And what a year it was!! It's easy to forget what happened in the last year. The price of $BTC and crypto in general might not have exploded as we would probably all like but there was much that was newsworthy.

In addition to covering the major news of 2021 I highlighted what I think are the going to major trends of 2022 and even made a prediction for the Bitcoin price in 2022.

I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrytpo.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Website

https://genwealthcrypto.com

Music Credits

Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

No one on this podcast is a financial advisor and all information presented on this podcast

is for informational purposes only.

Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let's jump on in, guys.

Welcome to the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast.

I'm your host, McIntosh.

Today we're going to be talking about the year in review.

Now, I do need to apologize right up front.

Of course, it's been a bit since we've done a podcast.

We had a planned vacation the week between Christmas and New Year's, and then we got

sick or at least I got sick.

So we've had the flu, felt very down, very sick for almost a week really, but I'm feeling

much better and I've been wanting to get this out.

I'd had the notes ready, but I certainly didn't have the voice for it, much less the energy

but here we are.

So we're going to talk about last year.

We're going to talk about what we expect from this year and we'll see where we go.

All right, last year, for those of us who don't remember, which is probably everybody

because there was a lot of stuff going on last year.

It was amazing.

I was going back through the list and some of this stuff that we're going to discuss

comes from the Masario report that I mentioned last couple of weeks ago, but this is just

kind of a general overview of some of the things that went on and then we'll talk about

where I see 2022 going.

I may be incorrect.

I was incorrect about 2021.

We've been discussing for several weeks now, several episodes, is this bull market over?

Are we in a bear market?

I still don't know.

I don't think anybody knows.

There's people who act like they know.

I don't really think they do, to be honest.

What we do know is that really for 2021, if you kind of zoom out, we were almost in a

sideways market between like 40 and 60K for a lot of the year, really.

And so in retrospect, even though we started the year at certainly late in 2020, we were

much lower than we are now and were late in 2021.

But the reality is 2021 was a lot of sideways.

So I don't know.

I don't know if that means we've got lengthening cycles going on.

I don't know if it's just market manipulation.

I truly don't know.

What we do know is we didn't have a blow off top yet, if we're going to have one, like

we did in 2017, 2018.

Nothing even close to that.

For those who weren't around the last few weeks of that cycle were insane.

And we've not seen anything like that.

I am very closely watching the markets at this point.

I was actually discussing a few days ago with one of our listeners who's a friend of mine,

you know, kind of the state of things.

And I feel like this $40,000 level that we have been at for quite a while, touching and

maybe going briefly below, certainly spending a lot of time at between $40,000 and $42,000,

you know, it's a very important level.

And if it goes much below that, I think this very easily could turn into a major downturn.

I hope it doesn't.

I don't think we're done with this, and I'm not ready to cash in, so to speak, at this point.

But I'm certainly more cautious than I was a few weeks ago, if that makes sense.

So, right now, we're sitting at $41,963, which is roughly what we were at during the weekly

close here a couple of hours ago.

And that was, you know, it's okay.

It's not terrible.

We could have done better, but, you know, we did go down for the week, certainly.

But it could have been worse.

Again, this kind of $40,000 level is a very important level to watch.

Some people think it might even go a little bit below that.

I'm certainly willing to allow for that possibility, $39,000, $38,000, kind of a quick down, kind

of like what we saw a few, I guess, months ago at this point, six or eight weeks ago,

maybe.

I'd have to bring up the chart to make sure.

But when it dropped significantly down to $42,000 and then made an immediate bounce back,

I don't know.

I will be getting very concerned if it breaks $40,000, personally.

So, of course, none of that is financial advice.

As I said up at the top, that's why I don't do a trading channel.

It is what it is.

This is a difficult market to be involved in that kind of thing.

And my recommendation would be just keep DCAing.

It doesn't matter if the market's down, if the market's up, you just keep DCAing like

we've talked about.

I just made my purchases for January.

I was a little late this month.

Again, I wasn't feeling well.

So I bought, I'll let you know, it's not a big deal.

I bought a little bit of Ether, Ethereum.

I bought a little bit of ADA.

I bought actually some XRP, which I've never talked about on this channel that I recall.

I might have mentioned it in passing.

And I'll discuss that briefly since I've never really talked about it.

It's the first XRP I bought in years and I haven't owned any recently.

And it seems like I bought something else too, maybe some Matic.

So anyways, this was certainly a good buying opportunity for those of us who DCA.

I did actually start setting up a daily buy of Bitcoin on Strike, which is Strike is an

app which I've mentioned in the past.

You can use it to send and receive money via Bitcoin and you can use it basically to buy

Bitcoin as well.

It's being used a lot to send money down to El Salvador.

So I set up my account and then ended up not being able to do it at this point.

So I'm going to reconfigure that.

I decided to go ahead and buy some of these small caps, the ones that I mentioned, rather

than buying Bitcoin this go around.

So I will probably change that next month.

All right.

But actually with Strike, I was going to do a daily buy like 10 bucks a day or something.

So that way, regardless of what's going on, I'm buying.

So if you're worried about it, that's the best thing to do because if you zoom out,

as I've said before, what's the long-term pattern?

It's up.

So whether we make it back up to $69K this bull run or whether that was the top and now

we're going down, I don't know, it doesn't matter.

Personally, I don't want to see Bitcoin down at $20,000, but man, if it was, what a buying

opportunity.

So you can look at it that way.

It's scary.

Been there several times.

All right, on to the year in review.

What happened last year?

Like I said, lots of stuff.

I'm going to hit the highlights.

China was certainly a big story last year.

China prior to last year accounted for over 70% of the world's Bitcoin hashrate, meaning

kind of the computing power that was being put towards Bitcoin to mine Bitcoin.

And essentially the Chinese Communist Party said, we can't do that.

We're running you guys all out.

That happened over the summer.

And now any mining that's going on in China is happening illegally if there is any.

And there's certainly no significant percentage of hashrate coming out of China.

And that was a big deal because what we saw was, like I said, 70%.

And the reason why is that cheap energy, cheap labor, it was a good place to do that.

But it became centralized, right?

And people were concerned.

What does that mean?

Is this going to affect Bitcoin?

And it did in the short term, certainly.

I think it was a big part of that summer lull, so to speak.

But certainly in the long term, we're actually back above that rate.

All of that hashrate has moved out.

And in fact, one of the news items, I'm just going to go ahead and throw it in here.

A lot of it moved, or some of it, about 20% of the total hashrate now is in Kazakhstan.

And Kazakhstan is having some issues now, not directly related to Bitcoin, but the government

actually shut down the internet, which means that the mining was shut down.

And so now that's caused a problem, but it's on a much smaller scale.

I don't really think it's materially affecting things at this point.

Those miners are going to have to decide to either ride this out or leave the country

and go somewhere else.

We do know that a fair amount of that hashrate from China actually migrated, if you wanted

to call it that, from China to the United States, to Texas, and some other places like

that.

But anyways, that was a big deal, of course.

So the next thing that happened with Bitcoin is the Bitcoin Futures ETFs.

We've had, I don't know, three or four approvals at this point.

The ETF approval first time was a big deal here in the United States.

It was not really what people wanted for an ETF.

There's different kinds.

There's two different kinds, and this was kind of the less desirable of the two.

So it was a step in that direction.

So you started seeing a lot of institutional money.

One of the themes of 2021 certainly was institutional money becoming more heavily involved.

We've had institutions for several years now being involved in Bitcoin, but I think 2021

was kind of a watershed for that, and ETFs opening that up to a different group of people.

So more wider exposure.

Another thing with Bitcoin, a big theme for 2021, Elon Musk kicked this off big time talking

about proof of work, which is how Bitcoin is mined and currently Ethereum, as well as

probably some other tokens.

Certainly those two, the big two.

Their mind via proof of work, running computations, and there are people who view this as a waste

of energy.

I am not going to enter into that debate, don't really have a dog in that hunt, as we

would say.

But Elon came out and said, actually, they came out and said, we're going to take Bitcoin

for Tesla, and then came out shortly after, oh, this is a bad thing, proof of work is

wasting energy, and blah, blah, blah.

So it turned into a big thing.

Ethereum already had its plan set, Ethereum 2.0 moved to proof of stake.

I've spent multiple episodes talking about that, not going to go into that in detail,

but they're already on that wagon, but I promise you Bitcoin will not change, and they're not

going to.

They have no intention, and I don't know, people can accept it or not.

It's the choice.

They're not going to change.

They believe in what they're doing.

They don't believe that in the overall scheme of things, so to speak, of world energy consumption,

that it's that significant, that it's wasteful.

They think it's providing a very, very valuable service, which if you think Bitcoin has a

future, you would think that that's true.

So they're just going to keep going.

You may see a shift of mining from place to place because, I don't know, of regulation,

but that's not really going to affect Bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin, at this point, that cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

This may be the episode of metaphors, sorry.

Next item, Lightning, El Salvador, a big deal, and I made it to be a big deal when it happened.

I still believe it was a big deal.

First of all, we had our first sovereign nation accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

They have moved forward very dramatically with their plans for that, and I've talked

about that a little bit.

Not a huge amount, but they've developed a plan to build what they call a Bitcoin city

that's going to be powered by a volcano, geothermal energy, really.

They have a lot of dormant volcanoes in El Salvador.

They would call them dead.

I'm not sure that that's really true, but certainly dormant volcanoes.

They can create a lot of clean energy for those people who are worried about energy

wasting or whatever.

They're going to power not only Bitcoin city, they're going to power Bitcoin mining.

They're doing a lot of things.

They're issuing what they call a Bitcoin bond.

I would suppose, probably the first half of this year, I believe it is in the amount of

a billion dollars, half of which will go towards buying Bitcoin, half of which will go towards

infrastructure for this city, and that kind of thing.

So, certainly very innovative, time will tell.

If you are on Twitter, you should follow the president of El Salvador's Twitter feed.

He's entertaining, if nothing else.

He does tweet, Twitter tweet, I guess, tweet a lot in English.

He also does it in Spanish.

If you don't speak Spanish or if you don't, well, if you don't speak English, you're probably

not listening to this podcast, but if you don't speak Spanish, he does do a lot in English.

But along with El Salvador, we had mass acceptance slash adoption of the Lightning Network.

I did spend an episode talking about Lightning in detail, but it is a way to make very low-cost

payments that are virtually instantaneous, that you can send remittances through something

like that strike app that I just mentioned at the start of the show, from the United

States to El Salvador, or wherever it's allowed.

And the amount of liquidity, which is what powers that network, really, in Bitcoin, is

just kind of on a hockey stick pattern.

It's kind of crazy if you look at the liquidity of that network, very, very fascinating.

I think Lightning has a big chance of taking over a big part of this moving money around market.

I don't know what the financial word for that is, but remittances, certainly, where we're

sending money from one country to another, which currently is a very expensive, time-consuming

and frankly annoying thing to do.

Alright, so that was kind of it for Bitcoin last year.

Ethereum, the big thing, of course, was EIP 1559.

That was what they call the London hard fork.

It was an upgrade to the Ethereum network that started what they call the burning of

Ethereum.

And this was...

So with Bitcoin, of course, we have a capped set, 21 million, all that will ever be mined

of Bitcoin.

With Ethereum, on the other hand, there's no limit.

They will continue to...

That will continue on.

There was no set limit.

We're at like 120 million Ethereum right now.

But the interesting thing is with this improvement, they start burning some of the gas fees, some

of the transaction fees, essentially, that are being used to move Ethereum around the

network.

And it turns out it's a lot.

I just checked, not that it would have changed dramatically, but anyways, right before the

podcast recording, since August 5th when the hard fork took place, 1.4 million Ether had

been burned.

And the reality is that even though right now, ETH is not deflationary, it's very close.

There's still more ETH being generated that are being burned.

I should say more ETH are being mined that are being burned.

However, it's quite close.

So it's already...

I would say it's already directly affecting the price.

In fact, I'm not even sure, frankly, that it's priced in at this point.

I'm not sure people realize what's going on.

And when the roadmap for ETH 2.0 gets finished, when we get the merge and staking starts occurring

and then the scaling solutions that are going to be implemented, not only will ETH...

Well, ETH will be deflationary at that point.

Ethereum will be deflationary at that point.

People will realize this is...

Not only is this a solid asset, not only has this got to fix...

Like with Bitcoin, they'll never be more than 21 million.

There's going to be a limit to how many ETH there ever is, and we don't know exactly what

that is, but when it happens and then the number starts going down and people realize

that that's not going to go back up, I think that's going to be an exciting day for those

of us who hold ETH, because I do believe that from that point forward, we should see...

You should see steady growth of that price of that asset.

All right.

So that's it for the big coins.

I'm not going to talk about a whole lot else in terms of coins.

I do want to talk about some overall things, certainly in terms of 2020.

I want to talk about DeFi.

One thing about DeFi, and DeFi, of course, is decentralized finance, talking about things

like Uniswap, a decentralized exchange in that case, to something like, say, Anchor,

which is a Tera-based system that allows people to loan money and allows people to be compensated

for that.

So you can put liquidity into this protocol or this asset, and in return, other people

can borrow on that and you make a return, which is actually quite good.

I'm probably going to do a separate podcast soon on staking and whatever.

I'm not going to go into that in a whole lot of detail, but DeFi in 2020 has grown a lot.

But even though it's had tremendous growth, oh, just in terms of what they call total

value locked, and I get this from a fun site called DeFi Llama, DeFiLlama.com, they're

kind of a dashboard of DeFi projects and whatever.

And they have an aggregate value, what they call total value locked.

So this is like all of the different things, tools like Uniswap, Anchor, et cetera.

They lock up liquidity, they lock up value.

The total value of that right now, $230 billion, so nothing to sneeze at.

And if you look at the chart, it's maybe not hockey stick growth, but it's certainly significant

growth during 2021.

But just wait, because even with the growth that it's had in 2020 and then in 2021, it

is still less than 1% of the global bank market cap.

So all of the liquidity in all the banks and all the world, we're still less than 1% of that in DeFi.

So there's a long way to go.

2022, these DeFi projects, in fact, will continue to prosper.

And DeFi in particular, I would point this out.

If you can earn money by basically committing your liquidity to a project, and that goes

on whether it's a bear market or bull market, that's going to lure a lot of people into

not capitulating, not selling off their assets.

It's kind of the same thing with staking, right?

With Ethereum, if I can stake my Ethereum and get a percentage back about 5% roughly

every year in Ethereum, do I sell my Ethereum and hope to buy at a lower level or do I stake

it and get that return?

So I think that DeFi in particular will help kind of stabilize this downturn.

I may be wrong, but regardless, I think it's going to prosper over the next few years.

Bull market or bear market, the growth may slow down, but I do believe it will continue

to grow.

And of course, in a review of 2021, we have to talk about NFTs.

As I've explained on this show, I'm not necessarily a huge fan, at least of kind of the art form

of NFTs.

I would say this while I was doing my research.

Right now in early September, so a few months ago, the total market cap was about 14 billion

for NFTs.

So it's actually quite small.

People think it's a big deal, but it's really not in terms of the overall scheme of things.

Just to give you an idea, physical art, which I had no idea, I'm not an art person.

Physical art is a $1.7 trillion asset class.

So if NFTs right now are at 14 billion, we're a long way off of that.

And it has $60 billion of annual sales volume.

So just the sales volume of physical art, which is difficult.

If I have, just to make this dramatic, the Mona Lisa, I'm probably going to take it to

a Christie's auction and sell.

I can't just decide I'm going to sell it and put it up on auction block, so to speak.

So even the difficulty of selling physical art, it's still $60 billion, which is more

than a long way off of even the market cap of current NFT market.

We got a long way to go there, I think.

I do believe that certain assets in that NFT market, I think it may mature.

I'll put it that way.

I think we're going to see some changes.

There will always be the board ape yacht club or crypto punks.

There will always be things like that, but I think it will mature.

And there are many uses, many of which we've never even thought of at this point, beyond art.

So, you know, NFTs had a great year, certainly a lot of growth, but I think they're going

to continue to grow.

All right.

Now, so that kind of covers 2021.

What about 2022?

Well, to an extent, it's going to depend on what happens with the market.

And I can't predict that, as I said up front.

However, there are some trends.

I'm going to make some predictions, and certainly in regards to this one, I could be wrong.

I'm going to say that in 2022, we do get to $100,000 Bitcoin.

I try not to go on record about that kind of stuff, but the reason why I say that is

even though I don't know what's going to happen in the next few months, and even though in

March, for example, we'll get our first hike in interest rates in the United States, and

even though Bitcoin was created kind of as a counter to this type of narrative of what's

going on with the US dollar in particular, but with a lot of currencies around the world

in general these days, it does very much seem to be currently following our stock market

and our overall economy for the United States.

And for one, that's disappointing to me, actually, but I do believe that will change at some

point, and it may not be anytime soon.

But it was created to counter these narratives of printing money and unlimited growth, which

is unsustainable.

So anyways, I will go ahead and say I still think that we will reach $100,000, maybe more

this cycle, and I think it'll happen this year.

But let's talk about some other things that regardless of what happens with Bitcoin and

its price, I think will happen.

I think one big thing, and it's one thing that we've not talked about, really.

This may end up being the dominant trend of 2022.

I think it's gaming, crypto and gaming, and they are developing systems where players

are getting paid to play.

They're developing systems where players can earn unique items.

We call those NFTs.

And maybe at some point, I don't think it's possible right now, but they could even move

those items from system to system, especially if it were systems that were developed by

the same company.

I'm sure they would build in that interoperability.

So you will see marketplaces for, I don't know, I don't play any of these things, so

excuse me if I sound ignorant, but let's say I'm in some fantasy gaming world and I get

a awesome set of armor that protects me from dragon's breath, fire type thing.

And it's mine.

I own it.

I might be able to sell that to somebody for actual crypto, not just some in-game asset

or whatever, gold in the game.

But maybe we have a marketplace where I can sell it for ether or Bitcoin, right?

Wouldn't that be cool?

And I think that kind of stuff is coming.

So just to give you an example, overall, by the way, the gaming market, computer gaming

market is $120 billion in annual sales.

And that all goes to the company.

Whoever owns Fortnite Epic, right, they make all that money off of that.

Doesn't go to anybody else.

So Axie Infinity is one of these early games.

It has a play to earn model that has essentially reduced customer acquisition costs to zero,

meaning it doesn't cost them anything to get new customers.

They're attracting millions of users and a $10 billion market cap in less than a year,

in less than a year.

And the game isn't even that good.

A few years from now, as these games mature, this market, there won't be a conventional

gaming market.

There will be the crypto gaming market that somehow ties into all this.

And we don't know how.

But if companies like Epic and these other companies, which I can't name off the top

of my head, but you know, if they don't get on board, they're going to get left behind.

Why would I play Fortnite if I can play something that looks as good or at least as close to

as good and earn money doing it?

I'd do that in a heartbeat.

So I think that this is going to be a big deal.

By the way, gaming is so dominant in the entertainment business.

It's actually bigger than movies and music combined.

I didn't know that.

I would never would have thought that a big part of that is because of its involvement

with the streaming, with internet.

But it would be rather funny if these studios, Epic, whoever, don't get involved and they

lose out.

All right.

So another item for 2022, Ethereum.

Everybody loves to be down on Ethereum.

Ethereum has terrible gas fees, Ethereum this, Ethereum that, blah, blah, blah.

But I point out time and time and time again, the reason why Ethereum has high gas fees

is because people use it.

It's because they use it.

Nothing else.

And they may not be working on the scaling issues as fast as you would like, but they

are working on them.

And there's two ways this is going to get solved.

And I've discussed this.

Ethereum itself will eventually provide enough improvements that they will be able to reduce

their transaction costs.

And you will see bridge protocols and layer two networks that will help with this.

We're already starting to see the beginnings of that.

Vitalik, who's the mastermind, so to speak, behind Ethereum, is getting very much behind

the use of ZK roll-ups, and I think we did a kind of a technical podcast about that earlier.

That will definitely become bigger and bigger.

You're seeing those companies that are involved in that, they are starting to move and grow.

That will definitely help with transactions.

It's kind of like the difference between, well, it's very much like the difference between

running on the Bitcoin blockchain, where even though their prices are lower, there's still

money that gets paid when you send somebody Bitcoin or you receive Bitcoin.

We move it on to the Lightning Network and kind of off chain and we solve it different

ways and the transaction fees are minuscule, same type thing.

And that's happening with Ethereum and people need to accept that.

But the amount of value that's locked up in Ethereum compared to some of these other chains

like Solana or ADA, Cardano, it's significantly, it's orders of magnitude higher.

And people won't, they're like, well, Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

Ethereum has high fees, but then they don't accept the second part of that equation.

It's because people are using it.

All right, 2022 and I'm personally, well, let me do a few more and I'm going to wrap

up with this one, actually, centralized digital coins, the digital dollar.

I do think maybe in the United States, you won't see that in 2022.

We know in China that they are actually right now rolling out the beta of the digital yuan,

which is their equivalent to the dollar.

You will see it in other countries as well.

China may lead on this one, but these centralized banks are realizing that they're getting left

behind in all this and they have to become involved and they'll do it through these centralized

coins.

And they're going to have their place.

They have to, but understand certainly, I think by the very name centralized coin, that's

not really what people in Bitcoin, people in crypto are looking for.

So I'll leave that alone.

I'll leave that there, but it's going to happen.

I do believe that several more countries will adopt Bitcoin as a legal currency.

I actually thought that would occur by late last year, 2021, it did not.

Of course, I do believe it will happen in 2022.

I hope I'm right about that.

I love to see that adoption.

Maybe it's a different coin, maybe it's Ethereum.

I think you would have to solve Ethereum's gas fee issue, so to speak.

I certainly think that's a solvable problem.

And one of the things that I would like to see, I've hinted at this at various places

and from what I can tell, there's no equivalent to the Lightning Network for Ethereum.

There's been some projects that have tried.

I would love to see something like the Lightning Network for Ethereum.

So if anybody wants some help with that, if they know about something like that, feel

free to reach out to me.

Maybe I can get involved.

I would love to hear about it.

All right.

Several, okay, I already did that.

Oh, DAOs, Digital Autonomous Organizations, will become even more influential.

Even if you don't know what it's all about.

You may not know what a DAO is, we've talked about them a little bit, but they will become

important.

In fact, Floki, which is one of these memecoin tokens just announced yesterday, the day before,

they are moving to a DAO model where the entire currency, from what it sounds like, what little

I understand, will actually be governed by DAO.

That actually could be a really big deal for them.

We'll see.

Let's see.

Oh, and then actually this is the last thing I wanted to wrap up with.

And this is something I think if you've listened to this channel, this podcast long enough,

you know this, not really a fan of regulation, but I do believe it's coming.

And I think some of it frankly is necessary, probably a lot less than what they're going

to do, but it is coming.

I think 2022 will mark a big turning point for regulation in a number of the larger,

more developed countries.

I think we'll start to see that in the United States.

I hope they clean up the tax code in regards to crypto right now.

It is a hot mess and I hate it.

It makes no sense.

Anyways, I'll get off of that.

But yeah, I would love to see clear tax regulation, but just regulation in general, it's coming

and we have to accept that.

You can fight it.

You can act like this is the wild, wild west, but this is the transition to kind of the

industrial economy if you want to put it in those terms.

So that's what I think is coming in 2022.

Hopefully y'all didn't all get stuck up on the $100,000 Bitcoin.

I know you all put it on little sticker notes and then end of the year are going to be like,

McIntosh said you're going to make $100,000.

I don't know.

I hope we do.

Because of the on-chain metrics that we see, the fundamentals, I think we will.

But we'll see.

So that's it.

If you like the content, I would love it if you'd visit the Apple Podcasts review page

and leave a review.

The more reviews that I have, the more visibility the podcast has.

Tell your friends about Generational Wealth Cryptocurrency Podcast.

Hey, thanks for being here.

I hope this has been helpful.

I would love to hear from you.

I'm on Twitter at McIntoshFintech, and you can reach me by email at McIntosh at GenWealthCrypto.com.

Of course, the GenWealth website is GenWealthCrypto.com.

Now go out and make it a great week.

I'll talk to you guys later.