and money being printed to fill the void and plunked into the hands of companies and individuals in the hopes of fixing the problem. And so while it's possible that this may not end in the same result, it's easy to draw the comparisons.

Starting point is 00:05:05 And I hope that it doesn't result in the same because in the process of that, it will hurt a lot of people. But the comparison is quite eerie. This tweet from Clay Space said, Why Mars hyperinflation was caused by a cocktail of zero economic activity and money printing. Sound familiar to any countries today? So I highly encourage you to read through this newsletter. In fact, I highly encourage you to subscribe to this newsletter because it is excellent and shout out to Marty Bent for putting it together every single day.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Now, moving on to more macro stuff, looking at the U.S. economy and mortgages in particular, the number of borrowers that are stopping making payments continues to rise. So I'll just read a little bit here. The number of U.S. homeowners who have stopped making mortgage payments is surging under the federal government's new forbearance program, according to a survey from Mortgage Bankers Association. The percentage of loans in forbearance grew to 2.66% as of April 1st, according to the MBA's forbearance and call volume survey. On March 2nd, the rate was 0.25%. So it's, wow, that's quite the increase. it's gone up, what is that, eight, ten, getting close to 11 times.

Starting point is 00:06:28 And for loans backed by Ginny May, which serves low and moderate income borrowers, the rate jumped to 4.25%. Pretty wild. Now, jumping ahead a little bit here, Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's analytics, forecast that as much as 30% of homeowners could stop paying their mortgages. borrowers with relatively low credit scores, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck are most likely to seek relief. Over the past two years, Ginny May has guaranteed $583 billion of 30-year mortgages with FICO scores below 715, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:07:12 So, yeah, I mean, we've only just begun to see the fallout from the economic shutdown, which continues and seems to be growing more. and more things being shut down on a worldwide basis, not just within the states. And again, those payments that need to be made to keep the economy growing because the economy in the U.S. and around the world is built and predicated on the idea that it has to keep growing in order to function. It's not particularly good when you have a crisis like this where people are just not paying and the only way out of it that the Fed sees right now is to more or less buy up bad debt,

Starting point is 00:07:55 buy up bad assets and essentially create liquidity and money that was not there before and plunk it into the hands of corporations and people which can only result in inflation of the prices of assets. So we will see how that plays out. And in relation to that, it was a pretty wild day when it came to equities and to the stock market today, the Dow and most other equities opened way up on the day, but then completely reversed and lost all of those gains to land just a little bit lower than open. At one point today, the Dow was up somewhere between 8,150 and 900 points, and it lost all of those gains by the time the market's closed. So pretty wild to see. Is this a reversal in the face of, is that how far the stimulus went or is there going to be more buying?

Starting point is 00:08:55 I don't know. But I guess we'll see how it plays out the rest of the week. Now, in the face of this, Bitcoin has been faring pretty well. Now, of course, equities have been going up all week. And they've seen some pretty crazy gains. And Bitcoin did drop a little bit today with the stock markets. but nowhere near as crazy, I would say. Now, there has been a lot of, I would say, bearish sentiment.

Starting point is 00:09:27 When I'm looking at people on Twitter, they're saying, hey, we're going to retest 4K, we're going to even go lower, we're going to have a double bottom, something like that, before we go back up. I don't know. I don't know. Could it be possible? Absolutely. But there are some people that are saying the inverse.

Starting point is 00:09:47 Now, we did break 7.3K. In fact, we went up to around 74, in the 7,400 range just yesterday. Now we're back down a little bit. We'll touch on that in a second. But some analysts are calling for higher price tags like 13.8. So back up to the highs that we saw in June of last year. So I'll just read a little bit here. Bitcoin almost touched 7,500.

Starting point is 00:10:17 yesterday, updating the highest level since March 12th. And on that day was the day that we broke below that level and went all the way down sub 4K to the lowest level in a year. Now, the largest cryptocurrency is about to double its value from the March low if it can get to that point. But it can go further than that. So one trader in particular said that the Bitcoin price might touch $13,800 by the end of June. So that's, that's coming up pretty quick here. Um, and so he, he kind of charted out what he saw.

Starting point is 00:10:53 I'll bring it up a little bit larger here. So, um, he sees this as just kind of a wave one and two of, of a larger structure. He sees that by kind of mid-May, end of May, we would be in around the 12k zone, um, drop back to around the mid-eighths and then extend all the way up to around, uh, 13-8. he called, which would have been the top of what we saw before and then some resistance there. Now, again, I'm not a huge TA guy, but it is interesting to look at these. I usually look at these kinds of things as just kind of something to keep me centered, because if I have in the back of my mind, oh, it might go to 4K, then I can kind of parse that when it happens and I'm not as panicked.

Starting point is 00:11:42 But if I think that it's just going to go up and up and up forever, then I get a little bit more panicky when I see these pullbacks and think, oh, how low is it going to go? How long are we going to have to wait? I find it far better to just, again, dollar cost average and ignore the noise. But it is interesting to look at this kind of stuff. Now, outside of the actual TA, the technical analysis here, the fundamentals are looking pretty decent. So there's a lot going on. with Bitcoin. Again, we've got the having coming up. We've got decreased selling pressure when it comes to miners. And then, I mean, just Bitcoin itself has grown and had so many things added to it in terms of layered scaling approaches and, you know, options for privacy since 2017, that it's better positioned even for this next runaround for your cycle to, you know, extend its gains, but we will see. We will see what happens. Who knows? Anyways, I wanted to move on a little bit. Now, in the same vein as that, demand for Bitcoin online courses has exploded by 300% on certain platforms. So let's dive into this a little bit.

Starting point is 00:13:04 Popular online learning platform, Udeme, told DeCript, it saw a four-fold increase in demand first Bitcoin and cryptocurrency courses in the past month alone. Now, outside of that, Coursera is a service that collates courses from universities worldwide. Similarly, saw a huge uptick in Bitcoin-based classes in the last four weeks. So they saw a large increase in total enrollments, but a 200% increase in blockchain cryptocurrency and Bitcoin courses specifically. So people at home looking to learn about something, maybe they've been putting off for quite some time. Now, again, to pop back and forth between the positive and the negative, we're still kind of in that extreme fear.

Starting point is 00:13:48 When you look at the crypto fear and greed index, we're still in the extreme fear side of the equation here. We're at around a 20, 0 being the absolute most fear you can have, 100 being the most greed. So that can be an indicator. One, I mean, people are still bearish, but it could be that they're a little overly bearish at this time, which could indicate a decent time to stack some more stats. I'm of the opinion. It's always a good time to stack stats. In fact, again, to back into the dollar cost averaging, if you just take all of this out of it and try to learn to ignore the noise too much, or not pay attention

Starting point is 00:14:28 too much to the noise, it'd probably be much better off. Now, looking at the chart, again, we're sub 7200 but we have again decisively broken above 7k and had had closures above the 7k levels so that's encouraging again i i won't be fully fully happy with this until we go above where we were before that massive dump so that'd be like well above $8,000 that will feel a lot better to be back in that range than sitting where we are right now because we haven't quite attained that. It would be nice to see us fully get rid of all of those losses since that crazy sell-off while the stock market is still trying to regain even a portion of that. Now, outside of the price talk and the economy, I did want to update on Phoenix Wallet. They just released a new version of their mobile lightning

Starting point is 00:15:31 wallet and it has built in support for Tor. This means that you can route through the Tor network and it hides your IP address and encrypts everything that you're doing, which is fantastic for privacy. So I highly recommend that you download the update if you have not already. And if you haven't used it, I did do a tutorial on Phoenix Wallet. Honestly, it's my favorite mobile lightning wallet. Now, it is a little bit more automated. You don't have as much control over channels and things like that, but I've just found it so simple and seamless. And that's more what I'm looking for. I don't mind the minuscule kind of fees that get tagged on just to make it a little bit easier. When it comes to lightning, I just want something simple

Starting point is 00:16:18 that is just going to work right away. That's kind of my main reasoning for using it. If you want something a little bit more hands-on, then you're going to want to be using like ride the lightning and setting up your own channels and all of that. But I do highly recommend you check out Phoenix. I will link to not just the video, but I'll link to this full blog. I did a full blog quite a while back called How to Buy, Sell and Use Bitcoin in Canada. It is, yes, the blog as a whole is specific to Canada, but it does have things like how to use a cold card wallet, how to use Wasabi wallet, how to use Phoenix Lightning wallet. So I'll link to the blog and take whatever you need out of there, but the Phoenix Lightning tutorial is in there as well.

Starting point is 00:17:01 on this, Paxful has launched peer-to-peer trading between gold and Bitcoin. So previously, they had Fiat to Bitcoin, a ton of different local currencies, as well as crypto-to-cropto-cropto, different things like that and paying for Bitcoin with things like gift cards and whatsoever or whatever, but they now have added gold. Now, you will be required to have more KYC because of that. The way that it works is the Bitcoin is held in escrow. until physical delivery of the gold to the individual is confirmed. If there's ever any sort of problem with the, you know, if something comes up where somebody says, hey, the gold didn't get delivered and there's no proof of it being delivered, then you could

Starting point is 00:17:48 probably get your Bitcoin back. They step in as the person that makes that decision, Paxville does, if there is some sort of a discrepancy between who says what. anyways it should be known that if you are trading gold anything above 50 bucks yes it's low but anything above 50 bucks is going to have mandatory KYC and there may be ongoing enhanced due diligence when it comes to this kind of stuff I guess when they're dealing with precious metals there's more regulatory concerns around that and in order to achieve that they need to comply depending on where you are so just keep that in mind

Starting point is 00:18:28 And last thing I wanted to bring up is Vlad Kosteia. He is an excellent writer. He's written for Bitcoin Magazine quite a bit. We've had him writing some articles for the Bitsie Academy. And he just wrote this great piece on running a Bitcoin node to maximize financial sovereignty. So be sure to head over and check that out. He gets into kind of the privacy implications of running a node, being autonomous and not having to rely on anybody else, and whether you should buy or build your own,

Starting point is 00:19:00 he was nice enough to include a couple of my videos in there of how to use my node, which again is a fantastic kind of mix between setting everything up yourself and actually using some designated software stacks that are just really easy to install. That's what I use myself, and I find it very easy to do so.

Starting point is 00:19:21 So anyways, yeah, check out the Academy blog there for this Bitcoin. node. If you haven't set up a Bitcoin node and you're not working right now, it could be the time to do it if you've got a lot of free time on your hands and you want to play around with a raspberry pie. Yeah, check it out. But that I'm going to wrap up, you guys. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you're on YouTube, of course, hit like, subscribe and share. If you're listening to this audio only on the pod, of course, like it wherever you are at, share it on your social media. And please, please do leave a review because that really helps

Starting point is 00:19:54 with visibility. Now, if you want to help the show in another, way. You can check out any of the mentioned sponsors down below. That was Ledden, Coinberry, as well as Wasabi Wallet for privacy with your Bitcoin. That helps quite a bit. And if you really loved what you saw, you can always drop me a lightning network tip at my tipin.combe page. That's tippin.combe slash at BTC Sessions. And with that, I am out. You guys can have a wonderful evening and I'll see you next for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Economy Shows Echoes of Weimar | Udemy Bitcoin Demand Up 300% | Phoenix Lightning Wallet Adds Tor EP041

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