BTC Sessions - VENMO ADDS BITCOIN - Access Given To Its 70 Million Customers ep167

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

📰 Much Wow: Venmo introduces direct, in-app buying and selling of Bitcoin. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/04/20/investing/venmo-cryptocurrency/index.html 📰 WeWork Begins Allowing “Member Companies” to use Bitcoin as a form of payment. https://www.wework.com/ideas/newsroom-landing-page/newsroom/posts/wework-starts-utilizing-cryptocurrency-as-form-of-payment 📰 Is the bottom in for Bitcoin’s latest price dip? https://twitter.com/WClementeIII/status/1384191390825947136 📰 …. Or, as Guggenheim cautions, could more amazing buying opportunities be inbound? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/bitcoin-could-plunge-50percent-near-term-guggenheims-scott-minerd-warns.html https://twitter.com/ScottMinerd/status/1348493010338803713 📰 Perpetuating their unilateral anti-“crypto” stance, Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, shuns exposure to Coinbase shares. https://www.finews.asia/finance/34290-hsbc-adds-coinbase-to-crypto-ban-list-bitcoin 📰 With more government regulators seeping into the Bitcoin space, a new article considers the possible outcomes. https://www.btctimes.com/news/when-policy-makers-meet-cypherpunks?s=09 📰 Canadian exchange Shakepay announces the Shakepay Card for Sats-back rewards on all purchases. https://blog.shakepay.com/introducing-the-shakepay-card/ 📰 OKEx, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency spot and derivatives exchanges, announces Lightning Network integration. https://www.okex.com/support/hc/en-us/articles/360059600412-OKEx-supports-Lightning-Network-for-faster-cheaper-BTC-transactions 📰 Adventures in nO iNfLatIOn: New data shows commodity prices across the world continuing to climb. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/04/19/coca-cola-will-raise-prices-to-offset-higher-commodity-costs.html https://twitter.com/charliebilello/status/1384511101958860801 https://twitter.com/BTCsessions/status/1384601277603061765/photo/1 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Cobo Vault: secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Audio-only version of the show: https://anchor.fm/btcsessions Telegram channel: https://t.me/btc_sessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Lots of news to talk about today. We got Venmo coming on board. We got WeWork adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet. We got a whole bunch of stuff happening. Lots of fun things to chat about.

As always, this show is live. Anything can happen. So a quick announcement from my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live Do it live I'll write it and we'll do it live

The fucking thing sucks As always I am Ben with the BTC sessions And this is your daily session All right So before we get into the news Of course let's take a look at where we are In the market right now

Bitcoin is sitting at 51,500 some odd dollars A bit of a dip over the past day or so. If we go to the one day, then yes, of course, we've had a big dip. If you start zooming out, it starts looking a little less scary when you get to around the one month mark. And then when you get to a year to date, pretty standard fare. We've seen this before twice this year already. You know, what are you going to do? That's just, that's how the cookie crumbles.

Now, a single U.S. dollar will pick you up 1,000. 942 sats. Seems like a sale to me. Are you stacking through the dip? Do we stack through the dip here? 88.99% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, pretty high right now because we had a drop in the hash rate for Bitcoin. So 271 sats per byte for next block.

That's pretty high. If you're willing to wait an hour, a little bit more than a third of that, 107 sats per byte. will get you through. Now, there is going to be a downward difficulty adjustment of more than 20% coming up. And that's targeted for around May 1st. So a little ways to go, but just know that there'll be a little bit of relief there coming up. But we'll talk a little bit more around things that you can do to mitigate that in the future.

In the meantime, before we hit the news, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.com. you can use your Bitcoin here for a variety of different services. For me, one of the things that I've used a number of times in the past are their Bitcoin back loans when I needed dollars. But I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because that's a taxable event. And of course, I'm always worried about having to buy back in at a higher price. So here, I'm able to deposit, get dollars in my bank account within 24 hours.

And when I pay back those dollars, I get the same amount of Bitcoin back in return. And that's the important number to me. Of course, they do also have their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts. interest rates of up to 12.5% annually paid monthly and their B2X offering uses the same loan mechanism to instantly buy more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. If you're feeling ultra bullish, check them out. Links below, if you click that link and opt to get either of their loan products, they'll give you at 25 bucks for free into your savings.

Up next, Kobo Vault, one of my regularly used hardware wallets. I love this thing. It's 100% air gap, which means you never plug it into anything internet connected. It is all done offline via QR code. And that keeps the keys to your money, of course, safe and offline. Now they've got a secure element on this thing, Bitcoin-only firmware, as long as you upgrade to that. And if you get the pro like I'm using, fingerprint scanner, rechargeable battery, I love this thing. I use it a lot from multi-sig.

Pretty solid. Check them out. Links in the show notes down below. Of course, I'm living on Bitcoin. And one of the things that helps me do so is Bit refil. You can pick up any imaginable gift card here. It's insane how much they have. And as you're paying as you're shopping, of course, you can pay main chain or lightning network for cheap and fast transactions.

And you earn sats back in the process. So for me, with my regular expenses, that's key. They also have a pretty good referral program going. And this is also kind of a bit of a privacy measure. So if you don't want people seeing everything that you're purchasing, well, hey, you can buy a gift card. And then that kind of stops the looking in on your spending habits. right there. And then finally, if you're backing up your wallet, folks, please be careful. I've heard some horror stories this year. If you're writing your seeds down on paper, it might not

be the most secure thing you can do. You can level up by grabbing a bill foddle, solid steel to store your seed phrase. And that saves you from things like water damage, fire damage, or just accidentally thrown the damn thing out. So check them out. Links are down below. And with that, let's dive into the news. I'm going to start today with Venmo. They just put access to Bitcoin and a handful of other cryptocurrencies on their platform. And I'm going to read a little bit here from CNN Business. It says Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, said it's more than 70 million customers can buy Bitcoin. And I'm not going to rattle off the rest of the garbage that they can buy.

Cryptocurrency can often feel confusing and inaccessible to newbies. So Venmo will offer in-app guides and videos to help answer commonly ask questions and share information about the world of crypto. The payment company hopes that this new initiative demystifies some of the common questions and misconceptions that consumers may have. Now, more than 30% of Venmo customers have already started purchasing cryptocurrency or equities, according to the payments company, and 20% of those customers started doing so during the pandemic. So, I mean, double-edged sword here.

Of course, this gets Bitcoin in front of a lot more eyeballs. It gives a little bit more legitimacy. Not great that they're adding in a few other trashy coins alongside it. And also keep in mind that as it stands right now, I don't believe you're going to be able to take custody of your coins. So not your keys, not your coins, much better to just buy directly from an exchange, which you can withdraw from. will just give you exposure to the price. It won't give you the actual coin. So it's kind of like a Bitcoin IOU.

So take that for what it is. And given the demands of the market, we've seen other platforms like PayPal and others say that they will be offering custody and options to withdraw. So maybe with enough pressure, Venmo will go that route as well. Moving down the line here, WeWork starts utilizing cryptocurrency as form of payment.

So WeWork, the leading flexible space provider, has announced that it will begin servicing a new economy by now accepting payment in select cryptocurrencies. Now, here's the part that's not my favorite. In partnership with BitPay and Coinbase, my least liked Bitcoin companies ever, the company will expand its flexibility by utilizing cryptocurrency for inbound and outbound transactions. Now, through BitPay, the payment service provider, we work will accept Bitcoin and a handful of other coins. Now, this is the part that I do like. WeWork will also hold the currency on its balance sheet. The company will pay landlords and third party partners in cryptocurrencies were applicable through Coinbase, a WeWork member, and the largest U.S. cryptocurrency trading platform.

In addition, Coinbase will be the first WeWork member to use cryptocurrency to pay for its WeWork membership. As a leader in the FinTech sector, Coinbase's decision to pay we work in cryptocurrency demonstrates the growing demand for flexible and easy to use payment options. Now, yeah, sure, there's good things and bad things about this story. Again, like adding in a handful of other unnecessary currencies, working with BitPay and Coinbase, but they're keeping Bitcoin on their balance sheet and I think that's a good thing. And I do like that there's kind of a bit of circular economy starting here.

So I think that in general, that's a positive thing. You know, with a lot of this stuff, I think people will generally, it takes a certain type of mindset to be open-minded enough to come to Bitcoin. And unfortunately, that also tends to attribute to people thinking that everything in the space is equally viable and is worth the same amount of, I don't know, is equally viable as just all I'll say. And with enough time and research, I think a lot of people come to the conclusion that that's just not the case. But hey, it'll take time. We get to watch everybody learn in real time. Let's keep going. Now, this is interesting. This is from Square. So Square put out this report

called Bitcoin is key to an abundant clean energy future. And so this is very much in response to a lot of the fud that we've been seeing around Bitcoin, you know, boiling the oceans and destroying the planet, which really couldn't be further from the truth. The thing is Bitcoin is the first quote unquote industry that you can easily see exactly how much power is consumed by it. What you don't see is the sources of that power. So a lot of that power does come from renewables already, things like hydroelectric in rural China, which is why there's a lot of mining in rural China because there's a ton of hydro there that's effectively stranded and can't be used for really anything else once it's used up locally.

We also see a lot of stranded natural gas. So if you're unfamiliar, when you do drill for oil, there are gases that come out of that. So natural gas, methane, things like that. And with those, a lot of the time when those resources are way off grid and there's no pipelines present, then there's effectively two options. You can flare it so you can just burn it or you can just vent it, which is just releasing it into the atmosphere, which is way worse. So you've got two kind of not great options. In some cases, they're forced to take it to market, which comes at a massive cost and is just not efficient whatsoever.

And so the solution there can be to capture those gases and use them to power Bitcoin miners and offset those emissions. So all around pretty great. But what Square is talking about in this is I'll read a little bit from it. In this memo, we aim to explain how Bitcoin, the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with more energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential Bitcoin miners

of tomorrow. And just some of the highlights that they have on the first page here, they say Bitcoin mining, presents an opportunity to accelerate the global energy transition to renewables by serving as a complementary technology for clean energy production and storage. Solar and wind are now the least expensive energy sources in the world, but are hitting deployment bottlenecks primarily because they're intermittent power supply and grid congestion. Bitcoin miners, as a flexible load option, could potentially help solve much of these intermittency and congestion allowing grids to deploy substantially more renewable energy.

And finally, by deploying more solar and wind, these generation technologies will likely fall even further down their respective cost curves, bringing them closer to zero marginal cost energy production. There's one thing that I highlighted down low, one little paragraph. Now, it says, without Bitcoin mining, solar, an intermittent energy source could supply only 40% of grid power before utilities would face the need to fund significant investments with higher electricity prices. With Bitcoin mining integrated into a solar system, however, energy providers, whether utilities or independent entities, would have the ability to play

the arbitrage between electricity prices and Bitcoin prices, as well as potentially sell the surplus solar and supply, almost. all grid power demands without lowering profitability. So the kind of CliffsNotes version of this is, hey, there are peak demands and drops in demand in power consumption every day. Peak demand tends to be afternoon, evening, when people get home from work and they turn everything on. Now, when it comes to solar, basically daytime, there's energy, nighttime, there's not.

And so you're dealing with storage issues there. The thing is it would be very, very expensive and just not practical to overproduce or to create enough infrastructure to overproduce solar energy and wind energy, which is even less reliable or even less predictable, to over create enough infrastructure to oversupply the energy grid so that peak times there's always enough. It's just not feasible because there's no, when there's no demand and there's extra energy, there's nowhere to sell it to. But with Bitcoin miners, all of a sudden, there's capital coming in. They can effectively sell that energy to the Bitcoin network to help secure it. And then that kind of makes it feasible all the time. So interesting.

I'm curious to see how this pans out. But I don't know. I read through the whole report. I thought it was kind of cool. checking out. I do think that Bitcoin will also still continue to be a big player in oil and gas as well and help reduce emissions there and make things even more efficient as things go forward. And then may the most efficient power source win. Let's jump forward here. Now, I got to give a shout out here. This guy was on my show previously. His name is William Clemente. And he's just

been tweeting out just fire statistics. He pulls stuff off glass node and gives a little bit of context. And so big shouted to him. He's been doing some great stuff. Anyways, he tweeted out this chart just the other day and he said, Bitcoin sits at the lower end of the largest on-chain support of this Bitcoin bull market. If Bitcoin closes below 55K, which we are now, don't be surprised to see a price slip down to the other support zones mark below. Note, 47,000. aligns with the NVT price floor, which is rarely broken in a bull market. And so he basically kind of points out these areas where it's UTXO realized price distribution,

so where most people bought in, where they're at a loss and where they're at a gain. And so there's kind of like these support floors where people aren't selling below what they bought for. And I found some of his insights. here pretty cool, pretty interesting. And he also went on to tweet and say, last night saw a short sell-off below 53K, get bought up within minutes,

3,355 Bitcoin of volume on Coinbase alone in these one-minute candles. So strong buying stepping in. So 1 trillion market cap continues to be defended strongly. Again, we are below that. I mean, since we started, we're back up at 52.1. So we've had a bit of a bounce. but right around where we are kind of these low 50s high 40s in that range,

it may be a local bottom. And the thing that makes me think that is this next article here, because we're seeing more of this. Guggenheim is an entity that started buying up Bitcoin, and Scott Minard is ahead of Guggenheim. And he so the funny thing is he projects these. high price points for Bitcoin, but continuously keep saying like, hey, we're going to see major selloffs. But like long term, it'll be good. But right now you might want to take money off

the table. So just the cliff notes from this CNBC article, it says Guggenheim's Scott Menard warns Bitcoin could plunge 50% near term. He said things are very frothy. The notes here say Bitcoin could see a major correction in the near term. I think we could pull back to 20,000 or $30,000 on Bitcoin, which would be a 50% decline, he said. However, Minard said he remains bullish over the long run, predicting an eventual rise to $400,000 or $600,000 per coin. Let's take a look back at what Scott Minard said just a few months back. Bitcoin's parabolic rise is unsustainable in the near term, vulnerable to a setback.

The target technical upside of $35,000 has been. exceeded time to take some money off the table i hope you didn't listen to him then the funny thing is when he tweeted this uh gugenheim wasn't yet approved to start buying bitcoin they had publicly said they were going to but they had not yet been able to um and that didn't happen until the end of the month that month so i think scott minard just wants your sats he wanted them in january and he still wants them now don't sell your sats to gubernheim hold on to them. Keep them. He's saying 400 to 600K, but he's warning people to look out for like a week or two of like a pullback. I don't think so. That's not the game that we're playing. It's a sat

accumulation game, not a try and perfectly time the market to get more dollars game. So take it for what you will, but oh Scotty, we know what you're doing. Let's keep going. HSBC, the worst bank on the planet, adds Coinbase to the crypto ban list. And let me start with saying, I'm not a fan of Coinbase, but that's besides the point. Let's read a little bit of this article.

Despite the growing embrace of cryptocurrencies among institutions and retail investors, HSBC is sticking to its policy of avoiding virtual currencies and stocks correlated to them. Europe's largest bank in Europe, good article, with total assets of $2.715 trillion is likely to avoid Coinbase's newly listed coin stock because of lingering worries about crypto's role in money laundering and criminal activity.

Keep that thought in your head. I reiterate, they are worried about crypto's role in money laundering and criminal activity. Don't forget that. Continuing on, HSBC has no appetite for direct experience. to virtual currencies and limited appetite to facilitate products or securities that derive their value from virtual currencies. This is not a new policy. I'm not sure how to say the first name here, Ankit Patel.

I probably butchered that, but hey, whatever. HSPC corporate media relations manager told CryptoNews platform CoinDesk. Last week, the bank confirmed that it stopped customers of its online trading platform Invest Direct from adding micro strategy stock to their portfolios, calling them a virtual currency product. The company holds about $5.5 billion in Bitcoin or about 80% of its $6.8 billion market cap. So last week, they stopped people from buying micro strategy.

Again, people deciding to freely buy the stock of a company just because that company has Bitcoin. And this week, they're saying, hey, you can't buy stock in Coinbase either because we don't like it. Now, remember that line that I'm going to read back to you again. Lingering worries about crypto's role in money laundering and criminal activity. You fucking hypocrites, HSBC moved vast sums of dirty money after paying record laundering fine. FinC files probe reveals Europe's biggest bank aided massive Ponzi scheme while on probation over ties to drug Kingpins. H.SBC has laundered billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels for decades.

There's a really great show called Dirty Money. It's on Netflix. There is a full episode dedicated to HSBC being hypocritical fuckers. I highly encourage you go watch it. I also highly encourage if you're at HSBC to just not have an account there because these guys are the biggest set of hypocritical douchebags I have ever heard. And furthermore, we touched on this story a while back, but Janet Yellen, Bitcoin and crypto fearmongers get pushback from former CIA director. And so the former CIA director was curious about the use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to solicit things that aren't legal.

Okay? We'll just go with that. So what did you find? Simply put, the percentage of illicit. transactions in crypto is minimal, less than 1% according to one report from chain analysis, and falling. So it's being reduced. Furthermore, for additional context, he notes that estimates of illicit activity conducted through traditional intermediaries, banks, range between 2 to 4% of global GDP, 2 to 4% of all movement of cash.

on the planet is illicit. And it's made possible by banks like HSBC. And they're worried about Bitcoin sitting at a trillion dollar market cap. It is, it boggles the mind. I had a lot of funny replies to a tweet that I put out people saying, well, they just, they don't want everybody honing in on their, their money. laundering game. They want to be the best game in town. Tushay, probably. Let's move on. I am very excited about this and this is specifically for Canadians. Now, those of you in the States and

elsewhere may be familiar with the Fold card, which is a credit card that allows you to get Bitcoin rewards on dollar purchases. So you're spending dollars and you're getting Sats back percentages depending on where you spend it. This is not available yet in Canada, although Will, from Fold keeps on telling me it's coming. But hey, I've got an alternative and I will be using this as well. When Fold comes here, I'll get one of those cards too. But Shake Pay, they're introducing the Shake Pay card. So very excited about this. They say in a blog, they say, we are extremely excited to announce the Shake Pay card with Bitcoin Cashback on everything you buy. All Bitcoin cashback will be settled to your Shake Pay Bitcoin balance and will be separate from your ShakePay card

balance. Earned Bitcoin, not reward miles. It says with ShakePay card, you'll be able to spend your dollar balance at any visa accepting merchant, both in store and online, and earn Bitcoin to your Shake Pay account. It's now even easier for Canadians to stack Sats on ShakePay. Right now, it's early access. You've got to join the waiting list, and they have different things that you can do if you shake for Sats and get free Sats every morning that bumps you up the list. Also, if you send dollars to and from people within the app with other people that are signed up, it also bumps you up the list. So anyways, very, very excited about this.

Just so you know, the visa card is like a prepaid visa card effectively with your dollar balance within Shake Pay. So yeah, stoked. Finally. Thank you, Shake Pay. Let's keep going here. OK Exchange supports Lightning Network for faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. We're talking off the top of the show about fees. They're pretty high right now.

Blocks are coming in slower. Plus, there's just more demand on the network. So it can be quite expensive to put through a transaction on the main chain Bitcoin right now. Lightning is an option to help alleviate those. I've done a whole bunch of videos on Lightning in terms of tutorials, just getting you started. Head over to the channel and just look through the playlist. There's a Lightning playlist and you can just get started there. But very nice to see OK Exchange, supporting Lightning Network.

that just says that it's now live on the website, enabling much faster and cheaper Bitcoin transfers. Users are now able to use Lightning Network for both Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals. We know that Cracken is also doing this. I believe BitFenex has already implemented this. If I'm not mistaken, there's a number of other exchanges that have added it. Coin Corner in the UK. There's a ton.

Bit refill, one of the sponsors of the show also has it. it's nice to see lightning start to hit more places. And I think that this bull run, the last bull run kind of necessitated being as efficient on chain as possible, doing things like integrating Segwit, doing things like batching transactions for withdrawals instead of sending an individual Bitcoin transaction for every single withdrawal for every single customer. So people are kind of on top of that. but now again, demand is ramping up. I think this is the bull run where we see lightning network necessitated, especially for small value transactions where it's not necessary to have anything on chain happen. So hats off to OK exchange, hats off to Cracken, hats off to everybody that's integrating this.

It is much needed. And thank you for jumping into it. And just to further kind of put that forward, we're talking about fees, 240 sats per byte. Mempool. That space is a great website to check out in terms of understanding fees. And yeah, like right now,

in dollar terms, like U.S. dollar terms, right away to get something through, you're looking at like $17. So it's no longer feasible. Like even sending $100 bucks, you don't want a $17 bite out of that.

So you do have to think about things like Lightning Network. Again, I highly encourage you check it out. Now, another off ramp, Another way that you can still be utilizing Bitcoin in a certain way and cutting down on fees is a video that I just put together the other day. I've now done three videos on the Liquid Network, which is a side chain of Bitcoin. Now, there are trust tradeoffs here.

It's nowhere near as bad as leaving your Bitcoin on a single exchange. It's nowhere near as good as having your Bitcoin in self-custody in a hardware wallet. But it sits somewhere in between. It's known as a federated model where there's a ton of different entities in geographically diverse locations that effectively create a peg between this token and Bitcoin. It's one to one. Most of them, the vast majority would have to collude in order to break that peg. But aside from that, you can actually store liquid Bitcoin on a hardware wallet, which you can't do with lightning. So it kind of depends what you're trying to do.

But anyways, I do encourage you to check it out. I've done three videos now on Liquid. You can check them out. There's a playlist on that as well on my channel. And it may be of use for you. But do look into both Lightning and Liquid. They should help you in cutting down on your Bitcoin network fees. Now, I want to dive into some, I don't know, I don't want to say real world stuff,

like macro stuff in terms of. why Bitcoin is even here in the first place. Let's talk about this. So this was an article from CNBC. Coca-Cola CEO says company will raise prices to offset higher commodity costs. And, you know, at first glance, you may say, okay, what the hell does this have to do with anything? If you're a hardcore Bitcoin or you're like, of course, yes. This is the obvious fallout from printing trillions of dollars over the last calendar year.

between 30 and 40% of all U.S. dollars have been created within, basically since the beginning of the pandemic. And we're seeing prices of everything go up, regardless of the fact that the measurements for inflation are so broken that they're saying it's effectively non-existent. So here it says that Coca-Cola will raise prices to offset higher commodity costs following in footsteps of a few other people. he said that the company is hedged against major impact in 2021, but he expects to see higher commodity costs next year. Now, some of the language used here is hilarious. He says, where was it, that we intend to manage intelligently thinking

through the way we use package sizes and really optimizing the price points for consumers. And what he's talking about is shrinkflation. He's talking about making smaller packages, but keeping the pricing the same, sometimes in a deceptive way. So it's almost imperceptible that you're getting less product for the same price. And you see it all the time. Next time you're at the supermarket, turn over the jar of peanut butter and look at the divot at the bottom of it. Those didn't used to be there.

But when they create that divot, they are able to give you less peanut butter for the same price and deceptively package it. Also, pick up a box of cereal. And while you may not have anything to compare it to, it's very easy to cut down on the amount of product there because you can make the box thinner from front to back and have the same front facing rectangle, the same size without anybody being any wiser. So start to make note of like the number of grams or ounces of product actually in there. The things where you will really notice it are things that. that can't be deceptively packaged away. So meat. Like how expensive is meat right now?

Vegetables. Anything that's just the thing is the thing. And it's not like in a package where there could be a different amount of it. That's where you're really going to notice this. But shrinkflation is all over the place. It continues to proliferate. And I mean, it's not really the fault of the companies.

Things cost more. You need to charge more to, maintain the same income for the company and you have two choices. Well, you have a few choices. You can just raise prices outright at which point people are going to be like, oh, shit, that's more expensive. You can use crappier products and keep the price the same. That's an option.

Or you can keep the price the same and package it smaller. Or combine the last two that I said. And you're going to see a lot of the last two because they know if they price something higher and somebody else uses the more deceptive practices, they're going to lose market share. So just keep that in mind. Now, in terms of this was a solid tweet from Charlie Bilo, I don't know how to say it. Anyways, commodity prices over the last year, lumber is up 265 percent, crude, 210 percent, gasoline, 182 percent, Brent crude, 163 percent, heating oil, 107 percent, corn, 84 percent, copper 83,

soy 72 silver 65 sugar 59 cotton 54 platinum 52 natural gas 43 palladium 32 wheat 19 coffee 13 l-o-l at gold 3% in fact great responses first of all that's insane I just did some work on my basement and we were able to watch the price of lumber go up as we continued to get more to finish the project it was fucking insane but I do enjoy this. Michael Saylor retweeted that list. He said, it's a long list, but please make sure you read all the way to the bottom, like pointing at gold. And then Peter Schiff's son replied to it,

you're brutal with a laughing face. Yeah, pretty funny there. I love that. Yeah, so they print a ton of money and then now you have Biden today saying that he wants to

add further capital gains within the U.S. So he said it turns out from CNBC breaking stocks sharply drop to new session lows. Bloomberg reports President Biden will propose a capital gains tax as high as 43.4% for the wealthy. Stocks extend drop. Dow falls 1% or 350 points after reports that Biden will propose hiking capital gains tax for the wealthy. For the wealthy? For the wealthy? Zach Bull had a good take on this.

I like some of his takes that he puts out here. He says, let's print ungodly amounts of money, inflate the price of everything, and force everyone to day trade for extra cash. Then let's hike capital gains taxes to fuck them again. Yeah, pretty much. Now, can this go on forever?

It can go on for a bit, but people look for escape valves. A really good book about this that was was uh really saw the writing on the wall it's called the sovereign individual and it was written in the 90s and they talk about the implications of the information age of the internet as it starts to proliferate and they talk about and i guess kind of speculate they don't specifically mention but um the idea of a digital money that truly kind of caps off the digital revolution where you actually have a natively digital asset and and

And the consequences of that. And one of the consequences of that is that capital is no longer stuck in one place. It's much easier to move. And that means that jurisdictions really have to consider that. So let's say Biden goes through and he changes capital gains tax for quote unquote the wealthy. By the way, income tax was originally just for the wealthy. And it was like single digit percentages. And it was played as a, hey, we got to, you know, these guys are way richer than everybody else.

We got to tax them to pay their fair share. But of course, eventually that crept down so that everybody paid that tax and it continued to go up for everybody. And so if you think that's not going to be applied to you, it will be applied to you eventually. Government never shrinks. Regardless, this talks about the implications of that. And so when you're in a jurisdiction that's treating you poorly and your capital is incredibly mobile, that capital eventually will flee to more favorable locations. And so I tweeted out this. I said, in a world, oh good, great.

Typo, wonderful. When edit button jack. Anyways, in a world of immutable, borderless sound money, capital gains will become a choice, not an inevitability. Will jurisdictions be able to justify the costs versus the services rendered? If not, they will lose constituents, businesses, and revenue. Things are changing. And the sovereign individual, the book, talks a lot about this, where countries and jurisdictions will effectively have to advertise their services

to potential candidates for people to live there and to bring their capital there because everything will be so fluid and mobile. If somebody doesn't like the services rendered by a government, it will be much easier for them to move to a friendly location where they won't be tax as much, but what they are paying taxes for, they agree to, and it's for them a good trade. So I think this world is already kind of starting to be upon us, but it will become more pronounced in the future. Let me know what you think. I don't know. I could be wrong. We'll see.

I don't think that's a wrong thought to be thinking. But yeah, I guess time will tell. Anyways, guys, I do see you guys all in the chat. Of course, when I'm doing the new show, it's harder to get back to all of you. But thank you for being here. There's like 200 odd people watching here. So thank you very much. As always, if you're here on YouTube, hit like, subscribe, share.

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