 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the top stories in cryptocurrencies and digital assets, and break them down into bite-sized pieces. Today, we got a lot of stuff to go over, so let's get to it. So first up, everyone's a trader, and we're talking about day trading surges amid the pandemic, and this is Greg Zuckerman. He's a special writer for The Wall Street Journal, and he's going to talk about dumb money, bubbles, and cryptocurrencies. Also, Goldman Sachs warns US dollar risks losing world reserve currency status as gold and Bitcoin soar. So it makes you wonder, why did Goldman Sachs not call Bitcoin and cryptocurrency an asset class? On top of that, there's a day of reckoning for CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet square off with Congress, and this is a backdrop as YouTube is being sued by three power players. And next to last, ledger got hacked, and we'll go over that momentarily. But finally, there was a question posed to me, and it talks about when should you stop dollar cost averaging, which I'm going to answer live in my office. So before you break into today's top stories and the market itself, I just want to go over this real quick because I got this via email, and it was concerning until I actually read it. It actually reached out to Nano Ledger just to verify, and they said, yeah, this is what's going on. So what it states is here is our e-commerce and marketing database leaked. We immediately fixed the breach. Contact and order details were involved, but your funds are safe. So here's what happened. Not too long ago in July 14th, they had some type of bounty program, and one of the hackers or the people that actually not hackers, the people that actually took part in this bounty program said, Hey, there is a potential breach need to actually look at this. So while they actually conducted the investigation, we they discovered an unauthorized third party hand had gained access to customer information. So what do they do? Well, contact and order details were involved, mostly email addresses of all the customers further to investigate the situation. We've able to establish that for a subset of customers that were also exposed first and last name, postal address, phone number and ordered products. But here's the most important part, payment information, credentials such as passwords or crypto funds are not impacted by this data breach. This data breach has no link nor impact on our hardware wallets and on the ledger live application, your crypto assets are safe and not in peril. So here's what they're doing. They're basically reaching out to governmental agencies like the French Data Protection Authority on July 17th, and they're in the process of filing a complaint before the French public prosecutor running on authorized access. We will support law enforcement investigation. So what you can do, exercise caution, always mindful of phishing attempts by malicious scammers. As a reminder, ledger will never ask you for the 24 words of your recovery phrase. If you receive any amount of looks like it came from ledger asking for your 24 words, definitely consider. No, not definitely. No, it is a scam. So here's a big thing. Everything looks to be safe so far. There's nothing that would state anything otherwise. I've checked my ledger accounts. Everything seems to be on the up and up, but just take the advice here. And any that just to make sure it's easy for you, treat everything like a scam until proven otherwise and you'd be a lot safer for it. All right. So that's it for that. Let's jump in today's top story. So first up, this is the thing that has been concerning me for a very long time. And that is that the economy is sucking, but the traditional markets are flying high. So I'm like, what the heck's going on? And before we start and before we go over this, I want to tell you about a story. And this was from, we just talked about the stock market crash in 1929. And there's a story that I always remember. And it says this. It's a famous story how in the late summer of 1929, before the actual crash, a shoe shine boy gave Joe Kennedy, one of the big traders of the time, stock tips. And Kennedy being a wise old investor thought, wow, if the shine boys are giving stock tips, then it's time to get out of the market. So the story says that Joe Kennedy sold all of his stocks and made a killing as everything took a nosedive. So it's like the same thing is happening here. It's like history keeps replaying itself, right? You've got, I've got everybody and their mother telling me what to invest in right now. And I'm like, I just, I'm like, I got my position, so I'm good, but thank you so much for trying to help me. I appreciate it, but no. And this is a great small piece, which really talks about smart money and dumb money and what's really going on behind the scenes. And it concerns me. So take a listen, tell me what you think. What do you make of the rise of the Robin Hooders and the other day traders? Good thing, bad thing? Hey, Brian, so the temptation is to be concerned. Generally speaking, we call these people the dumb money for a reason. They panic, they agree, they get into the wrong time in the market. They really aren't based in their trading on much of the way of knowledge. I hesitate to some extent, just because the evidence suggests that in March at the panic, at the lows, it was sort of hedge funds that were panicking and selling and it wasn't individual investors. So yeah, most of me is concerned, but part of me embraces the fact that small investors, individuals, are getting into the market and are saving a little bit and to the extent they don't blow it, then it'll be okay phenomenon. Okay, so that's perfect, right? He talks about, look, there's dumb money out there. We know that's true. And I'm not saying every investor that uses Robin Hood is dumb money. I'm just saying that there are people that are doing just the silliest things out there. I mean, they're investing in bankrupt companies. They're over leveraging themselves. They're just doing like the most ridiculous things because just something that they hear. And there's no real, I guess I could say like stoicism or plan of action or things to do and what to stick to. And it's just some basics. And it's kind of like going out there, just going, well, I gotta buy, gotta buy, gotta buy. And it's just not always the greatest plan. So that's just one of those deals. So really what's gonna happen, and this is what actually happened to me because sometimes you just gotta learn your lesson the hard way. So take a listen. Exactly. I mean, for years people screened all the retail investor is gone. Now the retail investor is back and the same people are screaming, oh, there's too many retail investors. They're gonna get burned. I think, yes, people will get burned. But you know how you learn lessons? You learn lessons by failing and coming back up often. I mean, this could ultimately be a long-term positive for the equity market, at least in my not so humble opinion. It's a good argument. So listen, I got two boys upstairs who are on the Robinhood accounts. They're sleeping right now, but they will be later today. And will they lose their money? They probably will. I look at it as an inexpensive lesson, but it gets them into investing. They learn about companies. There's some value in this. You don't want people to be blowing important money. Now, what we wrote about is this phenomenon where too many people are taking their employment checks, the $600, and day trading it, often sort of penny stocks. And that's a little scary, especially since they kind of acknowledged not knowing too much about the market and the stocks themselves that they're investing in. But there is a happy medium where we embrace a new group of young investors. And frankly, for years, at least at the Journal, we were hearing about young people who are ignoring the market. So there's not even saving. So perhaps there's something good that comes from this. So first of all, I like how that was all stated. And I really liked the fact that I actually showed cryptocurrency and people can say, oh, wow, cryptocurrency, I've heard about that. So the more exposure we get, the better. But I think the big thing here is that he's really saying the basics, which is like, yeah, sometimes you don't know everything. Sometimes you gotta learn a lesson and really what it comes down to is you. So for me, I always think like this, well, Elon Musk had a very great point during one of the SpaceX launches. He said, if this actually goes and works like we think it is, it is because I have a great team around me and I give all the credit to them. If this screws up, it's all on me. So really, if you think about these types of things, these are the types of mentalities that really successful people have. They're like, it's all on me. It's all on me to learn, it's all on me to know, it's all on me if I make mistakes. So if we own it, we should be okay. So that's that part. And then the next part is gonna talk about the investor, the trader and the gambler. And it was something that I really didn't think about, but it makes a lot of sense now. So one has to be cautious here. A lot of these people are used to gambling. And there's something that I've talked to who say, yeah, I'm having fun here. I'm learning a little bit, playing the market. I can't bet on certain other things. Let's say, go to Vegas. So they embrace the risk. Just like you go to Vegas, you lose some money, you've had a good time. That's fine. I've talked to a number of those people. You don't really want people to put a chunk of their savings or their wealth into the market without much of the way of knowledge. But to the extent that they're learning about it and not risking it all, then I embrace that. So somebody used to live in Las Vegas, I can tell you this. That makes huge, right? So right now you can't gamble on sports. There's really no really sports going on. I mean, major league baseball, I suppose, but yawn. So when he talks about like, hey, gamblers want to get in there and they want to just a little bit of gambling, but they're learning, they're not betting, like, selling their entire house and going, I got my mortgage money and I was going to put everything on. You know, tomato coin, it's just, that's what would worry me and I think everybody else out there. But if you're just doing little things like this and just learning, hey, so much the better, great. And the last part he's going to talk about, I think this is the most important part to realize and that is that be careful about who's on the other side of the table. Who are you betting against or with? And hopefully that person's on your side. Take a listen. But very quickly, Greg, since you've written about Jim Simon, he's probably the single most powerful individual in the stock market in history, maybe with the exception of, you know, like I don't know, Jesse Livermore 100 years ago. The individual investor doesn't have a play away as easy to play downside moves. It's not like these people, I mean, they can short, but it's expensive. There's a cost associated with, it's not free. You've got to borrow the shares. That's the ultimate risk, right? Is that the guys like the Simons and the Ken Griffins of the world, they can push the market around on the downside and profit. They don't care which way it moves. Well, the individual investors that we've written about who play Robin Hood, they can do things like buy options and frankly, too many are doing that, but that's sophisticated trading. And when you get into those kinds of trades, you're going up against Jim Simons and Ken Griffins of Citadel. And frankly, those are the people that are loving this phenomenon because they're on the other side of often these trades. And that's what I do worry about when it becomes, when the individual investors embrace much more risky kind of option type, dangerous behavior, risky behavior. So that really gets me concerned. So yeah, right there. I mean, we don't really know who is in this space. And what he was talking about there was really traditional players in the traditional market, but how do we know that these traditional players in the traditional market, having crossed over in some way, shape or form and are really pushing the numbers for cryptocurrency into the assets in our market. And that's the thing that would scare me if I was a trader, like I'd be like, well, who am I really going against? Cause sometimes these whales are just crushing me. Anyhow, that's it for today. Just food for thought. Let me know what you think in the comments section. Let's move on. Next up, Goldman Sachs warns US dollar risks losing world reserve currency. I've heard this song and dance for quite some time, but hey, who knows, this could be the time. Any outstates here, Goldman Sachs has warned that US dollar may lose its status as a world reserve currency. Investment bank is bullish on gold as fears over governments to basing their fiat currencies grow. And real estate rates are pushed to all time lows. And I just want to say this, a couple of things. First of all, it's amazing how Goldman Sachs comes out and says this publicly, you know, this world reserve status and there's all these things but you can manipulate any kind of number that you want to. But if you're heavily invested in gold, why wouldn't you say that, hey, the risk of the dollar losing the reserve status is going to happen or may happen or whatever else, then just push the price of gold up and you make, I don't know, for every hundred dollars, I don't know how many billions of dollars Goldman Sachs makes, but I'm sure it's a pretty penny. And then, so there's that part and they only believe in gold and they've invested in gold heavily, but what they haven't invested in or talked about positively would be Bitcoin. They even came out and they had this little presentation where they talked about how Bitcoin cryptocurrencies are not even an asset class. They're not even an asset class, even though they are the highest performing asset class in the last decade. So when they start talking about these things, it just infuriates me that they're just a bunch of liars and quote me, that's true. So when we just start talking about this, I get it, I mean, everybody wants to make a bunch of money, but come on, let's just be real here. Anyhow, Goldman Sachs, they state real concerns around the longevity of the US dollar as a reserve currency has started to emerge. The strategist explained the US dollar faces several risks citing that the debt level in US has now exceeded 80% of the country's GDP. Think about that for a second, that that is interesting. 80% of the country's GDP, it's been exceeded. So as far as debt goes, that is a scary situation to be in. They anticipate the government and central bank may allow inflation to accelerate. The resulting expanded balance sheets and vast money creation spurs debasement fears. They describe adding that this creates a greater likelihood that at some time in the future, after economic activity has normalized, there'll be incentives for central banks and governments to allow inflation to drift higher, to reduce the accumulation debt burden. Other factors such as increased political uncertainty and growing concerns of another coronavirus, infection spike also impacted the dollar. And I even said political uncertainty, like if Joe Biden wins first Donald Trump, perhaps, don't know. And Gold's record-breaking rally, even at Goldman Sachs, revised its forecast at $2,200 to $2,300 instead of $2,000. And Gold is up over 7%. This past month, while the ICE US dollar index dropped 3.7% more than a bit. So the Goldman strategist explained, Gold is the currency of last resort, particularly in an environment like the current one where governments are debasing their fiat currencies and pushing real interest rates to all-time lows, which is very true. If you're trying to refinance your house, it's a great day because you can get super low rates. Anyhow, then it goes to talk about Mike Novogratz and what he said. I'm just gonna show you what he said. And this was on The Unchained Podcast, which if you haven't subscribed to that, I have, I've liked it. It's a fantastic, I forgot the lay's name, who does the, Julie? Ah, that's not it. But she does, she's a real journalist and she asks fantastic questions, very smart. And just listen to this little one minute snippet when she talks to Mike Novogratz about what's gonna spur on the whole movement. So it sort of sounds like you're saying the decision makers have made the decision. It's just kind of a matter of time to let those decisions play out in the market and we should see the price rise. But I'm wondering like, so what is it that's driving those decision makers? Like what is it about Bitcoin that makes them think that this is the investment to make now during the time of the coronavirus? Is it just as simple as like Bitcoin is scarce and we're about to see unlimited quantitative easing or is there anything kind of more? Bigger. It's just that simple. So people ask me all the time, I bought more gold yesterday even. And so I own gold and silver as well, but why Bitcoin versus gold? If you want to buy gold, there's 16 different ways to do it. It's very easy and you need to pick up and you buy an ETF. And so there's no adoption curve in gold where Bitcoin, there's still an adoption curve, right? A small portion of the institutional world has participated yet. And so as that adoption grows, you've just got to jacked up upside versus gold. It's jacked up upside. So it just makes sense as everything has to falter and people are getting scared about what's happening with US dollar. They're like, hey, you know what? I don't know what this monetary policy is going on. I don't know what they're doing, but the 80% debt and the quantitative easing, I got to get into something that's a little bit more stable. And I like gold, I like silver and I like Bitcoin. And that is the big thing. So there's one more piece I forgot to mention, which was I supposed to do because I made a note, I just forgot to do it. It states here, even JP Morgan's analysts wrote in a February report that cryptocurrencies should be in a portfolio because they can uniquely hedge a yet unseen environment in telling simultaneous loss of confidence in the domestic currency and its payment systems. Like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan has also questioned the US dollar status as a reserve currency, the company outlined in a report in October last year. So again, who knows how much they have in gold, but if they're saying, hey, cryptocurrencies are actually good and should be a part of that portfolio, you bet your bottom dollar, they got cryptocurrencies somewhere. Let's move on. Next up, this little short little snippet. CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet square off with Congress. What's going on? So this hearing, and it's going on today right now is entitled Online Platforms and Market Power Part Six, examining the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. All these firms, except for Facebook's, Facebook have market caps of over a trillion dollars. Let me read that again. All these firms, except for Facebook, have market caps of over a trillion dollars. They also face longstanding accusations of muscling out competing businesses and misuse of customer data, prompting the question of whether they make their money by violating Google's one-time credo of don't be evil. And I'm not going to go into the big things, the hearing's going on, we'll figure out what's going to happen with that, but this is a bad situation to be. If you're ever in war, you don't want to fight a two-pronged attack or two-pronged defense. So when you have something like Google and YouTube has to go to fight against Congress, that's really what's going on, it's a fight. Then you also have these types of issues where YouTube is being sued by Ripple, because they're using the likeness of their CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, and I'll be scammed, which I'm sure you guys have seen. Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, or Woz is also suing YouTube, and there's also a class action lawsuit based on the ban of cryptocurrency advertisement in early 2018. So if you didn't know, they banned all cryptocurrency ads on all these different platforms, Facebook, Google, YouTube and everything else. The only types of ads you can see is regulated exchanges, nothing else. So that's why you don't see Ledger Nano and all those things out there. And this is a problem. And that's why they're being hauled into court and all these things are going on. So we will see how this happens, but I gotta tell you, I would not want to be YouTube right now fighting all these battles in all different directions. It gets kind of pricey. All right, let's move on. So and one of my, in the new section I'm talking about is people will, they will send me questions in email if they can't or don't want to do it in the comment section. I always recommend you guys do it in the comment section because it's very easy because emails, I'm not gonna answer every question, it's impossible. I've got, we're approaching 70,000 subscribers and we get around 20,000 views every video. So to answer all the emails is impossible, but I can't answer. I know when they're in the description, it's only a couple, maybe like 300, 400, 500 comments. I can go through that. So Ryan's got a question. I'm gonna read that real quick. Let's jump into my office. All right, so welcome to the new section where I answer everybody's burning questions that I get from email. So welcome to the office. Here we are. I know it looks great and everything else, but this is what I do. Probably some of my best work, cause I'm outside and I get to, you know, get away from the hustle and bustle of the house. So Ryan here, he asked the question, have been watching the channel for two months since I first dove into crypto before the having and your content take it and think it's great. As I'm a new crypto investor, I'm sure there are many out there who have the same issue, especially after seeing this 2000 price jump. And I can tell you, I'm sure a lot of you have the same problem as far as like dollar cost averaging in. So he asks, at what point do you stop dollar cost averaging? Do you keep going as it goes on parabolic spikes up and hits 11,000, 15,000, 20,000, 100,000? And I send the FOMO aspect of a bull run at the same time since I bought in last month at lower values. It's also mentally hard to keep dollar cost averaging at higher levels, even knowing the return will outweigh in the long run. And I can show your frustration, Ryan. I can see the issue that you and probably a lot of other people are going to have. Because the thing is, when the price starts going up, the fear or the feeling of FOMO starts to really take hold. And I can just tell you this, just hold on and keep dollar cost averaging. If you don't, you'll end up like me. And I'm just gonna tell you from experience, this might actually help out a little bit. In 2017, when the price, again, went from 5,000, 8,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, I felt the same thing you're feeling right now. I need to get in right now. Cause if I do not wanna miss out on this golden opportunity, guess what? There's another train coming just around the corner. You just gotta wait. So if you don't wait and you start to jump in, let's say you jump in, let's say it goes to 13 tomorrow. It's crypto, you could do that. So you jump in at 13,000 and then guess what happens? It drops to 11. Now you're feeling that tightness, that pressure that you have in your chest. You're like, shoot, I need this to go up. And then it goes down to 9,000 to 7,000. And something else happens, some FUD article comes out before you know what you're down to 6,000. So I'm just gonna stress this. Try to go on the way of air on the side of caution and stick to your plan, whatever your plan is. My plan is dollar cost averaging. Some people's plan is just to leverage trade at 100X. Whatever your plan is, go ahead and go with that. But stick with your plan and I think you should be okay. And there's another thing I wanna make mention that is that remember these things that are happening, there's so many things happening in this space that there's no way to really make mention of everything that's going on and to aggregate all the information into a perfect scenario and give you the perfect prediction. It just cannot happen. But I will say this, or this is from bitcoinist.com. And it talks about there's a big catch to this week's Bitcoin pump and it involves the dollar. And what it says here is that Bitcoin price pumped this week to above 11.4, well that 14% intraday move. However, the rally being so powerful, they have more to do with the dollar's weakness and less due to strengthen the Bitcoin. And if the dollar reverses sharply from here, it could cause a corresponding correction in the crypto. I'm just gonna scroll all the way down, the rest of it's just fluff and here's what we're seeing. As more dollars are printed, the value of USD is in decline against other currencies including gold, silver and Bitcoin. The DXY or Dollar Currency Index compared against these assets shows the striking divergence and valuations. So we can see right here, Bitcoin popping up, gold popping up, as I was talking about yesterday, I think Bitcoin and gold are gonna be best friends for a long time. And here's the dollar index going down to the ground, which is one of the things that we talked about in our first articles that we had. So this could remain the same. The dollar could weaken and go even farther. The reserve currency status could go out the window. Who knows? I don't know, but I can tell you that if you're gambling, if you're betting on that and you just wanna go all in, you can do that, but I think you're gonna fall prey to the same situation that I was in when in 2017 into 2018 and then towards 2019. So that's all I'll say. So great question and hope that answers all your questions and also to you people out there who have that same question about dollar cross averaging. All right, let's jump back. All right, that's it for today. So I wanna say thanks for all my subscribers. If you don't know, there's a join now button underneath. It's not a big deal. Don't give anything special. It's just like a tip really. It's a buck 99. And everybody gets these little cool little badges when we do live streams. But I just wanna say a shout out to the new one, Eric Miteko, Johnny Bitcoin, and then Jarky Burgesson. I hope I didn't screw that up. Dreamer, I'm not gonna try it for this one. Steven Hewlett, let's see who else it is. Bill Jerky, I hate it. But Jerk, I'm sorry. TVG, David Mills, Jack Allen, Young Boon, Beloved, and Chris Barnett. So just random shout outs. Thanks so much for sticking with me. And if you like those types of videos, there's gonna be two months gonna pop up on your left and right. Don't know what they are, because YouTube has control of that. I do absolutely nothing. So whatever videos pop up, fantastic. And that's it. So thanks for sticking with me. See ya on the next one.