BTC Sessions - Is $100K BTC Inevitable, Paris Hilton Cat Art Nets $17K ETH, Hashrate Falls Due To Floods EP088

Starting point is 00:00:16 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 in, I want to give a shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a bunch of different services. I've been working with and using these guys for well over a year now and I've had great experiences. and the first thing I ever used of theirs was their Bitcoin-backed loans. So in my instance, I was in a bit of a pinch. I needed to get dollars, but I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin for two reasons.

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Starting point is 00:01:44 there is a link in the show notes down below. And if you click that link and opt to get a loan using it, you will get 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin for free. And And you'll also be helping out the show in the process. So do check them out. And secondly, if you are into Bitcoin, of course privacy is important. And one of the things that I use, just one of many things in my arsenal

Starting point is 00:02:07 to help with that is NordVPN. So a VPN does a few things. It hides your IP address and it encrypts your browsing data, which is very, very important if you're using public Wi-Fi anywhere ever. You definitely want to have a VPN on. It also helps with Bitcoin transactions because those can also be tracked to your IP address.

Starting point is 00:02:27 So that can help in that instance if you're using a Bitcoin wallet that doesn't have Tor. And finally, it has another perk of unlocking geo-blocked content. So if there's some content that you wanna access and that's not available in your country, you can just change your country of origin within the app, whether it be on your phone or your computer or tablet, whatever, and all of a sudden that content will be available to you.

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Starting point is 00:03:08 And with that, let's dive into the news. So it's been a bit of a wild week price-wise. We've seen some solid moves up and a bit of a pullback here. There's a few articles I wanted to touch on regarding. regarding current sentiment. And this one here on Coin Telegraph talks about how there's a critical mass of long-term Bitcoin holders that seem to potentially point to $100,000 Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:03:36 being inevitable. And what that means is a lot of people have bought Bitcoin at certain price points, and they're already valuing Bitcoin at a price point in the future in their minds, and they refuse to sell it up to that point. Many of them have already experienced profits that they're just not willing to sell at this point. So I'll read a little bit here.

Starting point is 00:03:59 It says determining Bitcoin's value can be more complicated than simply looking at current market price. Most Bitcoins already cost at least $100,000 and probably more like 10 million. This said by Michael Goldstein, known as Bitstein, in an August 17th tweet. While Bitcoin does sit around 12K,

Starting point is 00:04:19 it's around 17, 1800, or, of 11,700, 11,800 are right now. Many in the industry like to value an asset with the asset with a much higher price tag. If somebody buys Bitcoin at $10,000 but is unwilling to sell it until it reaches $100,000, then the price tag of that Bitcoin in particular is actually much higher. It's just not on the market at these price points. At the start of the year, 64% of Bitcoin's circulating supply had remained in the same wallets since 2018, which seems to suggest that most Bitcoin has a higher valuation in the minds of the people holding it

Starting point is 00:05:06 than the current market prices indicate. Again, according to Goldstein, many of Bitcoin's large bagholders value the asset between 100 grand and 10 million. And these numbers sit in line with a bevy of price predictions from various authorities over the years. And it goes into some price points that people have pointed out. But again, it's very subjective saying people value it at X price and X price. Everybody's going to be looking at price fluctuations through different lenses. And again, the downside could be the same. The Sony bought at $10,000 and they see it drop to $1,000.

Starting point is 00:05:44 That could be very, very scary for some. and they may end up selling it. We saw in March what happened when we dropped to 4K along with, you know, everything, every market selling off globally. You know, it had to change hands there in order to reach those price points. And so people did get spooked and they sold it much lower than they could have, even right now, just months later. So it does impact people in different ways.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Now, the nice thing. right now is that 98% of all Bitcoin is worth more than when it was bought. And the way this metric is calculated is by when UTXOs or unspent transaction outputs, pieces of Bitcoin, changed hands and at what price points that happened. And so measuring that, put another way, on-chain analytics service GlassNode noted that it's weak on-chain weekly report that 97.6% of Bitcoin are in profit. This means that only 2.4% of the UTXOs or the little pieces of Bitcoin that people send around

Starting point is 00:06:57 were created as part of a transaction between wallets when the Bitcoin price was higher than the current levels. So that means the transactions of funds moving from different wallets, only around 2.5% of all Bitcoin changed hands at higher levels than it is. Now, this could be a little bit suspect. I think we need to look a little bit deeper at this type of analysis because, number one, some

Starting point is 00:07:28 of those transactions that moved at those price points above $12,000 could have just been people moving it between their own wallets and same with the rest of the transactions too. Furthermore, the UTXO is moving around, there's no movement on chain when you're on an account. And a lot of people trade specifically on exchanges. So again, I would have to say that this is not the best metric, but it could be looked at as, well, some people did not move. There hasn't been a lot of movement at price points above this as of yet. So take it for, I would say take this with a grain of salt. Now, Bloomberg has been weighing in on Bitcoin quite a bit. And they've been pretty Bitcoin positive, especially this year. And so recently there was a tweet out from a Bloomberg analyst that said something quite positive. He said, Bitcoin will only stop gaining value if something unexpected stops it, Bloomberg researchers believe. Tweeting a summary of the latest Bloomberg Intelligence Commodity Primer on August 19th, senior strategist Mike McClone revealed a clear bullish stance on Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Bitcoin has re-entered mainstream consciousness in recent weeks, thanks to price rises, which topped out at over one-year highs at around 12,400, which we just saw in the past few days. Despite a modest pullback, gains have been broadly retained, and analysts are confident that trajectory remains skewed to the upside beyond the immediate short term. And the quote here, something unexpected needs to happen for Bitcoin's price to stop doing what it's been doing for most of the past. decade appreciating demand and adoption metrics remain favorable versus the crypto assets unique attribute of fixed supply and they show a chart of Bitcoin and they should they use a charting indicator called the Bollinger bands it kind of measures volatility and what can happen within certain times and when those bands of volatility tend to squeeze you often get a

Starting point is 00:09:44 sudden break either up or down that can be quite violent. And so they seem to be indicating that they're anticipating upwards as opposed to downwards. So again, the chart here confirms that Bitcoin is currently within its narrowest Bollinger ban scenario on record. A timely occurrence after creator John Bollinger on Monday described the current bull run as picture perfect. Yeah. So again, a number of things.

Starting point is 00:10:14 pointing to to Bitcoin being positive here now again if we look at the the price chart we can kind of see we've been on a hell of a tear since kind of the beginning of the month here and you know we've had our pullbacks here and there but it's just kind of consistently been trending upwards and it's been pretty well in line with the stock-to-flow model so the stock-to-flow model put together by a pseudonymous online quant named Plan B, he talks about stock to flow. What this means is the stock, the current available number of Bitcoin that are circulating in the market, which is 18 something million right now.

Starting point is 00:10:58 I'm not sure the exact number. I can look it up though. Now in relation to the flow of new Bitcoin coming into the market, so the Bitcoin that are being mined by Bitcoin miners. And so the stock to flow ratio can also be used for commodities like gold and silver, and you can get a number. And Bitcoin's stock to flow is starting to be close to that of golds. And after our next halving in 2024, when the issuance of Bitcoin gets cut in half again,

Starting point is 00:11:30 it will basically double that of golds, which we've never seen for any other asset known to man. So very, very interesting to watch. Now, if you look at the price chart here, I've taken. out a couple other indicators, but I've just shown the stock to flow average over 463 days and the actual price. Okay. And so we can see here that we've been, you know, it does tend to kind of elastic band

Starting point is 00:11:55 back to the mean here, but we've been following it pretty well. And we're right in line with it right now. So the stock to flow right now has us around getting close to 13,000. We did get to, well, it has it said around 12, 12, 8. We did get to 124 the other day. Again, we are back down below 12, sort of like 11, 7. But again, we're starting to eke up along that line. And the last time we had our halving, we did pretty much the same thing.

Starting point is 00:12:31 We started a little bit higher, but then we went below stock to flow and just kind of followed it along the line all the way up until we started really surpassed. it at the peak of the bull market. And so if that continues, if we see kind of a rehash and this model actually holds, then we're seeing potentially bumping up against our previous all-time highs by the end of this year. Now last time, again, I should reiterate, last time in the previous bull market or the start of it, we bumped up against our previous all-time or got close to it and then had a pullback and then didn't see the previous all time high for about well let's do this in relation to the having our having this year was in may and the having in 2016 was in july it took about six months to get close to our previous all time high last time around

Starting point is 00:13:30 and it took about nine months to decisively break it six months from now is november which puts us pretty much in line with stock to flow mid-November, we see, again, that kind of $20,000 range. And then if we have a decided pullback, we may not break above that previous all-time high again for another few months until potentially into the new year, like February or so. But who knows? Bitcoin is a fickle beast, and it does whatever the hell it wants. So really, don't take my word for it, but I would very much. much enjoy to see this play out. By the way, the top of this model here has us at around $100,000 US and historically Bitcoin has overshot this model, sometimes by multiples, before coming back

Starting point is 00:14:24 down and skirting below it for a little bit. So that could be potentially putting us in the multiples, hundreds of thousands. Who knows? Time will tell. I still get the inclination to think that next year is going to be a little bit crazy. Either way, we're going to move on from the Price Talk. I just thought it's interesting seeing that we've been kind of volatile as of late. So let's move on. So Edward Snowden, obviously, he's been doing a lot of virtual talks. Those of you are not familiar with Edward Snowden, he basically leaked the information that the NSA and the U.S. government was spying on its own citizens. collecting data that previously would not be able to have been collected and they utilize the Patriot Act to do so.

Starting point is 00:15:17 And so he kind of broke that story wide open and he basically had to run. He can no longer return to the U.S. if he does, he will be detained and likely imprisoned. So he wrote a book and his book, it's quite good. I do recommend you check it out. And he made a fair amount of money off that. And he's also made a lot of money off doing virtual talks. I saw him talk at Bitcoin 2019 and it was an excellent chat. And at the end he did reveal that he did in order to pay for the website in order to get the documents live.

Starting point is 00:15:57 He did pay in Bitcoin in order to do that because he had no other means of payment at the time. Anyways, I'm going to read a little bit from here. the U.S. government is suing NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seeking proceeds from his book sales and speeches at conferences. Court documents, new court documents, revealed that Snowden made $1.2 million in speaking fees at virtual conferences. Around 35 grand of that came from Bitcoin and crypto-related firms. So the NSA whistleblower got paid at least 35 grand from these particular firms. Blockstack and Ethereum competitor paid him 20 grand to speak at Blockstack, Berlin. in March of 2018, where he was interviewed by Coin Center Research Director Peter Van Valkenberg.

Starting point is 00:16:43 BTC Media, publisher of Bitcoin Magazine, paid him 15 grand to speak at Bitcoin 2019, which was held in San Francisco in June of 20 of that year. And he was interviewed by the BTC media CEO David Bailey. Now, they're trying to scrape back the U.S. government, I mean, is trying to scrape back that many. They say that because he's banking on all of the information that he revealed and that it was their information that they're entitled to his money. The best part about this is it really shows the value of something like Bitcoin where you get somebody who did something, in my opinion, that was very altruistic in letting people know that the government was illegally spying on them. and then he wrote a book about it and he's asked to talk about it and he's making money from his insights into the topic. And the U.S. government is saying, yeah, but that's our intellectual property.

Starting point is 00:17:43 So you have to give us all your money for that. And something like Bitcoin, he essentially can tell them to fuck right off because you can't claw that back. Again, like, I just find it so hilarious that they would have the audacity to say like, hey, that was our information. information we want that back when they were illegally spying on people. It's unbelievable. So anyways, if you ever read the book, I recommend it. It's on my bookshelf back here. Over to the, over to my left, your right, maybe. Anyways, it's on the bookshelf behind me. Quite good. Check it out. Let's move on from something, from a person I respect to total trash. Paris Hilton drew a cat and it somehow sold for $17,000 worth of

Starting point is 00:18:31 Ethereum. Let's read this. Media personality and businesswoman. Can you say that, though? Paris Hilton announced that she successfully auctioned a digital painting of her cat, Munchkin, for 40 Ethereum, worth almost $17,000. The sale was held through an Ethereum-based auction platform called Cryptograph. According to a tweet published by Hilton, money raised from the auction of the portrait, we'll go to three charities in the U.S. The L.A. Food Bank, Wheels and BB4 Homeless. Well, at least it's going to charity. The anonymous winner of Paris' auction

Starting point is 00:19:09 known only as Adderalls has also bought artwork made by Bitcoin.com's founder Roger Verr, no surprise there, and Ethereum Foundation researcher Vlad Zimfeer. Yeah, are we surprised that he bought, given that he bought art from Roger Verre, Are we surprised that he wasted his money also on a cat drawing by Paris Hilton? No.

Starting point is 00:19:38 No, we're not. I mean, the one thing I will say is that somebody didn't spend Bitcoin on this. Somebody had to have Ethereum in order to buy this, which I suppose you could look at that as poetic. Let's move on. not going to dwell on this anymore. Okay, this one's interesting. Game show winner. Again, I put this story, I would say, in the same category as somebody wasting $17,000 on a cat picture by Paris Hilton. Same kind of thing, also a scam. Anyways, a former winner of the game show, deal or no deal, has been scammed out of his retirement savings after investing in

Starting point is 00:20:29 Bitcoin through an ad on Facebook. Spoiler alert, he did not actually invest in Bitcoin. This is unfortunate, but yeah, it's going to continue to happen until people actually place value on Bitcoin as if it were cash. People are not linking that. You wouldn't hand, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars to a person that you just met. Why would you do it digitally? The answer is because people are used to being babysat and they think that everything is reversible. It is not anymore. Anyways, according to a daily record report on Tuesday, Scottish retiree Graham Gariush, I'm not sure how to say it, was defrauded of around 30,000 pounds, which is around 39,400 US dollars by a phony investment company.

Starting point is 00:21:20 The former railway worker who appeared on deal or no deal in 2007 clicked on a face. Facebook ad from a company called OMC Markets. Interested in investing ahead of retirement, Gerrush agreed to invest after speaking to a company representative who claimed they were in London but were actually based in bulk area, according to the report. He deposited around 29,000 pounds into a Bitcoin wallet and signed a waiver denying him access to his funds for six months. The scammers also convinced them to him to give them access to his bank account, supposedly so they could make Bitcoin trades on his behalf. After supposedly doubling his money, he tried to pull out his funds in March of 2019, but was told he needed to pay a further 6,000 pounds or getting close to $8,000 in U.S. and fees. And he complied shortly after his funds were completely drained and the OMC markets ignored his email requests. demanding an explanation.

Starting point is 00:22:23 And then he just went on to say Facebook needs to do more. And he was planning and buying a house with his investments. Guys, guys, you got to stop giving people your fucking money. I feel bad for this guy,

Starting point is 00:22:38 but how many times do you have to see stories in the news of scams happening to put two and two together and be a little bit, think a little bit more adversely. with your hard-earned money. Like, don't, and I mean, too, it's bad enough that he deposited this and gave

Starting point is 00:23:01 full access to his bank account, but then he gave them more money afterwards. Why the, why would you do that? Ah, God. And again, I feel bad for the guy, but at what point, at what point does the blame rest on the individual? I would say most times. You can feel bad for somebody, but still realize that it's their fault.

Starting point is 00:23:29 Now, should Facebook be vetting people that put up ads? Probably. But in the end, the responsibility falls on the individual to make sure that they're using their money in a way that is responsible. And that did not happen here. Yeah, let's move on.

Starting point is 00:23:51 Okay, so the Bitcoin hash rate, has been dropping recently and there is a reason. Now this happens quite a bit, so it's not that big of a deal, but it's worth mentioning regardless. So continuous rainstorms in China. So it's no secret that a large portion of the Bitcoin hash rate is in China, although it is starting to proliferate elsewhere. We see mining firms popping up throughout the US. We see it in Iceland.

Starting point is 00:24:16 We see it here at my home, Canada, particularly in my province, capturing oil and gas waste. Shout out Steve Barber with his company. Anyways, in China, they regularly get a whole lot of flooding in the Sichuan province, which is a mountainous region that is estimated to have over 50% of the Bitcoin network's total computing power. And it's been hit with heavy rainstorm since last week, which peaked over the last two days. So the rainstorms have caused electricity outages in parts of the region

Starting point is 00:24:55 as hydroplants stopped generating power to help discharge the floods. Some countries or counties are also experiencing telecommunication and internet breakdowns. So we've seen that a lot of the major mining pools in this area have had hash rate drops of between 10 and 20 per. percent. Yeah. And so again, it's, it's, we've seen it drop from around 123 exahs per second. The average is around 127. Sorry, it dropped all the way down to 110 xahasches per second at one point, depending on what metric you're looking at, whether it's the, the

Starting point is 00:25:45 rolling one-day average or the rolling three-day average. Anyways, it's, it's, it's, it's a It's just kind of a fact of doing business in some of those areas where you're relying on very, very cheap power from hydro. When you get flooded out, those hydro dams have got a, you know, they're no longer operating correctly. And you're going to have power outages and everything. So, yeah, but guess who's picking up the slack anywhere else in the world? So the few consequences of this are right now until the difficulty adjustment. you will see slower transaction confirmations because the hash rate has dropped a little bit. However, when that difficulty readjust to adjust for the drop in hash rate,

Starting point is 00:26:33 then we're right back to 10 minute blocks. Now you also probably see higher fees. You'll see the mempool clog up a little bit. Again, Bitcoin just kind of adjusts to these types of things. We've seen this before. Not a big deal. and it's kind of a nice little boon for some miners outside of that area that can pick up a bigger piece of the pie for the time being until that difficulty readjusts. Moving on here, very excited about this. Lily Wallet is a multi-sig desktop wallet. I've talked about it before. Multi-sig is when you have a Bitcoin wallet that has multiple hardware devices, and you need approval from at least a couple of those devices. devices in order to successfully send funds. The reason you would want to do that is because if you spread out those hardware devices in geographically diverse locations, then if somebody breaks into your home and gets a hardware

Starting point is 00:27:31 device, they actually cannot spend your money or steal it or do anything with it. So some people have been moving to multi-sick. And so Lily Wallet was specifically for cold card before, but they've actually opened up to enable Treasor and Ledger as well in their mobile. recent update so I'm very very excited to try this so this is actually I believe they're out of beta now this is their first is their 1.0 release now I've been on a bit of a multi-sig kick lately I checked out doing it on Electrum I checked out using Unchink Capital's Caravan which is open source and free I did videos on

Starting point is 00:28:09 both of those so be sure to go back and search those and check them out I do plan on checking out Lily Wall it may be making a video on that another option is CASA, they have their paid option. I do plan on maybe trying a 30-day free trial and doing a video on that. But, anyways, multi-sig is interesting and I like playing around with this. I can't wait to dive into this one.

Starting point is 00:28:33 This one just looks so user-friendly and clean and you get to pick what devices you're going to use. So anyways, very excited. I just downloaded the update, and I will play around with that. And when I can, I will do it. When I can, I will do a video on it. But if you want to go check them out, I will link to that down below. Again, this is their 1.0 release.

Starting point is 00:28:55 Congrats to the guys at Lily Wallet. One more update that just happened. My node just issued a new update. I've done a video, a couple of videos on My Node, how to set it up, and then how to link a number of wallets to your actual Bitcoin node. So with that, again, their new update here, they updated the version of Bitcoin The updated Spectre, which actually is another multi-sig option that sits. You can just download the actual software itself,

Starting point is 00:29:26 but it does also sit within my node. So excited to try that one out as well. Thunder Hub upgrade, ride the lightning upgrade. They got a whole bunch of different stuff and some bug fixes and everything. So yeah, excellent, very, very excited. And that is actually updating as we speak right now. With that, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening.

Starting point is 00:29:51 If you are here on YouTube, please do remember to hit like, subscribe, and share all of those things really, really do help. I can't stress it enough. Please do them. They really help the channel grow. If you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsor I mentioned before, Leden in these show notes and potentially get 50 bucks for free. You can hit up NordVPN. Again, show notes if you don't already run a VPN.

Starting point is 00:30:13 And finally, if you really love it. what you saw, you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip at my tipin.me page. With that, I am out. Have a wonderful day, wonderful evening, wherever you are, and I will see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Is $100K BTC Inevitable, Paris Hilton Cat Art Nets $17K ETH, Hashrate Falls Due To Floods EP088

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