Shownotes
This week we will be performing your quarterly checkup. I hope that in these times of market confusion you are continuing to stack crypto. Daily, weekly or monthly it doesn't matter. What matters is that, like Nike, you just do it. The saying goes .. when in doubt..zoom out!! Don't loose sight of the end goal.
News
https://news.bitcoin.com/wasabi-wallet-to-begin-censoring-coinjoin-transactions
This weeks editorial
https://stacker.news/items/15948
Podcasting 2.0 Apps Available at http://newpodcastapps.com/
I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Website
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://incompetech.com
Transcripts
Hey everyone, no one on this podcast is a financial advisor.
Speaker:All information presented on this podcast is for informational purposes only.
Speaker:Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let's jump on in.
Speaker:Welcome to the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast.
Speaker:I'm your host, McIntosh.
Speaker:Today we're going to be talking about your quarterly checkup.
Speaker:Now really, before we begin, I would mention we are in the middle of a rainstorm and some
Speaker:lightning passing through, so you may hear that in the background.
Speaker:I do apologize.
Speaker:Not really anything I could do about it.
Speaker:I don't think it's going to get picked up very much.
Speaker:Won't be able to tell until I edit the audio, but in case you hear anything, hey, it's just
Speaker:life.
Speaker:All right, what are we going to be talking about this week?
Speaker:I did want to take a few minutes and basically kind of check on everybody.
Speaker:I hope this week finds you well.
Speaker:We are almost a full three months into the new year.
Speaker:Time is flying, but in the crypto world, it's kind of gone sideways, or maybe even down
Speaker:a bit.
Speaker:I'd have to pull up the charts, but we've been kind of in this sideways consolidation
Speaker:for quite a while, other than the brief kind of spikes outside of $45,000, $50,000.
Speaker:This is the time, I think, when people kind of get bored and stop paying attention.
Speaker:Bitcoin, in particular, and crypto in general, will kind of trick you and lull you off to
Speaker:sleep, so to speak, and then all of a sudden, boom, it's back, and it'll be spiking upward
Speaker:in a kind of a parabolic move.
Speaker:I don't know if that's happening.
Speaker:This week's price is a little bit better.
Speaker:At the time of the recording, it's $41,881 for Bitcoin.
Speaker:But yesterday saw a close actually, I believe, above $42,600.
Speaker:Now, it didn't stay up there, obviously, but it has gone back down a bit, kind of retesting
Speaker:things.
Speaker:We're in this area where there's actually a lot of resistance.
Speaker:There seems to be a fair amount of support.
Speaker:It may chew things around for a while, or frankly, we may get rejected and go back lower
Speaker:again.
Speaker:But I think one of the things that I've made very clear with the podcast is my opinion
Speaker:is that the best way for you to invest in crypto in the long term is through what we
Speaker:would call DCA, dollar cost average.
Speaker:Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the price of Bitcoin is, and in fact, if it's lower,
Speaker:that simply means that you can buy more of it.
Speaker:And the same goes for any crypto asset, whether that's Ethereum or ADA or whatever.
Speaker:We've discussed, of course, ways that you can do that.
Speaker:And for you, maybe that's once a month that you buy your crypto.
Speaker:Maybe it's weekly.
Speaker:Maybe it is daily.
Speaker:I've mentioned the Strike app multiple times, and I don't receive any endorsement from this,
Speaker:of course, but I am using it and buying Bitcoin on a daily basis.
Speaker:I buy other crypto in addition to that, but I have a percentage of my monthly allocation
Speaker:that I've set aside for Bitcoin, and I use Strike to buy that daily.
Speaker:The other things I buy once a month and typically at the very start of the month, and that's
Speaker:the way that works.
Speaker:So if you've gotten out of the habit, if you're waiting for it to go back up, I don't know
Speaker:what the reason would be, but if you've stopped buying, you probably are making a mistake.
Speaker:Now, of course, as with everything, this is not financial advice, et cetera, but when
Speaker:it comes to crypto and it comes to these sideways lulls, these crab markets, whatever you want
Speaker:to call it, it's always best to zoom out.
Speaker:We're in the middle of this and maybe it's a month long, maybe it's, well, it's been
Speaker:over a month really at this point, but it could be a while, several months.
Speaker:There's been periods where we've had a long period of time where it just kind of goes
Speaker:sideways or maybe it's going down.
Speaker:They certainly did that in 2018, on end of 2019, sadly, it was frankly a depressing
Speaker:time period.
Speaker:I've talked about that.
Speaker:I stopped buying and that was a huge mistake, maybe one of the biggest financial mistakes
Speaker:I'll ever make in my life.
Speaker:I've said it before, if we would have kept buying during that timeframe, I would be at
Speaker:a much better financial position.
Speaker:The past is the past, won't do that again and I don't want you to make that mistake.
Speaker:If you're worried about the price, zoom out, look at the long view.
Speaker:Where was Bitcoin two years ago?
Speaker:Where was Bitcoin three, four years ago?
Speaker:Where do you think Bitcoin will be in four years?
Speaker:I'm not going to sit here and tell you Bitcoin is going to hit $100,000 this year or this
Speaker:month or even next year.
Speaker:But I do know that 10 years from now, Bitcoin will be a lot higher because we get story
Speaker:after story after story after story of more adoption, more adoption, more people pulling
Speaker:their crypto off of the exchanges for both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Speaker:Maybe not all time highs, but extremely high levels of people not keeping their crypto
Speaker:on exchanges.
Speaker:And what does that mean?
Speaker:They're not selling.
Speaker:And when they're not selling, what does that do?
Speaker:It pushes the price up ultimately.
Speaker:So it will happen.
Speaker:And in the meantime, what do we do?
Speaker:We keep buying.
Speaker:We do our DCA.
Speaker:Whatever that means for you, keep on your schedule.
Speaker:It's always best, if possible, to have a service like Strike where it's just a regular thing.
Speaker:Or mark it on your calendar.
Speaker:Make it a weekly habit if you're buying weekly.
Speaker:Put it on your calendar.
Speaker:Oh, Monday morning I'm going to make my buy or Monday night or Sunday night or whatever
Speaker:works best for you.
Speaker:Get in that habit and keep doing it.
Speaker:There's a few things that we're going to talk about in terms of the news.
Speaker:This week's podcast is probably going to be a little short.
Speaker:No major topic other than that, but it's so important.
Speaker:It really is the core of what we do here, Generation Wealth Cryptocurrency.
Speaker:We're making this as simple as possible for you, but in the end, just do the work.
Speaker:Invest on the weekly basis, the monthly basis for your future.
Speaker:And don't lose track.
Speaker:Don't be the people who fumble in at the top and buy the crypto at $69,000 and then they
Speaker:sell it at $35,000.
Speaker:That's a terrible, terrible, terrible investment.
Speaker:You should just keep buying.
Speaker:Be like Dory, just keep swimming.
Speaker:There was some lightning.
Speaker:You probably heard that.
Speaker:Be like Dory in the Finding Nemo movie.
Speaker:I have kids and they watch that movie.
Speaker:She swims along and she just keeps swimming.
Speaker:You know, most of you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker:Just keep buying.
Speaker:Just do it on a regular basis.
Speaker:Enough about that.
Speaker:News.
Speaker:Lots of news this week, actually.
Speaker:When I sat down and I was doing my prep for this, I was thinking, well, there wasn't a
Speaker:whole lot.
Speaker:But then I began thinking about it and I posted some things on Twitter and there was actually
Speaker:quite a bit.
Speaker:Now, in the Rumor Department, which is exactly what this is, there are people making noise
Speaker:that Honduras is about to make Bitcoin legal tender.
Speaker:Now, a few weeks ago, we heard the same thing about Mexico.
Speaker:That turned out to be a senator from Mexico that was proposing a bill or whatever.
Speaker:So that's certainly not going to be happening anytime soon.
Speaker:But with Honduras, it sounds like it's actually the president of the country.
Speaker:They see what's going on in El Salvador and it sounds like they want to maybe not imitate,
Speaker:but at least follow along.
Speaker:So that will definitely be something to keep an eye on.
Speaker:The second item I want to talk about this week, I actually wrote an editorial about
Speaker:this on Stacker News, which is a website, stacker.news.
Speaker:It's a very interesting website.
Speaker:It's very new.
Speaker:It's only been up, I don't know exactly how long, but maybe a couple of months.
Speaker:And it operates kind of under a version of the value for value model.
Speaker:You post stories, you post editorials or long-form essays or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker:And people can go and read those, somewhat similar to DIG, I guess, or maybe somewhat
Speaker:similar to Medium, where people post really long-form essays.
Speaker:But there's a lot of news here as well.
Speaker:And then when you comment or upvote an article or news, you pay a Satoshi to do that.
Speaker:One Satoshi, which of course is, there's a hundred million Satoshis in a Bitcoin.
Speaker:So it's a very small amount of money.
Speaker:And that Satoshi goes to the person who wrote the article.
Speaker:So in fact, I wrote an article on our next news item.
Speaker:I posted it a couple hours ago.
Speaker:I've already generated 103 Sats, which isn't very much really, but it's kind of fun.
Speaker:You see your Sats add up.
Speaker:It's kind of like the podcasting, right?
Speaker:The streaming Sats with podcasting 2.0, and they're supporting the work.
Speaker:So I will probably continue to post.
Speaker:I do like to write in my alternate life, in my quote, non-crypto life.
Speaker:A number of years ago, I actually wrote a technical book in the computer industry.
Speaker:You could literally go to Amazon and actually purchase that.
Speaker:You know, it's there.
Speaker:But I do enjoy writing.
Speaker:So this is kind of an outlet for that.
Speaker:I could also post these up on the website, something I really need to start doing.
Speaker:And there's certainly nothing wrong with posting them in both areas.
Speaker:So we'll see how that goes.
Speaker:But I would point you to that website.
Speaker:It's stacker.news.
Speaker:You might want to check it out.
Speaker:I will provide a link to the editorial about Wasabi.
Speaker:So in case you didn't hear, Wasabi makes, well, there's a Wasabi wallet, first of all.
Speaker:It's a Bitcoin-only wallet.
Speaker:It's open source.
Speaker:The code is available on the internet.
Speaker:You can review it, which that's really good.
Speaker:The Wasabi wallet is built by a company called ZKSnacks.
Speaker:Here's the thing.
Speaker:They run a coordinator for what's called a CoinJoin service.
Speaker:Now, this gets a little complicated.
Speaker:I'm not going to go really deep into it.
Speaker:But basically, the idea of a CoinJoin service is kind of a way to anonymize your Bitcoin.
Speaker:Now, why you would do that?
Speaker:There's a number of reasons.
Speaker:Most of them are actually not illegitimate.
Speaker:So please don't instantly go thinking somebody's trying to launder their Bitcoin like you would
Speaker:launder cash.
Speaker:That's not really the purpose of it.
Speaker:But regardless, ZKSnacks runs a service that, from the Wasabi wallet, makes it really easy
Speaker:to use this CoinJoin service.
Speaker:This week, they made an announcement and a statement on social media explaining that
Speaker:there will be what they call...
Speaker:There will be some UTXOs, which are unspent transactions in the Bitcoin terminology.
Speaker:Actually, it's unspent transaction outputs that will be censored, that they will blacklist.
Speaker:They will not allow to use the CoinJoin service through their coordinator.
Speaker:Now, they did not say who this was, or I'm quite sure there's many of them.
Speaker:I hypothesized in my editorial that, in fact, this was some of the Russians.
Speaker:It could be all of Russia.
Speaker:It could be the Russian oligarchs or whatever these rich people in Russia who they're trying
Speaker:to move their money out of Russia.
Speaker:Of course, Russia is involved in the war with Ukraine.
Speaker:You've got lots of sanctions going on around the world.
Speaker:There was no call, and I will emphasize this, there was no call for ZKSnacks to do this.
Speaker:They are not a US-based company.
Speaker:They're not a European company.
Speaker:They're actually based out of Gibraltar, which I...
Speaker:Well, technically, that might actually be a European country.
Speaker:I don't know which side of the strait to Gibraltar that's on.
Speaker:I thought it was on the African side, but I'm actually not sure.
Speaker:Maybe they are a European country, but there was no call for that.
Speaker:It was basically something that they did preemptively.
Speaker:To me, this is a bad thing.
Speaker:This is a centralized service, by definition, and this is kind of the opposite of what Bitcoin
Speaker:is built on.
Speaker:Of course, one of the tenets of Bitcoin is decentralization, clearly not the case here.
Speaker:It's something to keep your eye on, something to understand.
Speaker:You may not have very many listeners that are using the Wasabi wallet, but it is certainly
Speaker:something to be aware of.
Speaker:I'm not a fan of this, I'll be honest, I'm not.
Speaker:It's a very long discussion about censorship that would then involve why.
Speaker:I go into that a little bit in my editorial, but it really is a very long, nuanced discussion.
Speaker:It's certainly not something that goes well over Twitter or something like that.
Speaker:Please go to the show notes, take a look at the editorial.
Speaker:You're certainly not required to upvote or comment or whatever on that article.
Speaker:Take a look at Stacker.News.
Speaker:I've been kind of watching this site for a few weeks, I've been thinking about posting
Speaker:some stuff on it, so I wanted to go ahead and jump on in.
Speaker:All right, next, we'll go ahead and go into the bad news, and we'll end on a good note.
Speaker:How about that?
Speaker:So, in more bad news, I actually think I was directly affected by that this week.
Speaker:I do have an account on Coinbase, and I logged in.
Speaker:I'm trying to do my taxes, yay taxes, fun stuff, and I had logged into my Coinbase account,
Speaker:and when I logged in, it said, hey, you need to change your password.
Speaker:And I'm like, okay, because of a security breach, it's what it said.
Speaker:And it turns out that this CRM software, customer relationship management, I think is what that
Speaker:stands for.
Speaker:It's basically a way to kind of keep track of your customers and their names and addresses
Speaker:and emails and email them out, whatever your email newsletter and that kind of thing.
Speaker:This company called HubSpot, which is a CRM based company, or they provide a CRM service,
Speaker:I should say, they had a data breach.
Speaker:Now the thing is, HubSpot, of course, is used by a lot of companies, including a number
Speaker:of crypto companies.
Speaker:Now I could not find evidence that a Coinbase was one of their clients.
Speaker:I'm speculating that's why I got that message, to be clear, but I give you an article that
Speaker:I provide a link to.
Speaker:This says that BlockFi, SwanBitcoin, Nydig, and Circle were all affected.
Speaker:These are all crypto companies.
Speaker:And there was a lot more.
Speaker:30 clients is actually what it said.
Speaker:They haven't published the full list.
Speaker:So that's not, oh, Pantera Capital, right, was one of the listed ones in a separate article
Speaker:and kind of in a bullet point on this article.
Speaker:Again, I hate to say it, it's a central point of failure.
Speaker:If we're going to use a service like this, SwanBitcoin is a good example.
Speaker:They're another company that they can provide custodial services for Bitcoin and they can
Speaker:actually set up the recurring payments for Bitcoin.
Speaker:If you're going to use a service like that, that service should be doing everything that
Speaker:it can to not rely on outside people, vendors, really.
Speaker:I've been in the computer industry for a long time, since the mid-90s.
Speaker:I've seen a lot of hacks.
Speaker:I've seen a lot of hacks in crypto.
Speaker:And it's just, I don't know.
Speaker:This is other people's money that they're managing.
Speaker:And you have to be super, super careful when you're doing that.
Speaker:Why would you rely on a CRM like, oh, well, it's convenient.
Speaker:Well, yes, it's convenient.
Speaker:Coinbase, if Coinbase is one of their customers, and again, I don't know that that's true,
Speaker:but as an example, and maybe a very obvious example, they're a multi-billion dollar company.
Speaker:They can afford to create their own little internal CRM.
Speaker:They don't have to rely on HubSpot.
Speaker:Does it make it more difficult?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And there's always these conversations, and I hear them all the time in the discussion
Speaker:when we're doing architectural-level planning of this type stuff.
Speaker:Do we need this service?
Speaker:Can we outsource this service so that we don't have to manage it?
Speaker:And that's the wrong...
Speaker:When you're dealing with people's data, with people's money, it's the wrong discussion.
Speaker:You don't want to do that.
Speaker:You don't want to rely on other people.
Speaker:You don't want to have that point of failure.
Speaker:So I do blame these companies.
Speaker:Now, they'll blame HubSpot, but this is yet another reason.
Speaker:I've always said, I've had a very steady record on this.
Speaker:You should not have your money on these centralized exchanges.
Speaker:You should certainly have it divided up.
Speaker:Really you should manage your own money on a hardware wallet that you keep at home.
Speaker:But at least don't put it all in one place where it can be wiped away.
Speaker:Can you imagine if you had money on Mt. Gox when it was hacked, for example?
Speaker:And I remember that one.
Speaker:I had an account on Mt. Gox actually and lost a small amount of money.
Speaker:So it just goes back to basic security.
Speaker:But again, decentralization, et cetera.
Speaker:I mean, this is the reason why Bitcoin was created.
Speaker:Good stuff.
Speaker:All right, on to the good news.
Speaker:There was a big dev meeting for ETH earlier this week.
Speaker:They are very much on the road to, quote, the merge.
Speaker:And we've discussed this in previous episodes where they're going to merge the test network
Speaker:with the main network.
Speaker:They will then, the proof, the staking that's going on with ETH will then become the primary
Speaker:function.
Speaker:We'll move off proof of work, basically.
Speaker:Sorry, that was probably a pretty poor explanation.
Speaker:Go back and listen to the episode if you need any further explanation.
Speaker:But it's a really large upgrade, probably, in my opinion, the largest one that will have
Speaker:ever been done in crypto.
Speaker:And they seem to be very confident about it.
Speaker:And it's moving forward.
Speaker:So they expect it in the next probably three to six months.
Speaker:So it looks like it is definitely coming this year.
Speaker:So that's good news.
Speaker:That will drive up the price of ETH.
Speaker:Basically, they've calculated, and I don't know how the calculation was done, frankly.
Speaker:I've heard it from multiple sources, though, from multiple places.
Speaker:Maybe they're just parroting the same line.
Speaker:That's certainly possible.
Speaker:But they basically calculated that it's like three Bitcoin halvings.
Speaker:So when Bitcoin, every four years, they halve the output of the blocks, the number of Bitcoin
Speaker:that are produced in a block, that's called a halving.
Speaker:You're lowering the supply output.
Speaker:You're making it harder to mine those Bitcoin.
Speaker:And ultimately, that drives up the price.
Speaker:They're saying that this is the equivalent of three of those.
Speaker:So it will be a huge boost if that's true.
Speaker:So hold on to your ETH.
Speaker:Last thing, and maybe the best.
Speaker:So late this week, I want to say it's only been, well, it's early in the week.
Speaker:But in the last few days, let me look for a date on this.
Speaker:This was actually 16 hours ago.
Speaker:I thought I'd heard about it a couple of days ago, like over the weekend.
Speaker:But regardless, very recently, it's come out.
Speaker:You guys, we just talked about Terra a few weeks ago, the Luna, the Terra Luna, the Terra
Speaker:stablecoin.
Speaker:So the Terraform Labs, the company behind that, is planning on buying, I hope you're
Speaker:sitting down, $10 billion, not million, billion worth of Bitcoin to add as a stablecoin reserve.
Speaker:So instead of being backed by USD, it will be backed by Bitcoin, at least in some cases.
Speaker:It's all kind of a big pool.
Speaker:But that's a huge, huge amount of Bitcoin.
Speaker:At today's prices, that's 232,975 Bitcoin, almost 233,000 Bitcoin.
Speaker:For some kind of perspective on that, one of the bigger Bitcoin whales, so to speak,
Speaker:one of the bigger companies in Bitcoin, Microstrategy, they hold about 125,000 Bitcoin.
Speaker:So obviously, this will instantly vault them into one of the top few whales in Bitcoin.
Speaker:And all of this purchasing will only do what?
Speaker:Drive up the price of Bitcoin.
Speaker:So this is a very bullish thing.
Speaker:They're not going to do this all at once.
Speaker:It's going to happen gradually.
Speaker:It's going to happen what they call OTC, over the counter.
Speaker:They're not going to go get a Coinbase account and buy $10 billion worth of Bitcoin.
Speaker:That would be silly.
Speaker:That's not how it's done at that level.
Speaker:And I don't buy at that level or sell at that level.
Speaker:I have no idea in detail how it's done.
Speaker:I just know it's done basically behind the scenes.
Speaker:They say, we're going to buy 1,000 Bitcoin in the next couple of days.
Speaker:And if they were dealing with Coinbase, for example, Coinbase would agree upon a price.
Speaker:And I believe there's usually a premium on the price, which is perfectly legitimate.
Speaker:It keeps all of that from flowing through the exchange and creating this spike on Coinbase.
Speaker:It would cause problems, really, if they did that.
Speaker:But ultimately, they're moving that money off of the exchange into cold storage, hopefully,
Speaker:for them, and out of supply.
Speaker:So very, very bullish news there.
Speaker:I will, of course, include an article to that in the show notes.
Speaker:I find this fascinating.
Speaker:I think this could catch on.
Speaker:I would love to see Tether buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
Speaker:I would love to see some of these other companies that do stablecoins buy their own Bitcoin.
Speaker:I think, ultimately, it certainly probably won't start out like this.
Speaker:But countries, when they create their centralized digital currency, which we know is going to
Speaker:happen and is already happening, initially, they would be backed by whatever that country's
Speaker:currency is.
Speaker:As an example, the US would be backed by the US dollar.
Speaker:But ultimately, I could see a mix.
Speaker:They would have some Bitcoin in there, maybe some of the local currency, and then maybe
Speaker:ultimately the local currency goes away as it kind of fades out of the system.
Speaker:That may take a long time.
Speaker:I'm not being a prophet here.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:I'm certainly not making any projections, but just a thought exercise as to how it might
Speaker:play out.
Speaker:So that's it for the news this week.
Speaker:I hope you have enjoyed this episode a little bit shorter than normal.
Speaker:Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency supports Podcasting 2.0.
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Speaker:Thanks for being here.
Speaker:I hope this has been helpful.
Speaker:I would love to hear from you.
Speaker:I'm on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech, and you can reach me by email at mcintosh at genwealthcrypto.com.
Speaker:And of course, there's the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency website at genwealthcrypto.com.
Speaker:Now go out and make it a great week.
Speaker:Talk to you soon.