welcome back to the bitcoin briefing
this is episode 13 and let’s start off
with some price action
bitcoin isn’t well the same as last week
really is not doing too well we’ve been
on a huge downward trend and for for for
weeks now and that we’ve just as i was
recording this
we’ve just fallen below 34 000 and we’re
now trading at 33
500 which is is amazing really if i had
some more money and if i’ve managed to
stay more liquid i would definitely be
buying but then you know last week at 40
yards i also said i’d be buying so
definitely don’t take trading or
purchasing advice from me now the losses
are not uh just confined to bitcoin the
uh and the wider crypto market the stock
market isn’t doing too well either um
but some of the companies that have done
worse are those with the biggest
exposure to cryptocurrencies so you know
companies like coinbase and
microstrategy coinbase is down 13
today
uh trading now at 191 which is
down a lot from its initial price
uh last year of 342
micro strategy is doing even worse it’s
down
17.84 basically 18
in 24 hours and that’s trading at 375.
now i will add that 375 is significantly
higher than the company’s share price
before
it started to get into
um into bitcoin and move
much of its treasury reserves into btc
looking at the wider crypto market
yeah it’s it’s been a bit of a bloodbath
okay ethereum finance cardano all all
around 30 down over the last seven days
solana which i believe is having some
some network problems
they’re uh they’re down 40
so
yeah painful and it’s going to be
painful really for anybody that’s got
into bitcoin over the last
six months i guess
about you know it’s a it’s a good lesson
to have really you it’s
it’s um
it builds character holding a bag
up into profit and then back down into a
loss
um
being a long term holder myself i’ve had
to do that many times and as i said last
week really you just have to hold the
bag long enough until these swings
become irrelevant to your um to your
profit position
next up we have some of the biggest news
from last week which is that russia has
or its central bank at least has put
forward a proposal to ban
uh mining in its country and the reason
it’s given for that
is financial stability citizens
well-being and monetary policy
sovereignty now i’m sure citizens
well-being is not as important as their
financial stability or the sovereignty
of their monastic policy but it’s nice
that they included and you know are
thinking about the the russian people
who thought they wanted to
to have exposure to crypto but
you know clearly wrong
now russia is a major player in the or
at least was or for the meantime is
a major player in the
the global mining game they have the
third highest hash power of any country
after kazakhstan who’s second and then
at the top is the united states now this
used to be
china they had 70 percent of the global
hash power however just like russia and
probably for very similar reasons
they’ve decided to prohibit their
citizens from or their subjects i should
say engaging in in bitcoin mining
now on the face of it
russia
turning off their their graphic
processes and kazakhstan who’s
who’s having a terrible amount of
internal instability at the moment would
would seem like terrible news for for
for bitcoin
but i think it’s not really that much of
a big issue
we have already gone through this with
china when china in may of last year
decided that they were going to stop
mining the the hash power dropped from
180 extra hashes to
260 which was a 60 drop which is is
about right given that they were 70 of
the hash power anyway
um
and it’s taken us six months to
basically get back
and um
it is no different now on the network
than it would have been had china not
done anything except of course it’s
significantly more decentralized and of
course we have one more piece of fud
which
um has has been proven to come to
nothing the the mining centralization in
china specifically you know i mean for
me it’s no surprise that
the the russia were doing this and china
were doing this because
you know bitcoin is anathema to these
kind of regimes bitcoin is
is a freedom catalyst and it it gives to
everybody who holds it an appreciation
of personal sovereignty and
decentralization
and
you know that’s the kind of thing that
these particular regimes are just not
going to tolerate
and it is a shame in a way strategically
for them because
bitcoin
would definitely help in their wider
aims to destabilize the united states
and the dollar as the world reserve
currency but
i think
that doesn’t quite stack up to the
you know the the terrible prospect for
them of having a
a free decentralized hard money
circulating in their in their borders
and competing with their surveillance
cbdc currency
so
yeah it’s a shame but it’s
it’s unsurprising
and actually i wonder if you could
create some kind of index where you’re
judging the freeness of a country
against its disposition to
to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies all
right so next up we have rio de janeiro
is investing 1 of its city funds into
bitcoin and it’s mayor edward baez i
hope i pronounced that right my spanish
isn’t great edward baez has announced
that um has announced this during rio’s
innovation week and he wants to turn the
city into a crypto hub very similar to
miami or in el salvador the the bitcoin
city and
he’s said that he’s going to accelerate
and incentivize this by allowing
citizens to pay their taxes in bitcoin
and cryptocurrencies and getting a 10
discount which is is great
one of the hardest challenges for any of
these
civic institutions to to make the move
into bitcoin is really being the the
first mover i mean you have to be pretty
risk tolerant and innovative to
to you know risk your career by putting
city funds into
what many many people would concern
some kind of casino ponzi scheme or you
know some of the the kind of fud or
notions that are in
you know the minds of
older people
who uh haven’t had time to to study
bitcoin
um it’s the kind of thing that you know
it’s hugely risky but the good thing is
is that now with cities like this now
they have
acted as the kind of vanguard putting
sacred public funds into in into bitcoin
it’s so much easier now for for the rest
of
of of cities particularly those in
in situations where it it’s highly
desirable or even they’re desperate um
to start making the move into into
crypto and finally we have the world
economic forum which kicked off last
week online rather than in the alpine
swiss town of davos which it’s
named after now the wef is run by this
man mr claus schwab he looks a bit like
a like a james bond villain and he has
taken it upon himself to unite
all of the politicians and billionaires
and thought leaders and movie stars to
this little village with an aim to solve
all of the the world’s problems problems
i would say that many of these people’s
companies and the politicians policies
are directly responsible to this is
basically a highly globalist
organization they
believe that global problems require
global solutions and they are the people
to provide those solutions they are
behind the narrative of the great reset
buildback better stakeholder capitalism
which for those of you that haven’t
heard of it it is a refashioning of the
the
kind of ideas that underpin western
capitalism which is that corporations
are working for their owners the
shareholders this would adjust that to
forcing corporations to
to work for its wider
stakeholders not shareholders
stakeholders being the community
employees people who work people who own
it basically everybody around that
business and this sounds really nice
until you realize that the
the uh the reality of that would be that
the government starts taking board seats
and uh and equity in companies over a
certain
you know employee threshold
so yeah it is a a kind of techno
socialism that the the wef is pushing
and one of their pet hates is of course
bitcoin now the wef is obsessed with
climate change and it’s probably one of
their biggest tools in their bag to
achieve their globalist aims through
esg and other mechanisms they’re using
climate change to suck up power from the
nation states and centralize it in a
in a global body with an aim to fix
climate change now the wef has become
quite a bit more famous during the
pandemic because conspiracy theories
between well about the wf and davos
abound and some have more merit than
others but
you can get a good idea about what this
organization wants just from looking at
the stuff they published themselves
there was a very famous article with the
title it’s 2030
i owe nothing i have no privacy
and i’ve never been happier
says a lot about the kind of future
they’re trying to bring in but anyway
back to bitcoin
the wef hate bitcoin and are always
attacking on it for its environmental
credentials i don’t think they really
care about that but they do care for the
same reason that bitcoin’s anathema to
the regimes in russia and china
everything the wef does is all about
centralization and all bitcoin can do is
promote decentralization
it’s like oil and water they’re just not
going to mix and of course just like
with china the wef pushing forward their
central bank digital currencies so
they’re not going to want a free hard
decentralized money undermining that now
as i say the wef attacked bitcoin every
year and this year is no different
in this year’s report they found a
professor mr pete hausen
senior lecturer in international
development at northumbria university
not one of britain’s top institutions i
might add
has said in 2022 it is likely to see
stronger public opposition to bitcoin on
environmental grounds
which could force regulators to act more
decisively and they’ve pulled up a
yougov poll
now yougov have lost a lot of
credibility for me during the
the health crisis we’ve had over the
last two years they published a lot of
very suspect poll data that would
suggest there’s a huge amount of public
support for
for even more strict lockdown measures
and you know
you try and find people that would be in
favor of
closing nightclubs forever
as an example
and you just can’t find them so i think
this is another case of that which is
saying
for the over 35s
between 40 and 60 of people would be in
favor of an outright ban of
cryptocurrencies on environmental
grounds now
you know i don’t buy this for a second
but
what is important is that these kind of
this kind of data this kind of polling
is used to justify future policy now you
know
the british might not be what they were
but they’re certainly not this
authoritarian there’s no way 40 or 50
percent of people would just ban
cryptocurrencies because it’s bad for
the environment so yeah i mean i i don’t
think that this this data is true but
certainly something to keep an eye on
now linaldon one of my favorite analysts
has posted a tweet on this phrase
subject on this very report in fact um
and a report from 2017 that ended up not
being true
fact check bitcoin consumes a small
fraction of 1 of global power today
compared to the wef’s 2017 statement
that it would consume all of it by now a
lot of these estimates and articles come
from people who don’t understand how
bitcoin works and i think that’s correct
a lot of people don’t understand how
bitcoin works they certainly don’t
understand how the mining works they
don’t understand the possibilities for
bitcoin to incentivize cheap power
productions in places that are
you know
abundant with energy but have sparse
people to send their energy to like
northern canada alberta inner mongolia
for instance but they’re not going to
get this information because the people
that control the news and the
information that they get are opposed to
bitcoin because it undermines their
plans so yeah the environmental flood is
an attack on the network and it’s up to
us the community to defend the network
by educating people
well thanks for joining me on the
bitcoin briefing i hope you enjoyed the
show and i’ll see you in the next one
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Episode Details
Thanks for watching The Bitcoin Briefing podcast.
Music: “Someone Cries” – Produced by Andrew Holt
