 Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories in crypto and bring out a bite-sized piece. So today, just like the thumbnail suggests, we're going to take a look at the validity of the digital dollar and is it really all you need as far as CBDCs as compared to cryptocurrencies? And the way we're going to do that is take a look at what's going on in the current market and some current news events. So first up, Fed Chair Jerome Powell says you wouldn't need cryptos if you had a digital US currency. So we're going to look for the truthfulness of what he's talking about and how it compares to crypto and how it really actually is different from the digital dollar. And since there are no coincidences, at the same time, the IMF, World Bank, BIS recommend countries work together on CBDCs to enhance cross-border payments. And this couldn't come at a better time as China reveals a digital yuan white paper. As they say, they're going to also have smart contracts. There's been billions already settled and large transfers are traced, but the small ones aren't because you can always trust China. So we'll take a look at what's going on there. And then I'm going to wrap it up with what Brad Garlinghouse said at the Economic Club of New York in 2019. And this is really going to play into what CBDCs are, how it actually pertains to the current situation, and really is it really necessary for what we're talking about. And then finally, just to make mention of, we're going to do a prediction evaluation live video with Guy from Coin Bureau and Crazy for Cryptos. And we'll talk about the very end. But first, let's take a look at what's going on in the market. So today, it is Sunday. It is July 18th. And it's pretty much the same. We're just moving sideways. You know, July, we've always thought that July wasn't going to be a great month and it did not disappoint. And here we are moving sideways. So I'm just happy that Bitcoin has remained in that $30,000 to $40,000 range. There was a little bit of $20,000. That's OK. So today, Bitcoin price is $31,724. This is trade the chain. It looks a little bit different right now because I have it on a condensed view. Let's take a look at some coins real quick and see where we actually are at as far as prices. So Ethereum really did break down. It went below $2,000. And now it's dropped to $1,904. And but within 24 hours, it hasn't really changed too much. Tethered, nobody cares. Finance going. Cardano up .52. Watch out. XRP down .48. Watch out again. It doesn't matter. Nothing's really going big. Dogecoin is down 6%, 7% because of that car salesman tweet, whatever. And that's the big stuff. Really, it's just sideways action. If you're a big trader, I'm not. Let's just use what trade the chain designed for, sentiment analysis. I'm going to click on that one hour projected range. Let's see what we got here. Wow. So between negative 1% and plus 16% with 90% assurance, this is what trade the chain is telling us. Take a look at Fusion. Take a look at Seller Network, DeFi.Money, Ocean Protocol, Electronium, AMP. And those are just ranging in the, man, 18%, 4%, 60%. And yeah, if you're looking for trade the chain, link's in the description. But let's just break into today's top story where we talk about the digital dollar is all you need. This ought to be good. So what's going on here? Well, during the hearing, which was just this week, Representative Steven Lynch from Massachusetts and Two Sits asked if a swift action, first of all, the Fed doesn't do anything swift except drop a ton of money from the helicopters. If a swift action on the Fed's digital currency would calm the markets and whether a digital dollar would be more viable alternative than having thousands of cryptos or stable coins. Pretty good question actually if you think about it. And Jerome Powell says, I think that could be the case in particular. You wouldn't need stable coins. You would need cryptocurrencies if you had a digital US currency. I think that's one of the stronger arguments in its favor. And before I go on, just to make mention of this, I can't let that pass without talking about it. Look, there is no difference between, and Brad's gonna talk about this later. I don't wanna steal his thunder. But the reason between the digital dollar, the CBDCs and a cryptocurrency is that there really is no difference between the digital dollar, CBDCs, that's the same thing and a crypto. There is no limit on how much they can print as far as the dollar. So even if you digitize it, which it's digitized anyhow, what's the difference? It's just a difference in the wallet and I'll explain that later. But really there is no difference in that. And you can just keep bringing things to infinity. So it's the same thing. There's same inflation, there's the same problem. And this is what cryptocurrencies, they limit the actual tokens to the amount of whatever it's at. Bitcoin's 21 million, that's a very famous one. So if we take a look at this, like there is a big difference and Jerome is not stupid. And I know he knows this, but when he's talking to somebody in Congress, he's probably just blowing over it and just blowing smoke and gaslighting and going, same thing, it's no big deal. And that's how things get done. You just kind of roll over and steamroll people and don't really get into the thick of it. And that's one of the problems I see here. I could be wrong, we know in the comments section, maybe Jerome has no idea what he's talking about. This ought to be great in the comments, but let's move on. So to finish this up, Representative Lynch also raised concerns about the slowness of digital dollar development, citing that many central banks worldwide are progressing fast within the US in this area. Look, the digital you want, they've already come through and said, we've already processed billions of transactions and guess what? We've got 20 million wallets out there, beat that. Powell replied, I think this is the beginning of an accelerating decision process. Wow, you've accelerated a decision process, that's good. We have a lot of work left to do on the technical side and on the policy side, but a critical part of it is just public consultation. I'm really concerned about getting this right. I think it's way more important to get it right than it is to get it fast. And I gotta tell you, there is one thing I will say about this and that is as an entrepreneur, I just try to stick things, just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. And I can kind of understand what Powell here is saying. And I will say one more thing. And that is that for those of us who remember history, we weren't the first ones in space. It was Russia. Russia beat the pants off us and we rallied together as a nation said we're gonna put somebody on the moon and we did it and we did it first. Go America, America. So I wonder if this is going to be one of those lights, light under the fire or light under the pants type of situation where we're like, look, we're getting crushed over here by different countries, China being one of them. Maybe it's time to put our foot on the gas and really start to do these CBDCs if this is what it is. But in all honesty, Congress and the Fed and all those things, it's not their job to innovate. That's not their job. Their job is to regulate. So I don't know why they're even like really talking about this. I do think that there is a good play for, I mean, we just talked about why it's not any different than the digital dollar but what I do see a difference is how they're going to use oracles for smart contracts and I'll get into that in a bit. So anyhow, to finish this up, the Fed chair also addressed concerns about the US losing its reserve currency status and he states there really isn't a good competitor out there. All the things you need to be a reserve currency the United States has, we're not in danger of losing it and certainly not to China. So we'll see how right he is and we'll go from there. I can speculate and I can talk all day long but it really comes down to execution and we'll see it all works out but really in all honesty, if you take a look at innovation, how fast things move, time to step up because if not, we're going to get passed by. Anyhow, let me know what you think about this in the comments section and let's talk about the IMF finally going, you know we should really work together. So this one was kind of funny and it's really hilarious the very last statement but there was a committee on payments and market infrastructures, the BIS Innovation Hub, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank published a joint report on the G20 on July 9th, titled central bank digital currencies for cross-border payments. The report explained that cross-border payments are commonly criticized for their high cost, low speed, limited access and insufficient transparency and it's pretty amazing that we still have it so expensive in today's world. Look, I can send an email to anybody instantly. What's the difference between sending money across borders? What it is is that we are hampered by SWIFT which was a company created back in the 60s to transfer money cross-border and of course banks, here's the thing, banks don't trust each other. Guess what? Countries don't trust each other so for all these different banks within the network, if you wanna transfer, I don't know, the pound across, right? You have to have dollars and pounds in that bank if you are a bank. If you wanna transfer the bot, if you wanna transfer any type of different currency, you have to have that currency plus your currency in that bank across the pond. You know why? Because banks don't trust each other. We don't even trust banks so why should they trust each other? And then on top of that, we know countries are kinda like I don't trust that one. So when we see about here, that's the whole thing that SWIFT eliminated because they said, well, we'll just do it like this. It's not even a transfer service. It's a telecommunication service. It's a text messaging service. That's really what it comes down to. So this is an old technology and it's still around. That's the kind of power the banks have. Hopefully they lose a little bit out of it. Anyhow, to finish this up, various aspects of central bank digital currencies were analyzed and it came out of this. The analysis highlights both the need for multilateral collaboration on macro financial consequences as well as the importance of interoperability between CBDCs. The main conclusion of the report said this, try not to laugh out loud. Central bank digital currencies have the potential to enhance the efficiency of cross-border payments. True, as long as the countries work together. Now, here's the thing, here's the thing. Some countries do like each other. I mean, we have a great relationship with Canada, pretty good with Mexico, EU, different places, right? But as far as like countries all work together, are you out of your mind? No way. So I don't see this actually working. I don't see this actually coming to the past. I think there's gonna be roadblocks because like, well, they can say, well, you can go from America to Canada and transfer any kind of service or like dollar to the Franks in France. But if you wanna go to like Russia or China or something like that, yeah, good luck. So we don't trust each other. And that's really what it comes down to. Let me know how, if there's a way to alleviate that, I just don't see this really working too well unless you have an intermediary type of crypto and I'll leave that up to you. So there is that piece. Now let's go on to one of the more important things, I think, the digital yuan. So this is what's going on. China's digital yuan is no different than the physical renminbi. I know we say that wrong, correct me in the comments, I'm sure you will. I don't really care. But the thing is like, and people will ask, what's the difference between the digital yuan and the renminbi? It's almost the same thing. There's a subtle difference, right? So like the US dollar, we don't, in America, we don't call the US dollar, the Federal Reserve note, we just say the US dollar. So the digital yuan, they don't call it the, people's make a China note or whatever else it is. It's just the renminbi. So people just call it the digital yuan, the yuan as far as like the money part or the coin part, there's different names for that. But anyhow, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. But to get to the point, the People's Bank of China's Digital Currency Working Group stresses that the digital yuan often referred to as the ECNY, and this is an acronym we're gonna have to get used to, ECNY, ECNY, that's digital yuan, is no different than the physical form of money used by the Chinese today. And it's the same thing we talked about as far as the digital dollar. There's no difference. It's just zeros and ones, but it's the same thing. The same thing. The only difference is the wallet. I'll get to that in a second. The issuance and circulation of ECNY is identical with physical renminbi, while the value of the former is transferred in digital form, zeros and ones. The paper claims, and this was the white paper, that more than 20 million digital yuan wallets have been created thus far, which I guess is pretty good, but you gotta remember China's like about a billion plus people, so sure. And 5.4 billion or 35 billion yuan has been set on the ECNY network, which I guess, again, it's pretty good because it's just, they just rolled it out not too long ago. The progress report notes that the digital yuan protocol has built-in programmability. This is the big thing. It alludes, and that alludes to the use of smart contracts. It doesn't say smart contracts, but it alludes to the fact that smart contracts and decision-based transaction. The ECNY obtains programmability from deploying smart contracts that don't impair its monetary functions under the premise of security and compliance. This feature enables self-executing payments according to predefined conditions or terms agreed between two sides. So here's the thing about smart contracts, as far as like finance and those types of things. So let's make a simple assessment here. Let's say that you wanna buy a house, okay. You have to go to the mortgage company, right? And they have to approve you because they have to take a look at your credit score, your work history, they have to take a look at your bank accounts, they have to look at a couple different things. They have to take a look if there's a lien on the houses, make sure that that's all in the up and up, and everything's pretty good to go. So to do all those things, that's a lot of middle men, middle women, whatever you wanna call it. And that's cost all the way along those little points, right? What if you didn't need those people and they could just be done automatically? Some type of thing called an oracle, right? And it pulls in all this data from outside in the actual real world and puts it into the actual blockchain because blockchain can't do that. That's why we need oracles. So if you can do something like that where it could go to the IRS and say, hey, is there any kind of judgments against this person or are they on the up and up with their taxes? And it goes to your credit score, Experian and all the different, all the other, both the other ones that escaped me right now. And they say, what's the credit score? 740, sounds pretty good. IRS, okay, you're pretty good. And also we can take a look at your employment history. Looks like you made X amount of dollars. And then also we can integrate with your bank and it's instantaneous and it gives us all the information. And it doesn't really do anything. I mean, as far as like a middle person and boom, it says approved. The money goes from your bank into their account. It pays for it. It sets it all up. That's essentially like a great smart contract, right? So when it talks about this, how's it gonna do that? How's it gonna do those types of things just because it has a digital yuan? There's a lot of different protocols that come into place and on top of that all the different hacks that could potentially come in. So when we see something like this, and that's just one example, right? We wanna see something like this. Maybe the whole thing isn't so much about the cryptocurrency and the digital dollar. Let's say that the America does go through with this and they do say, let's do the digital dollar and actually get it through, which I think they're actually gonna do it. What happens with the smart contracts? Is it their job to innovate or to regulate? It's not their job to make these different products. That's the whole point of the free market system. So if you're looking for things to get into as far as cryptocurrency, maybe a smart contract play is in your best interest. Now, again, on this channel, this is an investment opinion and investment advice, but just something that kind of just came up to me and I'm like, wow, this could be one of those things where we're gonna need an Oracle service. We're gonna need some smart contract functionality. And there's a lot of different ones that can actually do that. Which one will win? What will be Ethereum? Will it be Tezos? Will it be Cardano? Will it be Avalanche? Who knows? Maybe there's one for everyone but for every different aspect. But I think this is the interesting thing. And for them to say that it's just gonna be like an easy type of deal. I don't think it's that easy. And I think that's why they are China working with a lot of different private industries in China which is kind of weird because they're still not China, they're still not private and bringing smart contract functionality. We will see. Anyhow, to finish this up and this is the laughable part. Anonymity for small value and traceable for high value. The ECNY follows the principle of anonymity for small value and traceable high value. And attaches great importance to protecting personal information and privacy. It aims to meet the public demand for anonymous small value payment service based on the risk features and information processing logic of the current electronic payment system. I will let you comment below if you think that China really values anonymity and privacy, especially in payments. Look, even in America we think that big brother's not or some people think big brother's not watching. Well, it was so bad as far as like with Facebook, they shot down that Libra project in a heartbeat because they said you can't even deal with our private information. And now you want our business or our current monetary transactions you weren't out of your mind, son. So lastly, meanwhile it is necessary to guard against the misuse of ECNY and illegal and criminal activities such as tele-fraud, internet gambling, money laundering and tax evasion by making sure that transactions comply with blah, blah, blah. Okay, so great. So it sounds pretty good on half of this stuff. The other half is just, I think, nonsense. Let me know what you think in the comment section and let's break down to the last part, second to last part of what Brad Garlinghouse said at the Economic Club of New York a couple of years ago. Listen to this and tell me if this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense as far as the digital dollar. Take a listen. Because I wanna transition particularly for this audience at the Economic Club of New York, China and other countries, but specifically China. China has completed a prototype. I don't know if you all know this, a prototype of a so-called China coin, a digital currency. I believe it's backed by the Yuan. It is. And they are about to unleash their own network similar to what we're talking about here. Are we behind in that here in America? I mean, the Fed is a skeptic when it comes to cryptocurrency. The president is a skeptic. You have a lot of people who still don't quite understand it. Singapore, which is considered a financial center of the world, very forward-thinking when it comes to technology. That central banker has expressed a little bit of concern. Yeah. So let's first understand what stable coins central bank digital assets is kind of the way they're described. And so what the Chinese government is doing is that they are apparently going to launch a central bank digital asset. Let's go back to the thing I said about Starbucks earlier. What problem are we solving? So I look at the Fed today and I'm sure there are bankers here in the window or in the audience. And if you want to go and call on the Fed for liquidity, you go to the Fed window, you don't get cash. You get digits in a ledger. And so when, you know, I'm JP Morgan, I go to the Fed, the Fed's saying, okay, great, here's some sort of ledger change. It's already digitized. So I've actually been a little bit of a skeptic that central bank digital assets do much that we don't already do today. So you don't think the dollar should be tokenized? It already is. You think about it, like how many people here, like you look at your net worth statement on a bank account and like those are just digits. You know, yes, you could go to the bank and get cash, but frankly, if you're asking for any more than a few thousand dollars, you have to call in advance because they don't have the cash. So most of your, most of the US dollar is quote, I mean, you said tokenized, I would say digitized. There is a little bit of a difference, but I think we always have to go back to what problem are we trying to solve? If we're solving a problem or creating customer value, then I think it's great. The only argument I have seen around central bank digital assets is if they want to expand the Fed window from serving a small number of regulated institutions to a mass audience. If everybody here could go directly to the Fed and have an account with the Fed, well, that's kind of interesting. Now we just put the entire commercial banking business out of business. That doesn't sound like a very good idea. I'm feeling the room shivering. Ah, so he's talking to a bunch of bankers right there. And this is what I'm talking about as far as the only thing that changes is the wallet. So just like what Brad talked about, you know, if you wanna have that happen, sure, but what's the point of the banks? Because that's the whole point of a JPMorgan, that's the whole point of a Chase or a Wells Fargo, so we can start there. But if we're just gonna go up to the window ourselves and you're gonna give us a digital wallet, first of all, who's gonna create that digital wallet? Is the US government, are they gonna innovate or regulate? So that means that they're gonna have to create this digital wallet and then what happens if that wallet goes down? Who are you gonna call? You gonna call the 1-800-US government? I just don't get it. So when you take a look at that, you're gonna be like, okay, that kinda makes sense, but then what really makes sense though is like we talked about before with the digital yuan. So what China does is they didn't change too much, but they changed the wallet. Now the wallet is the government. Even though they would say that, oh, no, no, no, we have these private banks or anything else, which I think will still be in play. They'll still have that for loans or whatever else. But as far as like that wallet, well, the wallet's owned by the government. We don't like how you just protest. We don't like what you said in social media. We don't like how you walked across the street. Guess what? We're shutting down your wallet. So good luck getting any money. And then that's just how it goes. That is a frightening scenario and I'm just not too keen on that. So that's what we have. So anyhow, let me know what you think about that in the comments section and let's finish up to our last piece here. Crazy for cryptos. My man, Digital Dave, who has been great. He's called a lot of winners. I've listened to him for gosh, over two years now. And I also got Guy from Coin Bureau and we're gonna do price predictions video. And that'll be on Tuesday the 20th at 7 p.m. mountain time. I don't know what it is wherever you're at, but that's what it is. Cause Dave's in Thailand and Guy is over in UK or great better, whatever, wherever he's at. And so we have a little bit of a conflict. So Guy, I don't think he's gonna be able to make it. If he doesn't, he's gonna do a pre-recorded thing for us to talk about the price predictions. Dave should be good and that is it. So one real quick, real note is that we're not doing this on this channel on Digital Asset News. We're doing on Digital Asset News clips because over there, there's something that happens when I do live streams on this channel. It just kind of just messes up with the whole algorithm. So I like to do them over there and keep things over there. I like to separate and organize and that's what I'm gonna do for all the live streams from now on is stick them over there. Unless it's some huge, huge announcement like now I'll just go live real quick, it'll be over on Dan Clips. The link is in the description. You can go over there and follow us and we do a lot of different things as far as advancements and crypto and stuff like that. So anyhow, look that one a little bit long. It is Sunday, so what else? You know, it's a rest day. So hopefully you made all the way to the end. I appreciate it. If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up, a like, consider subscribing and that is it for today. So thanks so much for stopping by. Appreciate it. See you on the next one.