 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets, and breaking on to bite-sized pieces. Today is a great day. There's nothing but good news. So first up, Russia legalizes cryptocurrencies, terming them property. And this is a stark contrast because not too long ago, they were talking about banning everything also. This is a follow-up to yesterday's great news that the OCC actually went ahead and said that banks could custody cryptocurrency. But it's a great article and it talks about don't expect banks to jump on the OCC Cryptocurrency News. This is written by Alex Masioli and it just puts a nice spin on things negative and positive. Also, I hope you're ready for some more helicopter money because 2.1 trillion dollar budget is expected to go for another round of COVID-19 relief money. And finally, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or Waz sues YouTube over Bitcoin giveaway scams. And if you're like me, I've seen a couple scams come around. Don't know why that is, but that's what's going on in YouTube. Before we get into that, let's take a look at what's going on with the market. So today it is July. It is a two o'clock Texas time and it looks like everything's up. It's a great day, my friends. Bitcoin almost hit the 9600. It's up 2.4% and Ethereum posting massive gains, 12% in a day. So if you have been holding Ethereum all the way in the days of, you know, $100 or so, which was not too long ago. Congratulations. You're fantastically in the green. Tether's Tether XRP 20 cents. Watch out. Bitcoin cash is up 2.8%. Just along with Cardano, Bitcoin SV chain link up again. 786 hasn't seen the 864 it was before, but hey, not too bad. Can't go up forever. Litecoin. I mean, everything's in the green today. Tezos 5.5 for Monero 2.6. When everything is up, it's a great day. What started that? Well, let's go over that right now. So first up, Russia legalizes cryptocurrencies, terming them property. Now, I'm not saying that this is what kicked off this huge spike in revenue for cryptocurrency assets, but it just seems like there's just more and more good news. And this, I think is going to lead us to mass adoption. So let's get into it. So the article says that in Russia, any digital currency will now be recognized as a set of electronic data, which can be used for payments purpose. Let me read that again. Digital currency will now be recognized as a set of electronic data, which can be used for payments purpose or even as an investment tool. These currencies do not have any essentially responsible party and are maintained by the operators and nodes of the blockchain system. So essentially your keys, your cryptocurrency, no one is going to have to do anything for you as far as Russia goes. So this is a great thing. However, this next sentence had me confused. It says, the bill also clarified that the country sees the digital currencies as a type of property and they cannot be used as a mode of payment. So I don't understand why it says one thing, the other thing, maybe just a different legal speak and I just don't understand, but still it's good news because not too long ago, like I said, they were talking about banning everything. The lawmakers previously even moved a bill seeking abandon all crypto trading services in the country, labeling them illegal, but they faced backlash from the already operating Russian crypto businesses. And this was pretty amazing because all the different legislators in Russia, they were all talking, they were all hard-charging like, we need to ban this, we need to ban this, we need to ban this. But it totally went against Vladimir Putin and what he had said before is like, hey, I think blockchain's good and we're going to go with it. And guess what? Putin won. Again, how crazy is that? So yeah, it looks like businesses, they and of course the people in real power get over on the people who are legislators. So what are you going to do? The bill also detailed that from now on, the Russian central bank will oversee any issuance of new digital currencies in the country and will further decide on the features. The monetary regulator will also decide on framework of selling of digital currencies to qualified investors. So you can't have everything open. And it's like I say, you win some, you lose some. And this one can't be perfect. And I will say, hey, at least I didn't try to ban everything, which had been just more turmoil and more fud, just like India did and they got beat down by their Supreme Court when they actually overturned everything. And now it's legal in India. So it's the same thing here in Russia, at least we didn't have to go through the whole rigmarole where they say, oh, it's banned. But it really wasn't banned. And then you have to go with the fud and different dips in the in the market, just to get to the point where it's gonna be like, hey, this is gonna happen anyhow, so just legalize it. But I will say this, when it talks about, you know, they're going to really clamp down for the central banks are going to kind of do some regulation. This blood isn't or this bill doesn't go in effect until January 1 2021. So new digital currencies better step up. Because after that, it's all about regulation and hey, what are you going to do? All right, let's move on to the next story. Next up, this was a great one. So this was don't expect banks to jump on the OCC crypto custody news. And if you run familiar yesterday, the office of the comptroller of the currency or OCC, they actually announced that, hey, it's okay for banks to become custodians of cryptocurrency. And the reason this happened was because the head of department was actually had the legal department for Coinbase. So it's amazing how that worked out. But it's good, because this is exactly what we need. Because as we can see, just from the little story we just talked about in Russia, America is falling vastly behind in the regulation department. And if they don't step up the pace, the whole world's going to pass us by. That's just how it is. Anyhow, so let's break into this story. So this is from Alex Maschioli. And I was like, Well, who's this guy? So I click on his profile here, and it's a big blob. And I'm like, Well, that sucks. So then I take a look at his Twitter profile. And I'm like, Well, hey, he knows the mooch. So it can't be all bad. Then of course, I realized that I just I actually missed the whole things that says right here. Alex Maschioli is head of institutional services for Bequant digital asset prime broker. He's been really a decade in traditional financial markets before making the jump to crypto markets three years ago. So Alex, we will give a pass sounds like he knows what he's talking about. And I got to tell you, it was a beautifully written article, just from the first sentence, says here, banks can now offer cryptocurrency and digital asset cuss either clients. But what does this really mean? So great gets to the whole point of it right now. And he says the, as you know, the office of the OCC announced yesterday, that nationally charter banks in the US can now jumped into custodianship for cryptocurrencies. And he says here, some feel that banks are able to offer complementary digital asset services, which will bring in more investors, and maybe even a Bitcoin ETF on the flip side, other people will say, Hey, banks are going to audit and tax every penny, and they're going to actually seize your coins. And I got to tell you, that is the same sentiment that I got in the comment section after I talked to after actually, I just posted something in the community on YouTube about it. And that's what that it was like, like right in the middle, some people like this was great for mass adoption. But people like this is awful. Why would you trust a bank banks suck and da da da? Listen, that's all true. The banks do suck. I mean, if you've been on my channel for any length of time, you know that I'm not a big fan of banks, I cannot understand why I can send an email to a friend in India, and it takes less than a minute to get there. But this just to send my funds to a manufacturer, two states over in Arizona, it takes four days sometimes, get out of here. This is the worst. It's just, it's just the worst rails that we actually have and banks they're in for a reckoning because they're awful and they're slow. Customer services is pitiful. And not all banks, I mean, some banks, I guess customer service is fine. But but for me, it's just awful. So Alex goes on and says, here's the thing, traditional financial institutions, banks included move slowly as a truth, they're still using Swift. Most make turtles look like they're in a hurry. So don't expect anyone to announce their brand new custody platform immediately, if at any time at all, meaning this might actually happen and they could just ignore it. But I don't think it's gonna happen. I'm gonna tell you why. Moving on, he states, according to a recent fidelity survey, only only about a third of all these firms even own any crypto. So there's two things I want to make mention here. And that is, if it was uncovered during the 2017 bull run, that parabolic bull run, where everything just went straight up, that one out of three firms owned cryptocurrencies, people would have lost their minds, you have to understand, back in 2017, we we hit like an $860 billion market cap somewhere around there. And that was on vapor that was on white papers and nothing. And if we would have heard that these types of firms were, you know, one out of three 33% actually own cryptocurrency, it would have been game over. I mean, it would have hit a trillion dollars easy, maybe multi trillions. But we just didn't have the infrastructure in place. Binance even shut down for a bit, they weren't taking new people, same thing with Coinbase. It was it was a pretty wild time. And I expect the parabolic bull run to happen, you know, next year. But that's the first thing. The second thing is, I just want to take a look at this actual survey, because I thought was interesting. This was actually from Fidelity Agile Assets, you don't know Fidelity. They have about six or $7 trillion assets under management. So Fidelity is a pretty big powerhouse. And this was actually 9th of June. They did a survey they said digital assets are getting in favorability and appeal amongst institutional investors, with almost 80% of investors surveyed finding something appealing about the asset class. Very important word here, asset class. Digital assets, cryptocurrencies are an asset class. This survey of almost 800 institutional investors across the US and Europe, about a third of respondents say they are currently invested in digital assets and six out of 10, with digital assets have a place in their investment portfolio. And I gotta tell you, as time moves on, and especially when this fake stock market starts to crumble because it's being held up by the Fed, once it starts to go down, and everything is people are running around going what the heck's going what's going on. These financial analysts, financial planners are going to start to hopefully before that actually happens, go to their cusp and say look, Pete, we know we got you heavy in these types of investments, but there's no new asset class. And it is so far the best performing asset class in the last decade called Bitcoin. And there's other different cryptocurrencies as we can get into. I think we can offset your portfolio a little bit. Let's take two to 5% and put it into this new asset class, which could offset everything else. And of course, this has been said numerous times for different places. So I think this is what's going to happen. However, let's jump back to the article. All right, moving down. So Alex States, the bulk of banks and other sophisticated players in the old school markets don't know much about our industry. And that's true. They just don't they just don't get it because it was just like the internet. People didn't understand the internet. I was around when it was, you know, coming about and look, everybody thought no one thought it would be this big, nobody. And no one thought it would actually get off the ground. We really thought that the government wasn't going to actually let the internet happen because there was so much power and information. But like there's no way they're going to let this happen. And hey, here we are. So these banks, they just don't get it. But once they figured out, you know, and my elevator pitches this, look, Bitcoin, digital assets, cryptocurrencies, just Bitcoin itself. Let's just let's just keep it simple. Bitcoin's digital gold. Yeah, just like gold, it's finite. It only has 21 million ever. You're going to keep finding gold. You can't find more Bitcoin. There's only 21 million unlike gold, which is doing pretty well, actually, you can send it to anyone in the world at any time. And it costs you almost nothing to actually send it when it first came out about a decade ago was about a nickel, maybe even a penny. And that's worth almost $10,000. And it is the best performing asset of all time. It has beat any stock, it has beat any equity, it has beaten any kind of precious metals, the S&P 500, the Dow, everything by a large margin. And it's why I'm heavily invested into it. So I think with those two things, you know, talking about, you know, some type of portfolio management, where you kind of offset some things and then, you know, hopefully they learn more about it. I think people actually get into it. But what do I know? Moving on. It says a significant share of crypto asset traders and investors may avoid them altogether and stick with crypto native firms. So this is the same sentiment I got. A lot of people in the comment section were like, I'm not going to use banks. I'm not going to use banks. And that's true. Like for the people that are here now, for you watching this, you're probably not going to use a bank. But guess what? Cryptocurrency little assets are for everybody. And some people are not only adopters and they don't have the time to mess around with it, or they don't want to learn it. They're lazy and they want to just make it easy. So we want to make this as easy as possible. If people can be comfortable using the banks, so much the better. So like my mom is not going to use an analyzer, okay? My stepdad's not going to do the same thing. He's not going to learn about it. However, if the bank's like, we'll do it for you. Then all of a sudden it's like, I don't get into it because it might be some gains here. And then that's it. So we want to get, we want to have a large tent. We want to have everybody under our tent. And if we have to make it simple, so much the better. You don't have to do it. I don't have to do it to use the banks. But the masses probably will. And that's how it is. Now, unfortunately, when the masses get here and as time moves on, we're not going to see as near as many gains as we've seen over the early time. So that's the greatest thing about being an early adopter, such as yourself. Moving on, some firms have even publicly frowned upon Bitcoin. For example, just this past May, Goldman Sachs said in a wildly publicized research note that cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, are not an asset class, which is hilarious because they are the best performing asset class over the last decade. Comments like those don't appear to be aging well. And to prove my point, I made a little video. It's called Bitcoin and Thrin Lead. This decade's return ROI over Amazon, Google and Netflix. And it goes over the last decade about the greatest performing assets over the last 10 years. We take a look here and it just seems like in January 2013, here it comes, here it comes, and then there it is. So Bitcoin is pretty much going to stay on top for a while all the way until Ethereum actually comes up and takes it over for a little bit and drops back down. So we can just see that all these types of stocks and everything else, these are, this is the investment of the decade so far. I don't know what's going to happen in the next 10 years, but I know where I put my money and I got a pretty good idea of where I think things are going to go. So if you got a chance, you can check that out, share with your friends, because this pretty much lays it out. Let me go forward a little bit. Yeah, Ethereum up there, then Bitcoin and everything else, then Nvidia, Netflix, all that stuff. And here we are. Anyhow, comments like those don't appear to be aging well and are important because they show the fundamental lack of experience and understanding of digital asset markets that at least some of these firms have. When former Coinbase chief legal officer Brian Brooks became the acting head of the OCC, has had announced he wanted banks to submit input on crypto rules and they all pretty much set it up and said, yeah, this is what we want to do. And that's why we have that addition right now. Additionally, now the National Charter of Banks can officially do business as a crypto custodian. This will legitimize digital assets to more people, both in the retail side and institutionally. And I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a jump in value for many of the more well known crypto assets over the coming days and weeks. And that was a pretty easy play, Alex. We know that it was going to jump up. I was surprised how much it did. I mean, 12%, 15% for a theory, not too bad for a day. Anyhow, to finish it all up, once all the headlines surrounding this announcement fade away, what will be left with? What will we live with? Probably not many new custodial entrants from this regulatory approval in the short term, but the bright hope that the onlookers will see the acknowledgement from our government that crypto is real, at least real enough for the house that Morgan or JPMorgan built to be allowed to do business with it. And he's talking about when JPMorgan allowed Coinbase to use settlements for cryptocurrencies to their banks. So that's that's what I see. Like, I don't know if banks are going to do it, if they're going to start to say, yeah, we'll do all that custodial ship. But at least it's out there. And I even have had a friend today who had never talked about cryptocurrencies. Hey, what's up this Bitcoin? I said, well, I don't know where it's going to go. But I can tell you the government pretty much just said that all the banks can be custodians for crypto. So what does that tell you? And I think we're only going to see better things and more things in the future. All right, let's move on. Next up, and this is a very quick article. So the EU leaders approved 2.1 trillion budget. US lawmakers are going to do another round of helicopter money for the coronavirus or COVID-19 relief money. And the only thing that means to me is that more people are going to dump money into the cryptocurrency market. This was from April 20th. If you don't know, CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong shared a graph of user activity on the cryptocurrency exchange that indicated more transactions were being made of $1,200. So what's happening was for the stimulus package, if you're not in America, a lot of us got $1,200. Not all of us, but some of the majority got a lot of money or got a good amount of cash. And what they did with it was not buy groceries or pay for bills or anything else, went right to Coinbase. And they said, we want XYZ, whatever they bought. So I think once we see more of that happening, as far as like the stimulus package is going through, we're going to see an increase in cryptocurrency because people like to invest. Now, it's a crazy world. And then additionally, represented from Binance said they had the same thing regarding 1,200 transactions on Monday. So I didn't know that I didn't know was actually happening in Coinbase and Binance. But it makes total sense, you know, if a lot of people like Coinbase, I'm not a big fan. But yeah, a lot of people do use Coinbase and make sense. All right, that's all I want to say. Let's move on. Last up, my favorite story. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, sues YouTube over the scam. So what's going on here? This suit that was brought by Woz, praised Twitter, first of all, for acting swiftly and decisively to shut down malicious accounts and protect its users from the scam. If you don't remember about a week ago, a lot of the big, huge Twitter accounts like President Obama, Elon Musk, you name them, they were all hacked and they all said the same thing. Hey, I want to give back and I'm giving you Bitcoin, send me one Bitcoin also on YouTube, Bitcoin or something ridiculous like that. But what was surprising to me was that only like, I think it was like like $120,000 was actually lost out of all those people. So at least it shows that, I guess on Twitter, that people were more savvy. So that's what happened. That's what's being brought forth by Woz and his legal team. What's going with YouTube? Well, it's our contrast for months now. Defendant YouTube has been unapologetically hosting, promoting and directly profiting from similar scams, the suit said. And not only that, but we did a story yesterday, response by the YouTube legal team to Ripple's lawsuit, which say they were doing the same thing with their CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, and they put in an official response that, Hey, we're not responsible for that. We know it's in our terms and conditions and we say that scams will not be allowed, but we're not responsible. So if that happens in our watch, well, hey, that's too bad. And that to me is concerning because it kind of tells, you know, singles of scammers like, Oh, do whatever you want, because we're not going to we're not going to regulate. And that's it. So I'm glad to see that somebody like Wozniak is really getting in the fight and maybe more. So let's let's keep reading. So the suit alleged that the image and likeness of other well-known entrepreneurs, including Gates, Elon Musk and Michael Dell were also being exploited in these scams. I'm going to ask you a question. Put the comments below. What do you think is going to happen when all these big names, let's say Bill Gates is like, you know what, I have this huge charity organization. I don't want my name dragged the mud. Elon Musk is like, Hey, I got enough problems in California. I don't want to have my name dragged the mud in my business. And all these different huge corporations and entities and people are like, Hey, I'm tired of being part of these scams on YouTube. I'm not even a part of it. They're just using my likeness. You guys got to shut that down and they all get together and they all go towards YouTube. What do you think is going to happen? Let me know the comment section. I have my ideas, but who knows? Anyhow, like I said in yesterday's video when we were talking about scams or whatnot, there's one thing when you just have somebody who makes a video and, you know, makes it a scam. You have another issue when it goes through Google AdWords. Somebody reviews it, whether that be a human or an AI or some type of apparatus that checks out to make sure that is legit. It goes through the whole process. They take the money for that advertisement. That advertisement goes out and people lose money on the platform. That's a totally different thing. And that's what it says in the sentence YouTube and Google took the further step of promoting and profiting from these scams by providing paid advertising that targeted users who are most likely to be harmed, the suit said. And it's not like YouTube is responsible for the scam. I know some of you think that YouTube is responsible for scams. I don't believe they would be that stupid to try to scam people just to bring down the name of the cryptocurrency because if this was ever revealed that they were, I mean the backlash would be astronomical. It would destroy the whole business. So I don't think they're doing that. I think they're negligent in how they're doing things. I'm sure they're doing the best they can, right? But I'm sure they can do more. I'm sure they can do more. We do our part, right? We report these scams and they're still up. So I don't understand that. But speaking of reporting, I need to show you something. And this is what we talked about yesterday. So I actually did two videos. One was about this scam. The other one was about how to fight back and how to take control when you get these ads, these scam ads that pop up before, during or after your video that you want to watch. So first up, I was perusing the internet, the YouTube's, and I was watching Digital Dave Crazy for Cryptos. You should check him out, good guy. And this ad came up, 100,000 get away. And we know it's a scam because it's like no one, if you send an ETH, we're going to give you a 10 ETH back. That's some, no one does that. That's stupid. So my dilemma was, well, how do I report this? Because I can't downvote Digital Dave's video and then report Digital Dave for Crazy for Cryptos. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to report this and I couldn't do it. So I figured it out that if you actually just, you know, click on, because what we only do is on the upper left hand corner, we're looking for this icon, whoever it is, buterin, whether it be gates or musk or something like that, whoever they're trying to impersonate, that's their channel. So on a desktop computer, you can actually click on that. And of course, we want to make sure we're not screwing up Digital Dave's video. So we're going to click on the Vitalik Buterin scammer. And it's going to take us to the scammers layer where they actually host their video. Because I do Google AdWords for YouTube advertising. They have to, they have to upload their video to YouTube. You cannot host it externally. So it has to be there somewhere. And when I look at this, I'm like, what the heck is this? Foods that make no sense. I was just looking at a scam. What's this foods? Well, that, my friend is just a thumbnail because that is what they're trying to cause confusion. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to click on that. And what happens? Oh, there's the scam. And you can see, okay, it's the same thing. That's the video. And then the bottom left hand corner, you can see that this is actually the Vitalik Buterin video. This is not the digital Dave video. This is what I want to report, right? So I'm like, all right, what do I got to do? All I got to do is I want to do two things. I'm going to click on dislike, hit those three dots right there. And I want to report it. And that's it. So that's how you report ads on your desktop. I was having a real hard time with trying to figure out how I did this with on my mobile because I couldn't figure it out. But thankfully, somebody smarter than me, which is not hard, I might add. This is from bluggie, bluggie. And he sent me an email. And I just want to say a shout out to XRP Crypto Wolf and a fellow punch man, all the everybody who sends me information, I really appreciate it. But he said, Hey, I found a way to report a mobile. And he just said, on this little let me blow this up so everybody can see. So he said right here in the bottom left hand corner where it says add one of two on my mobile device, there's a little I right there. And if you click on and everything else doesn't work, right? These little three dots visit advertiser, that just takes you to the website. But if you click on this little I, what's going to happen is the screen's going to pop up. It's going to say, All right. So what's wrong with this ad? What's the problem? And you can't say it's a scam or be really specific. But it's not that it's irrelevant to you that's repetitive, it's inappropriate. And that could be anything that could be from it as sexual nature, it is inappropriate because it deals with violence and something else, or it is a scam. So he's clicking appropriate send and you're done. So it's like, it's super fast. You can do that in like five seconds. So now we know, I want to say thank you so much to, I'm going to say, Bluggie. Thanks for helping us out. So thank you. Let's go back to the article. And he had to finish up defendants failure to warn was willful malicious oppressive fraudulent and are reckless disregard of the plaintiff's rights, thereby entitling plaintiffs to punitive damages, the suit said, the suit demands a trial by jury on all issues, tribal and damages that include legal expenses and any gains, profits or advantages wrongfully obtained by defendants. So that to me is the catalyst. That right there is the catalyst of what's going to change YouTube and how they deal with these scams. Because if you start to hit a corporation in the pocketbook, all of a sudden they start to sit up and take notes like, wait, we can't lose money. We have shareholders. We can't report a shareholder who lost money. So what do you want us to do? Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen overnight. I'm saying the more this actually happens, it's already happened with ripple. Here's Wozniak. And I don't know who else going to get in the fray. But this is one of those fronts that YouTube has to deal with. There's also no class action lawsuit being brought forth by an Australian law firm, which we covered yesterday, or excuse me a couple of days ago. So they're fighting a lot of different lawsuits. I can tell you right this, I've been a lawsuit and they cheap. So if you're if you're a YouTube, you probably like, man, this is going to eat us somewhere profits. And yeah, that's it for today's video. I want to just want to give some shout outs, just some random shout outs. If you don't know, there's a join now button underneath. It doesn't, I don't hold anything back. You don't get anything special. It's kind of like a tip. It's a buck 99. And then I just want to say thanks to everybody who's actually signed up. So recently, ether black Chuxie shift happens. That's pretty good. David Thank you. Felipe Cathcart. That's a good name. Rama flash. I think I said last time. Barry Belasco, I like that one. Theodore Leyva and George McNamara. So just random shout outs. I appreciate everybody. Thanks so much for signing up and watch the videos. And that's it. If you like these videos, you need two more is going to pop up on your left and right. Don't know what they are because YouTube does all that magic. And that's it. So thanks for watching. See you on the next one.