BTC Sessions - My YouTube Ban And Reinstatement, G20 Stablecoin Crackdown, Bitcoin Stock To Flow 2020 EP045

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. Before we dive into the show, of course, a big shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different things. They've got savings accounts where you can earn interest. They've got Bitcoin backed loans. This is actually the first thing I ever used of theirs. and what you can do is use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. So in my instance, I was in a pinch and I needed some dollars, but I really didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because I felt it was a bad time and it would have been.

Starting point is 00:00:56 But luckily I was able to put my Bitcoin in a dedicated address, get a loan, and upon paying back that loan, get back the exact same UTXO, which I was able to audit 24-7 through the entire process. So super convenient for me. And then finally, they've also got B2X, which gives you the same loan mechanism to simultaneously buy more Bitcoin, essentially doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check out any of those, there's a link in the show notes down below. And if you opt to get a Bitcoin back loan using that link, they will give you $50 worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we have Coinberry. This has been my go-to for buying Bitcoin, especially the last few months here. It's super easy, super convenient for those of you in Canada.

Starting point is 00:01:43 It is Canadian. But I've had a wonderful time using it. They've got a really sleek desktop interface and they've got a hell of a mobile app as well. So a couple things that really stand out to me when using this. Number one is the speed of funding. E-transfer is super convenient. And honestly, in my experience, I've only ever waited about 20 minutes to get money onto the account, which is pretty incredible, sometimes even faster than that.

Starting point is 00:02:10 And the second thing I really like is they have their autopilot program, which is allows you to dollar cost average. So once you fund your account, you can set the intervals and the amounts you want to buy, and it'll take all the emotion out of stacking your sats. So if you want to check them out, there is a link in the show notes as well. And actually, to be fair, they've got probably one of the best bonuses for signing up. After your first $50 purchase, you get $20 for free. So if you have not yet to,

Starting point is 00:02:40 and advantage of that, then be sure to check out that link if you are here in Canada. And with that, let's dive into the news. And first up in the news is me, I guess. So what happened? I got banned from YouTube. Now, I wasn't the only one, and this has happened to other content creators in and around this realm in the Bitcoin realm. It's happened before. It previously came close to happening in and around December for myself and in the number of number of others when some of the YouTube algorithms got out of control. This time around, we talked

Starting point is 00:03:15 about it yesterday, but Tone Vaze got flagged. He essentially got a warning on a live stream and then was taken down within, you know, like an hour or so. After that, his entire channel was taken down. Luckily, he did get it reinstated. He kind of raised a lot of eyebrows on Twitter. A lot of people were helping out with that. And he did get reinstated after the, appeal process, well, much the same happened to me. I woke up in the middle of the night around 2 a.m. to see that I had an email from YouTube. I did get a flag on an old video yesterday morning and it was about a year old video and it was just the same kind of stuff as this, a typical daily news type thing. It happened to be one on Warren Buffett not liking Bitcoin, but that

Starting point is 00:04:06 one got flagged oddly enough i don't know why that one came up um and it was just a warning and typically the way youtube works for that kind of thing is you get a warning and then you get three strikes so three further violations of whatever it happens to be and then your channel gets taken down now i did not get those three strikes warnings afterwards i got the single video flagged and then nothing and then it got taken down entirely and essentially what it said was your YouTube has had frequent blatant violations of our rules regarding spam, scams, and deceptive content, which I find particularly hilarious and somewhat insulting, given that I've taken so much care over the past four years of creating this channel to ensure that I only brought up things

Starting point is 00:05:00 that I thought were legitimate, and I have now, especially the past couple of years, focused entirely on Bitcoin and driving people towards Bitcoin and not all of the other trash that's out there. I've never promoted an ICO and I try to put out the best stuff that I possibly can in regards to not leading people astray. I've also tried to focus very much on, yes, I do news now, but on the educational aspect and walkthrough so that people can practice proper security when utilizing things like Bitcoin, practice proper or improve their privacy and make sure they're not victims of scams. And even last summer made international news by scamming a scammer and then donating the

Starting point is 00:05:49 proceeds to a Venezuelan charity. So for them to have said that the channel was in some way promoting scams and spam and deceptive content. was pretty ridiculous. Now, luckily, through the appeal process, it was deemed that my channel was inappropriately flagged and it was not the case and so it got reinstated. Also, I want to say a huge thank you to everybody that was on Twitter and, well, other platforms as well, Facebook, just email me, anything like that, that were so supportive in retweeting and calling out YouTube on social media and expressing your disgust at this situation.

Starting point is 00:06:31 Just to give you an idea of how crazy this was, let me just give you a quick little refresh here. But I, so this was my original tweet that I put out. I said, just like that, four years of hard work wiped out. Please take a look at this. My educational Bitcoin channel is a large part of my livelihood, and I would hate to see it go. And so then I did a screenshot of what they said, how it was. they prohibit scams, spam, and commercially deceptive content. It got retweeted 382 times, almost 1,000 likes.

Starting point is 00:07:07 The comments just go on longer than I can read. It was pretty amazing to see, so thank you all for that. And, I mean, just looking at like 165,000 people have seen it. And this tweet is like 14 hours old. So, again, thank you guys. much for helping out with that. I am now, I am now going to be on a number of different platforms. So I'm this is this video is actually very much an experiment of figuring out how I can simultaneously push out content to multiple platforms. So the ones that I'm

Starting point is 00:07:43 looking at are I'll still be putting up YouTube content as long as it remains here, but it will also simultaneously go up to Facebook to LinkedIn to D-Live to Twitter via Periscope. It's also going to be going on library. And then I've of course got the audio-only podcast, which some of you may be listening to right now. So that's, you know, like Apple podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, all that. So there's going to be quite a few mediums that I try to push out to from now on to mitigate the risk because I can't, you know, this is a large part of my livelihood and I can't be hinging on the whims of a runaway algorithm. I just, I can't take that risk anymore. So if you are watching and or listening to this on anything other than YouTube,

Starting point is 00:08:34 then please do give it a share elsewhere, even if you're on YouTube, sure, give it a share, but the more eyeballs that I get on different platforms. And if you're on YouTube right now, please go to at least one of those other platforms that I mentioned and follow me there. so that if anything happens and you do indeed find any value in the show, then you can at least stay up to date elsewhere. But besides that, once again, a heartfelt thank you to everybody that was so quick to respond and be supportive of this. It was very nice to see after four years of creating stuff. Anyways, enough about me. Let's move on. So the G20 has a rather harsh stance on stable coins. It looks like they're looking to regulate or suggesting regulations.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And so I'm going to read a little bit from this Coin Telegraph article. They said, according to a study released by the G20's Financial Stability Board on April 14th, stable coins pose a pertinent risk to the financial stability of the global economy and therefore need to be regulated in a manner that is not only meticulous, but also future ready. Additionally, as per data released by the FSB, members of the G20 have been advised to make use of their existing financial rules, especially those related to money laundering and terrorism funding, in regard to any stable coin offerings that may be available within the respective borders.

Starting point is 00:10:04 The G20 seems to be particularly hostile towards Facebook's Leaper Project, which we'll touch on in a second, as the cryptocurrency holds an enormous amount of potential for instant adoption. However, the board is not too concerned about other projects like Dye, saying they are too small to pose any sort of a systemic risk to the local economy of any nation. I have thoughts on this. Number one, I feel like this is, I feel like they're kind of looking in the wrong spots in a few different ways. Number one, first they're thinking that stable coins are the threats, which in and of itself is, kind of ridiculous. Why is that? Well, fiat currency is already trash anyways. The reason that Bitcoin was created was because of absolute shit monetary policy. It was designed as an escape

Starting point is 00:11:03 from that terrible system where your savings are devalued on the regular. So if anything, the real threat is Bitcoin and alternatives. They just need more time to grow. And by the time they're large enough to have stability of purchasing power, it will be too late to stamp them out. And luckily, they don't have a fucking clue when it comes to this. So I find it funny that they're going after stable coins and saying that they have some sort of inherent risk when you look at the way that these work. Okay, so right now you'll have an entity that that is saying that they're claiming to hold large amounts of regular currency of dollars or whatever the local currency is and in exchange they're creating these digital tokens that are backed more or less one to one by either the currency

Starting point is 00:11:56 or assets that represent the dollar value that they're going for um so in and of itself is that not a little bit like fractional reserve banking as it is right now is that not a little bit similar in fact, maybe in certain terms a little bit better. Maybe on the, if they're worried about fractional reserve from stable coins, if they're worried about that risk, sure. But why would they be worried about that in a system where the federal reserve has just, and where the new stimulus bill has just dropped reserve requirements for commercial banks to zero. So we're living in a system where banks need zero capital to issue loans. They can make money out of nothing.

Starting point is 00:12:46 They don't even need a fraction of that money. Zero reserve requirements. I don't get the systemic risk when it comes to stable coins. Now, they could be talking about stable coins posing a risk as far as their draconian draconian, oh god, what am I saying? They're draconian laws around anti-money laundering, tariffs financing, stuff like basically they just want to have a handle on where the money goes and flows.

Starting point is 00:13:15 One, the thing about that is, is that they're focusing in the wrong area again because they're focusing on Facebook, which is an entity that they can easily crack down upon, and they're saying that things like die, which, again, I'm not a fan of Ethereum or other, of these other projects in any way, shape, or even stable coins for that matter. But they're talking about how Facebook is the real threat and how these other ones that aren't from a set company are somehow less of a risk when I would say those are the real sleeper cells in this situation, because a lot of those can't really be controlled or cracked down upon. Now, if they made them illegal, it would open up the doors for even more debasement and even more fractional reserve on the part of

Starting point is 00:14:05 these stable coins. If they just regulated the entities that issued them, then there's not really any risk there because you can just regulate the reserve requirements, which apparently they're fine with zero anyways. And again, they can just regulate Facebook. So let's take a look at Facebook Libra. What is the fallout from the instant hauling into the Senate to answer questions after they mentioned to launch, I think, last year around this time. Anyway, so a little bit from this article from Decrypt, it says, um, co-creator of Calibra, David Marcus, has posted an update on Facebook's Libra project today. He has published a new white paper for the project, which includes several major changes.

Starting point is 00:14:48 The project will now focus on providing individual stable coins for specific fiat currencies such as USD, euros, and British pounds, as well as its Libra coin. Instead of being backed by a basket of fiat currencies, the Libra coin will now be backed by the stable coins. Smart contracts will keep its price linked to a combination of stable coins. The pivot has been made following a strong backlash by regulators. As DeCrypt reported, global regulators called for the project to be stopped in this tracks, the Libra network will now also have a comprehensive anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist protocol. It will be able to enforce sanctions over coins on the network under requests from law enforcement. As a result, the coin will no longer be permissionless. And I've been saying this all

Starting point is 00:15:39 along. Either Facebook's Libra will not launch at all, or it will be a neutered version of what it had intended to be. And now what they're saying is they're going to create a bunch of different stable coins issued by Facebook. So that means Facebook is now going to be taking in dollars and euros and whatever else and holding them and then issuing one to one tokens for those. And then they're going to use those stable coins to back their Libra currency. So kind of they're still backed by a basket of fiat currency, Libra coin is, but there's just an extra degree of separation there, which is also fucking hilarious. I'll be surprised if they're able to. to do this as is anyways, which is probably a bit of the reason for the G20 FSP pushback.

Starting point is 00:16:29 But again, it's just, and not only that, with these comprehensive anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist protocols with sanctions and the ability to freeze coins and prevent transactions, what's the point of this anymore? It's just another PayPal with a useless token in between. Why bother? But they will bother because they want some degree of control. But the elephant in the room here is that Bitcoin cannot be pulled into the Senate. Bitcoin doesn't give a fuck about any of this and it will continue to barrel on and over time it will get more and more stable because it's the only sane actual sound money out there that cannot be coerced by anyone. So, in closing, everything is bullshit and at least there's Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:17:23 So let's move on to more bullshit. Craig Wright, oh, God, I know, I know some of you don't like when I talk about him. But this one is a happy one. Not for him. It's a happy one for us. But anyways, so obviously a lot of people know he's fake Toshi. He's the guy that pretends to be the creator of Bitcoin. He's been proven to be a total fraud multiple times.

Starting point is 00:17:47 And as people have said that, he rolled out a bunch of libel lawsuits to some notable figures. And those libel lawsuits are not going particularly well. So if we take a quick look across the board here, Craig Wright versus Vitalik Boudarin, the creator of Ethereum, well, that one is gone. It's abandoned. Yeah, basically just dropped. It's no longer being pursued. What about Adam Back? just dropped the other day. In fact, he paid all the legal fees for that one. In fact, I think he paid.

Starting point is 00:18:20 Did he pay the legal fees for the Vitalik? No, not Vitalik. It's the next one. Anyways, yeah, Adam back. That one got dropped. It just, yeah, right. So here's Adam's back tweet, and I mentioned this the other day, but RPC, we're currently hurriedly contacted by SCA before they notified that they were representing me. Basically, they declined to give an explanation of why Craig retracted. Consequently, Craig agreed to reimburse 100% of my legal costs, and that was, yeah, yeah, the whole thing probably cost Craig Wright around 20,000 British pounds. So, wonderful. Moving on from there, also, Roger Verr, cases dismissed. From there, oh yeah, also. Also, also, Also, he may end up having to pay around 60,000 pounds or 73,000 U.S. dollars in legal fees.

Starting point is 00:19:24 But, Wright is currently, Craig Wright is currently appealing that decision. Furthermore, this Hodlenot, that was the one that kind of made waves where everybody changed their Twitter profiles to the now infamous Spacecat from Twitter. and really came down hard on Craig Wright. It really riled a lot of people up. Anyways, that one, he was trying to sue him in the UK because the libel laws are such trash there, but that got thrown out because Hodlman is based in Norway, and now it's proceeding within Norway,

Starting point is 00:20:01 but we'll see how that goes. And the only one that's still left standing is Peter McCormick because he's actually based in the UK. He's being sued for 100,000 pounds, this is around $126,000. Now, the funny thing is that the judge is kind of questioning why he doesn't just prove that he's a Satoshi and just get it done with. So the master, a procedural judge, wanted to see Wright prove that he is Satoshi. So here's a couple tweets from McCormick. after the master pointed out the staggering costs proposed by the lawyers, not only the highest

Starting point is 00:20:40 in any libel case, but any case he has seen, he asked the question why we are going through with all this. Can't Mr. Wright just provide proof? Remember, they want 100,000 pounds and myself to bend the knee. I offered 250,000 and to bend the knee if Craig signs the private keys as he did for Motonis and Gavin. And so that's when Craig claimed he was Satoshi and signed a message with one of the original keys holding some of the earliest Bitcoin, which was proven to be a fake. He just attached and previously used signature to something. So he didn't actually prove anything. Anyways, it looks like one by one the dominoes are falling and this whole thing is just crumbling around Craig Wright. Good riddins.

Starting point is 00:21:32 move on. Okay, Bloomberg, unbeknownst to them, made a pretty good case for Bitcoin in an opinion piece the other day. So what do they say? This is kind of via Bitcoinist here. Bloomberg may have just made the best possible case for crypto. Let's replace that with Bitcoin for Bitcoin. Come on, Bitcoinists. Let's change that up. In an opinion piece for the mainstream news outlet, the writer points out that by throwing trillions of dollars at the coronavirus, problem, governments risk undermining trust in currencies. Good point. Doing whatever it takes may be good for Bitcoin. As the Bloomberg piece points out, governments pledging to do whatever it takes is going to cost a lot of money. This is extremely concerning as it highlights how meaningless money is and it

Starting point is 00:22:21 starts people thinking. After all, the Federal Reserve can simply create trillions of dollars out of thin air, so why can't they just print money to pay for other things like taxes and healthcare and maybe a wallet at the border. Since 2008 and 2009, Bloomberg found that 12 major economies, including the China, including China, the U.S., the Eurozone, and Japan had already more than doubled to an astounding $80 trillion. So they pointed out, these numbers are so large that they no longer have any meaning. They are simply abstractions. It's been some time since people thought about the concept of money and its purpose. The dollar has no real intrinsic value, backed only by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, which, you know, doesn't have a lot of faith in it,

Starting point is 00:23:04 I'd say, at this point in time. And it's a good point, right? Like, it perfectly outlines how ridiculous the monetary system has become and how it just continues to be whittled away by central banks run amok. So this is why we Bitcoin, folks. This is why we Bitcoin. And I just wanted to touch on one more thing here, and this is an article outlining a little bit about what Plan B was saying about his stock-to-flow model. So the stock-to-flow model measures the stock, the existing amount of Bitcoin versus the inflows of newly created Bitcoin, the flow, stock-to-flow. And so this model is frequently used for things like gold, commodities that can be easily measured to kind of chart potential price fluctuations. And so Plan B, what he's

Starting point is 00:23:58 did is he modeled this out using existing data and was able to kind of back test it. And it seems to be, it seems to hold up relatively well. But he is saying that if anything, this next year, potentially two years is going to be a make or break for it. So post-having, once the supply, once the issuance of Bitcoin gets cut coming up here in 25 days, in 25 days, once it gets cut, we should start to gradually see, not right away, but over the next year or so after that point, we should start to see it kind of coincide with what stock to flow is predicting. And if it doesn't, then that means the model is broken. So, you know, a year out from now, if it holds up, we should be significantly higher than where

Starting point is 00:24:50 we are currently. So a little bit about what he said. So the creator of stock to flow price model says that the upcoming block reward having will decide if it lives or dies. In a series of tweets on April 16, Plan B said that he is sticking by the Bitcoin price increasing by an order of magnitude in the two years after the May having. In my opinion, he said, Bitcoin 2020 having will be like the 2012 and 2016. As per the stock to flow model, I expect a 10x in price, order of magnitude, not precise, one to two years after the halving. He said halving will be make or break for the model.

Starting point is 00:25:29 I hope this halving will teach us more about underlying fundamentals and network effects. So he did say that it won't be correlated forever when he was talking about correlation with Dow and stock markets. we did see a massive plunge in the midst of the kind of the start of people realizing this was a real crisis when it came to coronavirus. We did see a huge drop. We dropped from around 8K to around sub 4K. And now we're back up above 7,000. So we've recuperated a lot of those losses, but we're not where we were.

Starting point is 00:26:06 And we are below, but not too far below the stock to flow model. So there is a website that tracks stock to flow live. Now, you can add in the stock to flow on a basis of a rolling average of 10 days. I find that that's not particularly useful because it takes, you know, Bitcoin tends to lag a little bit on this model. So I tend to remove that out. And I like to look at the current price versus the stock to flow model prediction over an rolling average of 365 days.

Starting point is 00:26:40 And what it shows is that while it doesn't stay perfectly in line, it kind of elastic bands back and forth along this line. And from what I can see, especially looking at the last halving and how it kind of gradually caught up to Stock to Flow, it's around a two to three month lag, at least last time around behind the actual model. And so if that was anywhere close to similar, we would see, you know, we would, we would end up seeing new all-time highs in early 2021 if the model holds up and if it has the same kind of lag that it did in 2016 into 2017. I hope that holds up because that would be incredible and that would mean we would see, you know, larger than $100,000 Bitcoin in the next couple of years. it's it's anybody's guess this model could could break down eventually hopefully it breaks down to the upside that would be a bonus hey uh but who knows time will tell but in a couple years we'll either have somebody eating some humble pie based on their assumptions or well we'll have somebody eating humble pie no matter what whether it be the tractors or the person who actually put this together

Starting point is 00:27:58 uh but either way we'll know we'll know if this is accurate and then we'll have to see is it going to be priced in or not following that. So, yeah, I don't know. Anybody's guess, but I am happy to see us back up from that crazy dip from the panic sell-off with everything. Again, it's important to remember that in crises like this, everything is correlated because everybody wants to sell all their assets to get their hands on cash so that they can feed their families and be stocked up.

Starting point is 00:28:33 So, yeah, Bitcoin is uncorrelated until it is correlated, but it's better to kind of zoom out and look at correlation there or lack thereof instead of focusing on shorter timeframes. So regardless, from there, I'm going to wrap it up, guys. Thank you so much for watching. As I said, this is, of course, a different method. This is going out to multiple platforms. I'm also using different recording software for this right now. I don't have my lights because I'm moving soon. So things are a little bit different right now.

Starting point is 00:29:06 But I thank you so much for coming and watching and hopefully seeing me on many different platforms now and continuing to support the show. It means a lot to me. And yeah, if you can, whatever you're watching on, whatever you're listening on, please do share, thumbs up, leave reviews, do whatever you can. Whatever is available on whatever platform you're watching to raise awareness and get more eyeballs on the show. and if you want to help with the show in another way, you can always hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below. Those were Leden and Coinberry. They've got some good deals for you.

Starting point is 00:29:37 And also check out Wasabi Wallet because it can help with your Bitcoin privacy. And if you really loved what you saw, you can always drop me a tip, a lightning network tip at my tippin.combe page. That is tippin.combe slash at BTC sessions. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful evening.

Starting point is 00:29:55 And I will hopefully continue to see you next time on your daily session. Good night, guys.

BTC Sessions - My YouTube Ban And Reinstatement, G20 Stablecoin Crackdown, Bitcoin Stock To Flow 2020 EP045

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