BTC Sessions - Global Recession and Zombie Markets, Bitcoin Halving Search All Time High, CSW Pulls Adam Back Lawsuit EP043

Starting point is 00:00:05 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Hodel their Bitcoin. Before we dive in, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.i. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. They've got Bitcoin savings accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin backed loans and this was actually the first service I ever used. used. It's where you use your Bitcoin as collateral and obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. So I did

Starting point is 00:00:53 this at a time when I needed to get my hands on dollars and I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because I thought it was a bad time. I was able to drop it in a dedicated address that I could audit 24-7. And when I paid back my loan, I got back the exact same UTXO. So super convenient there. And secondly, finally, they've got their B2X offering. This uses the same loan mechanism to purchase more Bitcoin and double your Bitcoin on the spot. If you want to check out any of those, there's a link in the show notes, and if you opt to get a loan with that link, they'll give you 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin for free.

Starting point is 00:01:25 And secondly, we have CoinBerry, and this has been my go-to for buying Bitcoin stacking sats as of late. Super convenient. I really love their web interface and the app. The app is super, super easy to use. And one of the main things that I really like about these guys, the speed at which I can fund my account. The e-transfers are super convenient for those of you in Canada.

Starting point is 00:01:48 And yeah, all around good experience. I also really like their dollar cost averaging. They've got autopilot so you can fund your account and set specific intervals and amounts that you will buy so you can take the emotion out of stacking your sats. So be sure to check them out. There's a link in the show notes. And with that link, after your first $100 purchase,

Starting point is 00:02:09 you'll actually get $20 for free. So with that, let's dive into the news. So the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, has confirmed that this is, yes, indeed, a global recession. So I'm just going to read a little bit here from CoinDesk. They say the coronavirus economic crisis officially has a name, and it's called the Great Lockdown. So they did say the Great Lockdown is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and far worse than the global financial crisis of 2008, the International Monetary Fund, Chief economist Gita Gopineth.

Starting point is 00:02:47 I'm not sure. I'm totally butchering that name. I apologize. And she said this on Tuesday. She projected the global economy will contract by 3% in 2020 due to $9 trillion in losses. The United States is expected to decline to roughly negative 6% growth as are other nations in the Advanced Economy Group. And this year's losses will apparently dwell. for the global financial crisis from 12 years ago.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Now, despite this, you wouldn't know it looking at the stock market as is. The Dow is up 544 points today, so two, a bit over two and a third percent. And I mean, that's off lows in the around the 18,000 range. We're closing in around 24,000 for the Dow. Everything else has rebounded quite a bit. Now, this, why is this? Well, money printer go burr, Deutsche Bank calls out the U.S. for this. So this excerpt from a coin telegraph article. Suspitions about the health of traditional markets, meanwhile gathered steam despite modest recovery since last month's mayhem.

Starting point is 00:04:05 Among the detractors this week was Deutsche Bank, which accused the United States Federal Reserve of sparking the end of the free market. In a note quoted by Forbes titled The End of the Free Market Impact on Currencies and Beyond, the bank's global head of foreign exchange research, George Seravelos, firmly laid the blame at the government's door. At the extreme, central banks could become permanent command economy agents administering equity and credit prices, aggressively subduing financial shocks. It would be a bipolar world of financial repression with high, real economy volatility, but very low financial volatility. A zombie market. And that's kind of what we're

Starting point is 00:04:51 seeing right now in that right now, the markets on their own have taken a dive. And the only reason, the only thing keeping them afloat is this artificial liquidity pumped into the market by the Federal Reserve through these quantitative easing programs. If that was not there, you would have companies that were run poorly that would be wiped out, but in their absence, companies that can run better businesses and don't use bailouts to just buy back their own stocks and pump up their own numbers would take their place. And yes, it would hurt, but at the same time, the reason that we got in this position in the first place is we didn't fix the systemic problems that we had in 2008, 2009, we just papered them over, literally papered them over by printing more money and tossing them

Starting point is 00:05:46 at inefficient companies and corporations. So take it for what it is. Let's move on. Search volume for Bitcoin halving has outflanked the previous all-time high. So just reading a little bit here from Coin Telegraph. Interest in the forthcoming halving event on the Bitcoin blockchain has searched to levels higher than ever seen before. So data on on Google trends as of April 14th indicates that the year's peak interest in the event is 16% higher than back in 2016, the last time the having occurred on the network. And I should note that's with still, let me check, around 28 days to go before the having. So we're not even at the having. We've got a month out. Breaking down this data geographically, the time focusing on the past 30 days,

Starting point is 00:06:35 the top five countries showing the most interest, interestingly enough, are Luxembourg, Via, Estonia, Switzerland, and Lithuania. Now, if you do a related search term, which would be Bitcoin having 2020, you get a different geographical distribution. These quite different here, Nigeria, Venezuela, Austria, Portugal, and Czechia. So, yeah, very interesting. Overall, I just like the idea that search interest in this is up and we're not even close to the actual having yet. We've still got a month. More people becoming privy to how Bitcoin works, but my guess is most people still have no clue. We're just starting to get people cluing in.

Starting point is 00:07:22 And you're seeing a little bit more mainstream coverage of it. And that will continue to increase every single halving. So I think over time, the halving will have less of an effect on price. Also, when you go from currently, we're going from around 4% annual. inflation on Bitcoin down to sub 2%, which interestingly enough is, one, below target rate for inflation from the Fed and most central banks, and two, below inflation or the mining capacity of gold. So the year-to-year influx of newly mined gold is above what will be above what the stock to flow of Bitcoin will be.

Starting point is 00:08:10 Now, moving on to what I think is probably one of the worst takes that I've seen in a while. The founder of Swiss broker Bitcoin Suisse predicts that Bitcoin will move to proof of stake once the Ethereum network has proved the algorithm's success. So I'll just read a little bit more from CoinTalograph here. Bitcoin's current proof of work consensus algorithm, the pioneering concept, which in fact pre-existed Bitcoin that has since become indissotiable from the cryptocurrency will probably, in quotations will probably change in the future, said the broker. In outtakes from an interview conducted for a German TV documentary recorded back in October 2009 but uploaded April 6th, he said, Bitcoin's move to proof of stake is not planned,

Starting point is 00:09:00 but the second largest cryptocurrency ether will move to proof of stake concept that demands vastly less electricity already in a few months. I'm sure once technology is proven that Bitcoin will adapt to it as well. Once it's proven, proof of stake works well. It's a superior system to proof of work, he said. Now, the hilarious thing is, number one, Ethereum is no closer to actually moving to proof of stake. And I don't see that going particularly smoothly for them. But the fact that he thinks that Bitcoin will just easily switch over to proof of stake is lavable. Now, first of all, proof of stake, I think, is inherently flawed because it's, it's, no matter what, somebody, it's going to be zero sum.

Starting point is 00:09:49 So the idea behind proof of stake is in order to create new coins, you have to stake your coins, lock them up in order to create new ones. And those that do are rewarded proportionally with the amount of ether. that they've staked. Now, the issue with this is, if you're not staking, your funds are being diluted by those who are. So if you are not locking up your money, then whoever is is getting a larger and larger piece of the pie, meaning that the rich get richer. So let's say in a world where you had to live on ether, God forbid. But in a world where ether was the main currency of everyone and everybody had to live on ether. Those that could only afford to live paycheck to paycheck

Starting point is 00:10:39 are screwed because they cannot save. Meanwhile, those that are exceedingly rich have limited expenses and can afford to stake the majority of their wealth while they get richer and richer and richer and dilute the non-savings of anybody that has minimal savings or anybody that has a set income at the current, the current, I guess, value or the current buying power of ether just gets diluted further and further, and odds are their wage increases are not going to keep up with that. Now, what happens if everybody just stakes, well, then all of the currency is completely locked up, 100% of it and the new currency is evenly distributed against all ether. So it's a zero-sum game and you're just creating a bigger and bigger pie with everybody owning the same amount of the pie,

Starting point is 00:11:36 but not being able to eat it. So again, the system in itself is inherently flawed and favors the idea of rich getting richer. It also lends itself to entities like exchanges having a lot more influence and again becoming richer and richer because they can stake people's coins on their platform and a lot of them will do this but probably won't be giving all of the staking rewards to people on their platform they'll be taking a cut again unfairly taking people's rewards or taking a cut being that middleman to take a cut of their rewards now the other thing about this bad take is the value proposition in and of Bitcoin is the certainty with which the base protocol will work and will not change. You want to be 100% certain that the issuance of new Bitcoin will

Starting point is 00:12:32 remain 21 million. That is the value proposition of Bitcoin being sound money. And when it comes to making even trivial changes that are backwards compatible, like, adding something like Segwit, which essentially fixed a malubility issue with Bitcoin and added for more throughput on the main blockchain, more transactions per second. Even getting that through was an absolute struggle. And if you think that a non-compatible, non-backwards compatible hard fork can be easily achieved while also making all current miners of the system absolutely irrelevant and forking them off the network, you've got another thing coming. I just find it so funny. And not to mention the problems with assuming that proof of work is wasteful when in fact

Starting point is 00:13:30 the amount of waste in the current banking system is absolutely insane. But beyond that, Bitcoin actually drives more efficient uses of energy and uses energy that would have been lost anyways from surpluses from, you know, a lot of the time, green energy sources, even with things like hydroelectricity in rural China, in northern Alberta, with natural gas that would have been flared anyways. There's just so much wrong with this article. So congratulations to the founder of Swiss crypto broker Bitcoin Swiss for not having a fucking clue. And speaking of not having a fucking clue, Craig Wright has dropped his lawsuit against Adam Back. So Adam Back is the CEO of blockchain, or blockstream. So what happened is Craig Wright

Starting point is 00:14:26 was suing Adam Back for libel for calling him a fraud, which a lot of people did. Now he's withdrawn the suit and paid all of Adam Back's legal costs incurred. back tweeted yesterday that the case, and this was from a couple days ago, so it would have been on the 12th, that he tweeted, the case was dropped in January 2020, when Wright told the court he was discontinuing continuing the case, he said that Wright agreed to pay 100% of his legal fees, which he claimed was unusual, and that typically around 75% of fees are usually meant. Back received 6,666,66 British pounds, which is around 8,400. $800 US in fees. Now, there was no reason given for the drop in suit, but I suspect it's because other libel suits are not going particularly well. Now, Peter McCormick is still on the chopping block, but it will be interesting to see where this goes, given that this one against Adam back has been dropped. It would be absolutely hilarious to see Craig Wright retreat with his tail

Starting point is 00:15:41 between his legs. Now, those of you that don't remember who Craig Wright is, if you've been under a rock, he's the guy who claimed to be Satoshi, claimed to show a digital signature proving it, which was immediately debunked and has just come out with constant, incorrect, and often doctored and fraudulently produced documents that are purportedly showing that he is the creator of Bitcoin, of course, which he is not. And finally, Finally, I wanted to let you guys know that I did drop a new tutorial yesterday on the channel. This is for Samurai Bitcoin Wallet. So I go through setting up just the basic wallet functions.

Starting point is 00:16:24 I also take a look at how to sync it with your dojo via My Node, which I've done a tutorial on as well, which is in the show notes for Samurai Wallet tutorial. And we also take a look at Whirlpool Mobile Mixing, being able to cut the links or sever the links between you and your coin. to add to your Bitcoin privacy. So be sure to check that out and give it a share. These tutorial videos are a huge pain in the ass to make, but I'm always very happy once I do get one out there because they are the longevity of these videos

Starting point is 00:16:57 and the utility for newcomers. Again, just very happy to have this out. So be sure to check out that Samurai Bitcoin Wallet tutorial. But I'm going to wrap it up, you guys. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. As always, if you're on YouTube, hit like, subscribe, and share.

Starting point is 00:17:14 If you're listening to this audio only via the podcast, of course, share it on your social media, and please do leave a review on whatever platform you're listening on. It really, really helps with visibility. And from what I hear, it just dropped on Apple Podcasts.

Starting point is 00:17:30 So that's great to know. Great to know. If you want to help this show in another way, you can have the sponsors that I mentioned before. Those were leaden and coin Remember there's some deals in there for you. And if you really loved what you saw, you can always hit up my tipin.

Starting point is 00:17:46 dot me page. That's tippin. dot me slash at BTC sessions to drop a lightning network tip. With that, I'm out. Have a wonderful evening, you guys, and I'll see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Global Recession and Zombie Markets, Bitcoin Halving Search All Time High, CSW Pulls Adam Back Lawsuit EP043

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