 and happy Christmas. Welcome and thanks for joining us with our team today for the market reports at Cointelegraph. Now, my name is Joe Hall and I'm a reporter for Cointelegraph. I'm joined today by surprise, surprise, Marcel Teckman who appears from the wild and Sam Borgie. How happy Christmas, gentlemen. Good to see you brought some cheer with you. Marcel, fast up, how are you doing mate? How are you? I think you might be on mute. Marcel was muted, my man. Yeah. How are you doing, Sam? We'll jump back to Marcel. Yeah, well, I survived the Blizzard. So we had a massive, massive Blizzard here the past few days. So it was definitely a white Christmas for anyone who cares about that kind of stuff. And yeah, we're on the other side and looking to wrap up a brutal 2022 for this industry. I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat it, right? You said it, you said it. I've been listening to lots of those sort of wrap up reports of 2022. And yeah, there's no way of sugarcoating it whatsoever. Marcel, can we hear you now? Earth to Marcel. Can you hear me now? How are you good? Finally. So I think that holiday season is good for us to remember. Never shield cryptocurrencies to our family and friends. Never recommend them for buying because they always buy at the top and they complain with you later. You're gonna stream months later down 50%. And you're gonna hear it for your whole life. So you're gonna orange peel or whatever if they're Ethereum fans. They're gonna take their own pace. It doesn't help trying to force them to buy. So that's what I always remember when it gets to end of the year. Fantastic. Marcel very well said and I'm glad you found the mute button as well. Now, Sam Borgie is a business editor at Coin Telegraph where he brings over a decade of experience to the table and resident expert, Marcel Peckman, is a crypto space, crypto derivative specialist even. Okay, it's a Christmas show so I can tell that the vibes are a little bit more, you know, jolly this year, which I'm really glad to see and it's really good to see people checking into the chat as well. We'll read through your messages in a little moment. But first up, what is today's show going to be all about? As Sam has rightly pointed out, it's been a tough year. So we're here for you guys, our loyal viewers and we're gonna help you navigate through this brutal bear market and answer any questions you might have. We're also giving away a $50 gift voucher to the Coin Telegraph swag store. So make sure you drop a comment and take part in the conversation with these lovely gentlemen. Now, here's a quick roundup of today's show. We're gonna start off with the market roundup, even not off, followed by some memes. There'll be a market news updates, a quick crypto tip, another one from Marcel, and then of course the markets pro summary, we're gonna explain another tip and then a giveaway of that $50 Coin Telegraph gift card. Don't forget as well that there's a 20% off code in the YouTube description just below where you're looking at the screen right now. Don't miss out. It's a great opportunity to start trading. And maybe next time there's a family get together, you might have given them some good tips. Hey Marcel. Cool, okay, let's kick the show off with the weekly roundup. Take it away guys. And just to think that the year started off with a 42,000 or 43,000 Bitcoin price. And ETH was something up in the three grand. So yeah, we've come a long way down. And as it goes in crypto, we can go a lot further, can't we? Down or up? Right then, let's kick off with the first article of the week. It's all about four things to watch for in 2023. So let's fire it up. What are the memes? Mr. Killer memes. Yes, of course. The memes. How could I forget? The most important part. Any comments before we jump into the meme video guys? About the perhaps based on the meme weekly review. I think the most important news either remissed or it was some 10 days ago. It was Charles Hoscon from Cardano, complaining that he was not on the yearly review of Masari or whatever saying, well, we went off the top cryptos and commenting on Cardano. We've done a lot over this year. This guy is simply either lunatic or he's a plain liar. Nothing happened on Cardano this year. Yes, they said to be implementing smart contracts. If I, but the TVL, it's less than $20 million. You can only do basic functions on Cardano. It doesn't work really for DeFi. So I think it's honorable to mention here. I don't know if it was this week or 10 days ago. No, no, it was, you're right. It was last week. I remember seeing this and chuckling to myself. It was in a coin-based business review, like a year in review. And it mentioned Bitcoin 30 times, Ethereum a couple of times and then Cardano zero times. And Charles Hoskinson was very upset about it because when you don't look at Charles Hoskinson for a while, he gets a little bit upset because he really does love the limelight, doesn't he, myself? Important news to flag out there. And of course, there was lots of going on with SPF despite the fact that you'd hope that these poor criminals would get some time off of the Christmas as well, right? Okay, humor's high. Let's jump into the memes of the week. What have we got? I feel like this is in reference to the, you see the video of the policeman that found a seed phrase at the side of the road and they like unwrapped it and they're like, oh, this is a crypto thing. And then eventually they realized, you know, what it was about and I feel like family might react in a similar way. It'll be a confusion. They're all the next meme. I actually saw the shed in the water cooler today. It's, do you guys also trade regular stocks, you know, tradfire stocks? I've just, you know, sort of a bit of investing here and there. I follow them, but I don't trade them anymore. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, because it's not a good year to be a trader full stock in crypto or in tradfire. How much you down, Sam? How much you down on stock this year? Be honest. It's an obscene amount. You know, I've watched myself lose a lot across all my portfolios. So... What is retirement anyway, you know? You've been in a coma for a year. How are my Solana investments doing? I bought it $250. Oh, gosh. Not only, you know, are you in hospital, clearly ill, but you're also waking up to realize that Solana was propped up by some bankman Friedan FTX amongst other, you know, VC traders. Could it go back up? What do you think, Marcel? Solana backups the moon? I think after the NFT project started to depart this week, I think that was the nail in the coffin because I don't see a really big use case for Solana right now. Okay, okay. Here, the trader is a therapist and is the Santa Rally in the room with us right now. We have an article about this a little bit later, the community reaction to the lack of the Santa Rally. And that is our weekly memes. People were having too much fun out in the real world this week, weren't they, to make fire memes. Although I definitely saw a lot of good memes around San Bankman Fried and how he's cleaned up his act since going to a prison. You know, he's had a haircut. He's got a bit of like stubble, you know, five o'clock shadow. And, you know, he's wearing a suit now. He still doesn't know how to tie his laces, however, but I really don't understand. He lost some weight, at least he lost some weight. I just want him to, I do to get a lot of TV air time so people get to know what they were investing or sending money to. It's a complete damn idiot, crack head with 30 years old and people should understand, know what they did. So they don't repeat four years from now. Precisely. And just a general notice, this is all, of course, our opinions and this does not represent the views of Cointelagraph and nor is it financial advice. Okay, let's crack on with the first article of the week and a little hello to Rong again and to Vikram. Lovely to see you in the chat as well as Parash Mandal. We'll get to your questions in a little bit. Okay, cool. Let's take it away with the first article. I think I'm going to be showing my screen here to talk about the four emerging narratives in crypto to watch. Okay, screen is up. Here we go. Now this was a trading firm which was actually relatively new to me on my radar. So I spent some time looking at the writer who is a Oxford graduate in 2013. You did politics, philosophy and economics. So very, very bright guy who's clearly done the, you know, Goldman Sachs route and the traditional finance career path before capitulating into crypto and he's clearly taken a liking or a trining to NFTs. So this man here is called Stephen Golden who's a senior research analyst. This is the man that went to Oxford at this crypto trading firm Cumberland which is also relatively new on the scene. This article looks at what Cumberland has been reporting over the back of 2022 and its predictions for 2023. So that's our context and the key takeaways from this is that apparently there's going to be some green shoots to break the surface of crypto in 2023. And on top of that, he mentioned in NFTs there could be the go-to method of tokenizing a brand's intellectual property or IP and web three apps. I'm not going to give you a definition of web three because there is no actual definition of web three and games becoming genuinely popular while Bitcoin and ether obviously the two largest crypto assets in the world could become more commonly used as a nation's reserve asset. Wouldn't that be nice if, you know, France decides to buy a bucket load of Bitcoin? That would certainly boost the markets. Now it's one of those articles that sort of goes into their research report which I actually recommend you read the report which is here Cumberland a year in review or just know the snapshot which we provide readers for a coin telegraph. And the whole thing is that there's going to be real world utility coming to the crypto markets. I am of course very skeptical about these sorts of movements. I'm really interested to hear what Marcel and Sam want to say about this. You know, are there going to really be real world utility movements in 2023? What do we think first Sam? Have there been real world utility moments in 2022? First part of the question. Second part of the question. Do you think there could be more or these growing green shoots of a real world utility in 2023? Well, I think the big question that's outstanding is what are the use cases of blockchain technology outside of money, right? And I think that that's where a lot of the question marks are. I've been very excited about projects in the past about their ability to use blockchain for various purposes. You know, I was really interested in the privacy side, decentralized social media side. Nothing has really bared any fruit outside of the core monetary aspect of Bitcoin. I'm in my opinion. So I know there's a lot of excitement around web three and as Joe, as you mentioned, we don't really have any kind of unified definition of what that even means. When we talk about web three, we're simply referring to some future iteration of the internet that is more decentralized and perhaps is based on blockchain technology, but there's no unifying definition beyond that point. On the NFT side, I mean, look, I think that it's pretty obvious that a lot of big brands are experimenting in the space and I think they will continue to, whether that leads to actual real world utility is yet to be seen. In terms of the Bitcoin and Ethereum being reserve assets, I think that's, we're still way too early for that. You know, I think that game theory in the future may eventually lead to Bitcoin going on some government's balance sheet, but right now there's really no direct indication of that. I still think that there's a large adoption curve to be had and I don't think nation states are smart enough right now to be adding Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Could some small island nation somewhere or some country that's sanctioned add some BTC on its balance sheet? It's possible. I don't know if 2023 is gonna be the year for that. That's just my take. Yeah, no, that's super interesting. And I think, yeah, we didn't, I didn't quite touch upon it on the introduction there, but yeah, the most important takeaway for me from that article was about countries potentially putting digital money on their balance sheets. You know, to date, we've had, I wanna say three countries that have dabbled in this area. You know, El Salvador, of course, is buying Bitcoin. You know, Naid Bukele said maybe a couple of months ago that they're gonna buy a Bitcoin a day for the next 100 days or so. So I think they're still doing that, but I would need to verify it. Central African Republic have said that they're going to use the proceeds of Sango coin to buy Bitcoin, but Sango coin has been delayed somewhat. And then you've also got Ukraine, which accepted Bitcoin as well as ETH and USDT at the start of the Russian invasion back in February this year. So it didn't say whether or not they're putting those Bitcoin on their banshee. I presume it was offloaded straight away. Maybe we can have a chat about this in a little while. But yeah, so far, you know, three countries doing something along those lines, but there's no outright I am buying this Bitcoin to protect the nation's wealth. I don't know if we're gonna get to that stage in 2023. Marcel, what do you think about these predictions for 2023? And what are your own as well? Well, Joe, I don't agree with most of them as for utilities, NFT. I hate when I see companies trying to force adoption. Like, yeah, to get into the show, you need to buy this NFT. So this will be used as your ticket and you're gonna have access to additional experience. So if the guy is not really a crypto users of his averse to the technology, you're excluding him to participate on that. And currently, I don't agree with them. I don't see any real utility besides money, besides decentralized finance applications using blockchain. Maybe they emerge. It's been 13 years since Bitcoin was launched and blockchain was invented. We've seen none of that really working besides money. As for the reserve, global reserve, assets, thesis, I don't think that even Bitcoin Maxi would agree that Bitcoin served as a reserve asset this year. Maybe it worked when the central banks were expanding money, when we saw those trillion dollar hell packages. But if you watch over the past, I don't know, eight months, since February or March, the Federal Reserve from the United States has been reducing his balance sheet. And since then, Bitcoin and Ethereum lost over 50% of their value. So one may argue, yeah, there's a high correlation right now between cryptocurrencies and traditional markets and traditional markets are facing economy crisis and they're going down. So Bitcoin is more volatile, but it shouldn't be that way. If more people, if adoption was, if more people understood the scarcity value of Bitcoin, it would be going another way. But it's too, maybe 10 years earlier in the curve, most of the people, like 98% of the planet don't understand the need for decentralization, the need for scarcity, the need for not being hostage of a bank or a central bank even. So currently, I don't think that the thesis of global reserve asset is gonna work for the next year. I don't think it's gonna happen. Yeah, okay, no, no, it's another point you can take. I think as well that these properties that we all hark about decentralization, centralistic resistance and you can't debase it, let's be honest here, most of the world doesn't care about it and might never care about it. So it's almost like, okay, if those properties aren't going to be the driving force for adoption, then what can we do in terms of utility to make people realize that, oh, okay, maybe this is better than the current payment rails or this is better than my current money? So yeah, I think there's gonna be a lot more sort of banging heads together and trying to work out, okay, what's next for this new economy that's being built? I just wanna flag one of the comments in the chat from wrong again. He said next year is gonna be the year where we go back to basics. What is old will be new again. So BTC, ETH, DeFi, so Bitcoin, Ethereum and centralized finance 1.0 might recapture value in 2023. It's an interesting take. We obviously focus this conversation a lot on money, but it's true there is a lot going on in this space in terms of decentralized identity, NFTs of course is still a big hype area, particularly for people like Golden, the man in the article. But let's jump to the second one, as I know that we can't spend all day talking about these specific articles. The next one's a bit more light-hearted and it's all about the Santa rally, which unfortunately, unless Santa is gonna deliver some presents tomorrow, which he's not, then I think we're out of luck there. So Ezra Aguera, a lovely colloquial on the European team, he brought us this crypto community roundup article where the Christmas market sentiment is there is no Santa rally. Sadly, as we discussed in a market report that you would have seen three weeks ago, that Santa rally is when sometimes in the run-up to Christmas, there is a price increase across the total crypto market as well as Treadfy. And sadly this year, we were without luck. He then highlights a few memes. This one in particular is good. Rosa read, your PNL is too, Santa isn't coming tonight, SPF liquidated him too. And I thought I'd bring in Marcel and Sam to ask if they'd perhaps written a poem recently about the lack of Santa rally. And what does this mean? Does meeting January we could get a bear market rally? Is that such a thing? Sam, well, let's go to you first. Could January see this delayed Santa rally? Is it in certain countries that they deliver the presents on the January the 8th? I forget which country it is. Well, yeah, I was gonna say orthodox Christmas is on the way. So maybe that's when we're gonna get Santa rally. Yeah, gonna get the Santa rally. Yeah, we really didn't see much this year in seasonality. I mean, typically in Treadfy, you do see that end of year pump, you know, a little extra goodies in your stocking. This year, not so much as you saw Bitcoin's volatility has dropped pretty substantially, which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing, but there's really not much happening right now. In terms of a bear market rally, I mean, look, I've been calling for, I was expecting a bear market rally earlier in the year. And I think, I mean, we did get one off the lows, but the bear market rallies that we've gotten haven't really been as sustainable or even as impressive as previous bear markets. You'll recall even during the 2008 financial crisis afterwards, we had some pretty massive rallies during that bear market in Treadfy. We haven't seen that in crypto. I think everything is on ice right now. I think a lot of the crypto tourists have kind of exited the market, speculation has exited the market. And as Marcel mentioned, and as we've talked about for many months, the correlation between Bitcoin and stocks has increased. It has declined in recent months, relative to where we were earlier, but the correlation is still there. I don't necessarily expect a rally in January, but at some point I am kind of marking the end of this cycle and the beginning of the next one, which still means quite a bit away before we get any kind of substantial price appreciation. But of course, anything can happen. A Fed pivot, a soft pivot by the Fed could be interpreted positively among Treadfy and that could trickle into the Bitcoin and crypto markets, maybe some favorable discussions around the regulations. But right now, in terms of the core crypto thesis, aside from people like us, there's not a lot of people who are drawn in the market right now. I think everybody, all the tourists have fled and it's just the OGs, we're still here. This is when you find out who your real friends and the colleagues that are in to stick it for the long term. Marcel, you're smiling away there at the end of the last comment. What's your take? I kind of agree with you, Sam, but you forgot a small point. 1.7 trillion has just been issued as a package to, I don't know, solving the salmon or whatever, solving Ukraine or I don't know how they're gonna spend the money, but the United States printer is back on and if you guide what's triggered the last Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies rally was exactly when the printer started, when the Federal Reserve started to stimulate the economy by injecting money. Doesn't matter if it's adding treasuries or reducing the reserve requirements, they have many monetary policy instruments to do that, but as soon as the Federal Reserve construction holds and it seems like we're on the verge, we're on the edge of that because we all know that this 1.7 trillion dollars are not gonna last more than three or four months. They're gonna be begging for more. It's like crack, it's like cocaine. The governments and the participants and the companies themselves are addicted to easy money. We have been on that wave for the past, I don't know, 15 years. So they got used to that. So that's what's gonna trigger the next rally. So I don't think it's gonna happen over the next couple of months, but as soon as the investors realize that another 1.5 or two trillion dollars package is gonna be needed in three or four months or six months even, then they're gonna realize the necessity of scarce assets and the importance of scarce assets. So we could see a rally by the mid of 2023, but not earlier. That's nice to know. I like the note of optimism there too. Yeah, the 1.7 trillion dollar stimulus package, for me, when you hear these numbers now, they just don't make any sense. Like, you know, the first stimulus package back in 2020, the COVID relief stimulus package, you know, and a lot of Americans got their stimulus checks through the post. And now it feels like the word trillion just comes up every couple of months. And, you know, there's that amazing graphic that maybe we should share it next week of a man standing next to a tower of a billion dollars and then a man standing next to a tower of a trillion dollars. And it's a football field of the same towers just to give you an idea of like how much money one trillion is. And it just boggles the mind, you know, it makes you realize that maybe we are entering this period of hyperinflation, but it's just a sort of gradual occurrence. You know, Jack Dorsey tweeted it in 2020 and was ridiculed saying that, you know, hyperinflation is coming or hyperinflation is here. I forget the exact quotes. So we've had an interesting article about predictions for next year. Next up, we had a fun article from the community. Now we've got a bit of education for you because it's very important that we take these bear markets to learn. Now, this is all about how despite the FTX fiasco, and I think I can say that it was a scam, it was fraud, Bitcoin exchange withdrawals have sunk to a seven month low as apparently in William Suburg's words, users have forgotten FTX. As Bitcoin exchanges gets uncomfortable, as do nothing December sees Bitcoin price volatility drop to record lows. What does this mean in a nutshell? And it means that fewer people in this month have withdrawn their Bitcoin from exchanges in the last seven months. And of course, in the last seven months we had huge numbers of people withdrawing extraordinary amounts of Bitcoin from exchanges in light of the centralized exchange collapse of FTX. Here's a graph to show just how many Bitcoin spiked over here. I think you can see my cursor. And that was one of those days, a few days after the FTX collapse where record numbers of people withdrew money from exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase or Kraken or you name the exchange. And this month we've seen a drop off. It could be as Suburg suggests, it could be a do nothing December or do nothing month or it could be that people have gone lazy again and are trusting centralized exchanges with their Bitcoin. I wanted to bring this up with the gentleman today because it's a really important topic that is one of the reasons that I like to work in the Bitcoin encrypted space is to try to remind people that not your keys, not your coins, self-custody is paramount. Gents, do you think that this could be a do nothing December or is there something a bit more cynical or insidious going on? Marcel, have you sensed that people are getting a bit more lazy and a bit more relaxed about centralized exchanges again? No, I think people are getting more confident after the proof of reserves from a couple of exchanges including hobby, OQX and Binance. They're starting to rebuild some confidence on those centralized exchanges which they shouldn't but I'm going to recall the viewers that not everyone is a holder, not everyone wants to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or a couple of coins and wait four years to do that. It's the easiest way to embrace the crypto spirit and to benefit from it but most people are anxious and they want returns in very short-term time frames. So they rely on centralized exchange to trade outcoins or whatever they do. So they're starting to get more confident on those exchange that were left saying, well, if they survived or well, if Tetra survived this crisis so Tetra is safe or if Binance still holds over $50 billion then I don't think CZ is lying to us. So they're starting to rebuild the confidence that's what's happening in my view. Okay, so we might be seeing this reversal in people withdrawing Bitcoin from exchanges. Sam, has there been any news event, Marcel brings up the proof of reserves which might have buoyed confidence and has there been anything else that might have inspired this change in consumer behavior? I think perhaps people have identified that or they think they identified that the contagion may be over. You know, we had the collapse that we had. You know, we saw the centralized lenders go bust. You know, now we saw FTX go bust. Everything else seems fairly status quo. I know there's a lot of talk around Binance and Binance does make me nervous in a sense but I think right now maybe more people are sensing there's no more fire. I know that Coinbase came out with some pretty strong statements about it's apparent safety and the protocols that it takes. So I consider this to be more of the ebb and flow. I think that people responded positive, people responded in the right way to FTX by taking their coins off exchanges. And I think that the natural ebb and flow of things has probably led us to a point where that activity may have stagnated. But I think that more people are beginning to realize or they should realize that if Bitcoin is a bearer asset and if you're not holding your keys and you're not responsible for your asset, there's a lot of risks that could potentially take place. We've talked about a lot of the hacks in the past but right now the issue isn't even hacks or security. The issue is exchange solvency and the opaque business practices of centralized exchanges. I think those concerns are still there but I wouldn't really take this to mean that investors are now all of a sudden very confident about centralized exchanges. I just think that maybe the perception is that the ones who fell have fallen and the ones who are remaining are, we don't really see any direct indication that anything could go wrong. Obviously that could change and it's always a good thing to practice self-custody. I just think it's more of the ebb and flow of market activity. It wouldn't surprise me to see another spike in people taking their coins off exchange in the next few months just as more people learn about self-custody moving forward. That would be encouraging, wouldn't it? And it would hopefully imply that our reporting and our coverage is landing on the right people's desks. Okay, cool. I mean, you mentioned something there which was important regarding CZ and Binance and whether or not this could be another centralized exchange to go belly up. Before we address this article because it's one of the articles we're gonna discuss this week, I just wanted to check in with a chat and just firstly, send a big hug to Ron again who says he's feeling lonely. It's a terrible time of year, it's a field that way and my heart really does go out to you. There are plenty of ways to interact with people in the Bitcoin and Cryptosphere. One of them I mentioned it in the chat but it's called the Orange Pill app which helps you connect with Bitcoiners in your area. It's not a dating app but it is a way of meeting people and also participating in these kind of things. You might get some good merch out of it at the end of the talk. The other point that was brought up, yes thumbs up for myself. And the other question was, can the Ripple case bring clarity to the market in 2023? I presume Sam, this is something that you've reported on several times. Would you be able to give viewers a quick update on what the Ripple case is and whether or not, as Christopher suggests, could it accelerate regulation in 2023? Well, I think that the Ripple case, for me, the SEC went after Ripple over its alleged security status and basically running an unregistered security offering. And for me, when the SEC goes after someone they usually have a pretty strong case. When there's smoke, there's fire. And as we've seen recently, the SEC has gone after several other ICO projects. And based on the comments from Dirty Gary and the rest of them, they're gonna be coming after a lot more. So surprisingly, I think that the Ripple case has been fairly favorable to Ripple right now. I haven't been following it as closely the last few months, but it hasn't been the slam dunk that the SEC thought it was going to be or that I would have thought it was going to be given that the SEC is very careful about who it goes after. So if Ripple actually wins the case, I think it's gonna be probably a pretty big boon to the XRP token and perhaps to the industry as a whole. I don't know how much of a tailwind it's gonna be given that we're in a bear market, but it just seems that right now that the SEC case, it's not as cut and dry as we thought it could have been when it first went after Ripple, I think it was over a year ago. So I'm still in wait and see mode right now. I don't wanna speculate too much further, but I do think that Ripple may have a case here and we'll probably end up seeing what happens as the case evolves. Amazing, great analysis, Sam, thank you. I hope that addresses your query there, Christopher. Quick question, Sam, sorry. Dirty Gary, is that Gary Gensler? I was Googling Dirty Gary the other day. That's the one, you're on top of things. Nothing gets passed, it's passed you guys. So yes, dirty Gary. Cause I looked up in the urban dictionary what a dirty Gary is and it didn't come up with Gary Gensler. It came up with all sorts of things. So I don't recommend people do that at home. Okay, right then. So we've got the last article to come up now which is all about CZ and Binance and whether or not this FUD, which I feel like we've been talking about this for months now guys, is still rearing its ugly, fuddy head. Although his Mr. CZ's very nice head, Chao Peng Zao, Ms. Full Name. So he took to Twitter on the 23rd of December, two days before Christmas and he did a 98-part Twitter thread. I'm gonna hold my hands up here. I got to tweet 46 and I just checked out after a while it became a lot of rambling but fortunately I've got Marcel and Sam who the experts on Binance and the FUD here today to help talk me through it. But basically his biggest gripe was about centralized exchanges. And he said, and I quote here, regardless if a sex or centralized exchange helps with crypto adoption at a faster rate they just hate sex. What centralized exchanges? Basically saying that the critics of Binance and these real perpetrators of Binance FUD are people that just generally dislike centralized exchanges. Who are those kind of people? They would be probably your die hard self-custody advocates and those people that think that you should use Bitcoin as intended, i.e. appear to appear, you know, no KYC money. So you buy Bitcoin off someone in a car park with cash as opposed to logging into Binance giving your home address, your phone number, your blood type, your wife's maiden name all those sorts of things to Binance. Guys, what do we reckon here with regards to CZ and Binance FUD? Is this 98 tweet thread finally the end of this story? Or is it coming out in early 23? Marcel, let's jump to you first. What's your take? Oh Joe, even if Binance right now holds the 60 billion dollars and the clients deposits are worth 60 billion dollars and it's like 101% covered. That doesn't mean that CZ himself doesn't have a backdoor access to withdraw the funds without a board or a committee or a multi-sig or whatever. The security measures that you expect from a multi-billion dollar company. And we've seen in the past like Binance was hacked at least two times for 7,000 Bitcoins each. And the community only found out later and there were no much details on how the hack happened. They only said it was the hot wallet but they did not explain exactly what other coins were involved, maybe some Monero was also robbed but we will never know about it. But the lack of transparency over the past four or five years where Binance has been, has existed. And even how the corporate structure is when you compare it to Kraken or even to Coinbase it lacks, it doesn't goes to the same standard. So it's not about showing that the reserves right now on today are covered. It's about showing how the security works and why the hacks happened and what was done to prevent those hacks from further happening. And there's questions about the bridge on the BNB, the Binance BNB chain and even the stable coins itself, the BNB stable coin. There's a lot of uncertainty if Paxos is still handling administering this stable coin or if it's Binance what happens when the stable coin is bridged from Ethereum to Binance chain. So there's lots of open questions and we don't always get the level of details, detail level that we expect from a multi-billion dollar multinational company. It seems like it's an amateur and this wholly, CZ is like the 100% owner and he controls it and the directors just do everything that he asks. There's no way to trust so much centralization. It's a problem. It's never gonna go away. Yeah, it's really interesting this dichotomy or this juxtaposition of being in the crypto space and knowing that decentralization is everything and self-custody is really important and then also having these heroes of the space like CZ who's put on a pedestal is like the guy in crypto space and mainstream media loves him and he's a sort of humble guy. I mean, the more I'm talking about it, it's comes across as like SPF vibes. I really hope we don't have another SPF on our hands. Hey-ho, but he is a bit coiner. He does supposedly only hold BNB, so Binance token and Bitcoin, although apparently the split of his holdings is 99% Binance, 1% Bitcoin which is not my portfolio of choice by any measure. Hey-ho, he also flagged up some interesting comments saying that, you know, it's racism against CZ, although he's of course Canadian. So that was quite interesting in the comment section. Yeah, Marcel, that actually happened. It was hilarious, the comment section there because I was like, no, there's no racist tone to it. What's the other? Hey-ho. Sam, you mentioned the Binance case a little bit earlier in our conversation today. What do you make of more FUD and more defense from CZ? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I should clarify that. I don't necessarily think that centralized exchanges are a problem per se. I do think that a vibrant Bitcoin market or a vibrant crypto economy does have a place for centralized exchanges. Centralized exchanges do play an important role, provided that they're actually well-capitalized and they're doing what they should be doing, right? I think if you're doing what SPF did and you're defrauding investors, that's outside of the realm of crypto or any other market, you're just committing fraud in that case. If a centralized exchange is doing what it's supposed to be doing and it has proper internal controls and it's actually not co-mingling user funds, all these things, I think centralized exchanges could be actually very, very positive. I'm not a big fan of Binance, but I think that it's probably onboarded a lot of people to Bitcoin. So for me, I don't necessarily have a gripe with centralized exchanges per se. I do think that Bitcoin represents a more decentralized future and we're heading in that direction. But as a general concept, my gripe is less with the centralization aspect and more with the complete opaque nature of their operations. And I think that a few weeks ago, there was a former FASB member who basically talked about Binance's proof of reserves and why they raised red flags. I just think the issue with Binance is there's a really lack of any kind of information related to their internal quality controls, how they liquidate assets to cover margin loans, for example. We also don't know anything about their corporate structure, which for me, that's always a red flag. I mean, I'm all for privacy and I think if it's a private company can conduct its business the way it wants. But when you absolutely cannot find any information about a corporate structure, that's usually a pretty big red flag and you combine that with a lot of the tweeting activity Joe, you mentioned that there's been a lot of parallels with SBF before that exchange went belly up. I don't wanna fud Binance more than it's already been fudded, but for me, there's a lot of potential concerns there and that's why I'm being vigilant. So my gripe isn't with centralized exchanges per se, it's with some of the behavior of those who operate in such an opaque nature or an opaque manner. Yeah, that's really well nuanced, yeah. And I think also, I'm gonna have to be a bit cheeky here, but I think it's the holiday period, lots of journalists have a lot on their plate, they're a bit burnt out after the year and it's quite an easy low hanging fruit to be like, okay, what's Binance doing? Maybe I could write about that for an article or two. So the industry is to some extent to blame as well and I can say that because I'm a journalist, I think. Okay, cool. There was a quick question from Vikram in the chat that I thought it might be interesting to tackle before we move on to the final segments of today. Vikram asks, what would the impact of CBDCs on stablecoins be, particularly as many countries plan to launch CBDCs? Who would like to tackle that? Marcel, you're smiling there, yeah? I think the dollar is already digital. So why do a client prefers the USDC or Tether or Paxus dollar or Binance dollar against the dollar at JPMorgan? Because it's easier to transact and you can move money across the exchange and you can sell it with the CBDC, you can do none of that because it's 100% centralized. It's a digital bank that you have with the central bank of the issuing country. So if the central bank decides, well, starting from tomorrow, you need to spend half of your money on heating, energy and food and you cannot spend on entertainment or stuff. You're just blocked, you can't self-custody, you cannot opt out with the stablecoins, you can cross chains, you can swap from Tether to USDC, you can swap from USDC to Bitcoin. You have options, you're not stuck with the issue. With the CBDC, we're stuck with the centralized issue and a single database. So I don't think they compete in any sense. So stablecoins and CBDC, they have nothing to do with another. Okay, okay, good analysis. Sam, would you like to add anything to Marcel's assessment there? No, that's absolutely true. I think I've always called CBDC's slavecoin because as Marcel mentioned, the dollar's already digitized, right? I mean, even Neil Kashkari of the Fed even mentioned this. What role does the CBDC have outside of trying to control your population? The problem with the CBDC is you, me and everyone, we have a account at the Federal Reserve and they'll be able to turn on and turn off our access to money with a switch and that's what Marcel was mentioning. If you don't hit your climate goals this month, that's gonna be a knock against you and we can control your money through the CBDC switch. Oh, you said something online that we don't like. That's another potential red flag and that can have monetary consequences on you. So for me, it's more of a question of state surveillance and the ability of the government to have a more intrusive role in our lives. A stablecoin is simply using a fiat currency and making it more accessible. And for me, they're not the same. A lot of people view them. There's like a convergence between the two and I know that Circle talked about that at the conference I went to in San Fran back in September, but they are fundamentally different concepts. Yeah, so watch out for those slave coins, guys. So what isn't slave coin? Bitcoin, not financial advice, but you know, might be worth having a little bit. Okay, onto the quick crypto tip of this week and this week I'm gonna talk to you all about crypto cards. Don't forget though, there's 20% off Markets Pro in the description down below and you could be in the chance, in with a chance of winning a $50 swag voucher for the Cointelegraph store. So drop a comment and we'll see how it goes. Okay, my Zoom has just taken up my screen. Sorry, everyone. Let me just drop out of that. Okay, back to my notes. Now, crypto cards, what are they? It's not a birthday card. You don't give this to someone during a bear market or a bull market. A crypto card refers to a card that goes in your wallet. They're like regular debit or credit cards, but crypto cards let the consumer use their crypto to make payments. So that could be in brick and mortar stores. That could be your local Starbucks and McDonald's or whatever. They essentially deduct crypto from the user's wallet and transfer it at the merchant's end. I've got friends with crypto.com cards so you can have Bitcoin sitting in your Binance account, which you haven't withdrawn to self-custody. When you go to pay, it automatically converts that Bitcoin to euros, dollars, Canadian dollars, pounds at the point of sale to the merchant accepts fiat and you don't even realize it's happening. It's actually really quite slick and works very smoothly. So why would you do that? Well, because it helps users pay their routine bills through crypto without the complexities or challenges of finding outlets that accept crypto payments. Plus nowadays, numerous crypto card companies offer mobile apps like the ones I mentioned that make it easy for the customer to spend Bitcoin anywhere. Compliment your crypto card. This is an extra top tip with BitRefill because together you're gonna have cashback, rewards and all sorts of fun crypto stuff that make spending crypto and living off crypto a reality. Cool, let's go back to the conversation and as I mentioned earlier, don't forget to get 20% off Markets Pro in the description down below. Quick one, Sam and Marcel, do you have crypto cards? Have you ever used crypto cards? Do you swear by a particular company or is this something that you're on the fence with? No use from my end. Okay, Marcel, we're right in Brazil. No use. Do you have friends in Brazil that have them? Yeah, I have some friends that have but they use mostly when they're using abroad outside of Brazil. The problem of using in Brazil is that you never know the rate that the exchange is gonna sell your cryptocurrencies for the fiat. So it's easier for them to just pay with their regular credit card, wait for the end of the month, sell the crypto themselves and pay for the bills. But when you're traveling abroad, it's easier to do. Okay, no, no, fascinating. I mean, I also thought it was interesting the switch between debit and credit card. So where I'm from in the UK, debit is the 99% of people pay for things with a debit card. Whereas in the US, most payments are done with a credit card, right? And it builds up and at the end of the month, they pay off that credit. So it's interesting to see how crypto would sort of navigate that playing field as well because payments as well as being like this global thing is quite cultural and certain things are specific to certain geographies. So it's good to get your take from the various corners of the world that market reports cover. Great, now let's move on to the next segment today which is Marcel's trading insights. What have you got for us this week, Marcel? I'm excited for this. Okay, Joe, so this week we're not gonna talk about derivatives or even crypto trading data. I want people to understand why it is impossible to predict the Bitcoin price movements and how useless it is trying to estimate a fair value for market capitalization for Bitcoin and Ethereum considering the very low global adoption. It's very teams like less than 6% of the global proposition use cryptocurrencies. So everyone is probably familiar with Netflix, the video streaming company. So I wanna share my trading view screen, please. So we're gonna start from the beginning. If you can see my screen, the trading, yeah. So starting from 2003, you can see that the price skyrockets from seven cents out away to 550. Right after the company launched its shares, it existed back to 1997, but its shares in 2002. 2002. So what happened over there? We had DVD subscription by mail. That was what Netflix used to do. It was not a streaming company. You rented the DVD company, the DVDs themselves, physical copies, and you got them by mail. Some of you are unfamiliar with that, but that's how the company started. So what happened there? Why did the stock plunge? Because there was too much competition, which included Blockbuster, the traditional brick and mortar stores, but there's also growing demand and offering for satellite TV and even cable TV. So everyone thought that Netflix was lost, they lost the battle because their other options were better for it. So the stock collapsed at 75% in nine months. Okay, thanks for sharing. So we saw an incumbent company struggling to compete with traditional well-funded TV giants. What does that have to do with cryptos? Well, everything. Firstly, the crypto industry is in infancy. It's just starting and constantly evolving from decentralized finance to NFT, layer two solutions, zero knowledge privacy, NFC-enabled payments. There's even a debit card that you can use with Bitcoin right now, Lightning Network. You don't need even swipe, you just get your card next to the POS and it's paid. So everything is emerging like WebTree identity, everything is being developed under our eyes. And the traditional finance company, the banks themselves are well-funded. So it's easy for the general public to think, well, there's no way to compete with Visa, with Mastercard, with JP Morgan. Those are giants in the payment system and international payments. There's the central banks, Bitcoin and Ethereum and the decentralized finance is never gonna win the battle. So it's really hard to predict how much this industry can grow. So I wanna share another screen. We're gonna come back to the Netflix chart, but this time we're gonna see a more recent timeframe, 2011. So that was after the broadband merged Netflix won the fight against Blockbuster and it was finally able to stream high quality content on the internet. So what happened there is that the number of memberships, the number of subscribers grew, so did the stock price. It jumped from $7 out of $42 in 18 months. Well, it was a bubble and it was followed by a 77% crash in five months. So that's the second bubble for Netflix. So we're gonna jump to a more recent timeframe that's 2021 right now. Again, we see a huge jump on the price followed by a 75% crash in five months. So you see that Netflix over the spam of 15 years had 75% crashes three times. Thanks. So what's the lesson here? Well, one can say, well, it bubbles are normal for tech stocks and emerging industries, but we haven't seen that most of the Amazon and Googles and Facebooks. Yes, there may be that was one bubble back then in 2000 and the stock dropped. But with Netflix and cryptocurrencies, we're seeing the recurrent bubble formation and 75 drops. So my point is when it is impossible to predict how much the market can grow 10 times, a hundred times, a thousand times, we don't know how much Bitcoin and Ethereum and the centralized finance can grow. It can grow a thousand times in 10 years or 20 years. We don't know, it's impossible to estimate. So that's what causes the bubble. Same thing happened with Netflix. It was impossible to predict that it was gonna win the battle against satellite TV or cable TV. It was impossible to predict. It was gonna grow to a company with 200 million subscribers. Nobody could even think about that five years earlier. So that's why the bubbles happen so often. So don't think that's something explicit about cryptocurrency. That is that because it pressured for the third time 75%. Netflix is strong. It's one of the hundred biggest companies in the world. It has revenues and that income of over $5 billion per year, 13,000 employees. So it's a huge company and it's gonna continue growing over the years. Great insights, thank you Marcel. Yeah, I mean, I still have my Netflix subscription. Cuff me, officer, I apologize. And that's the way it's gonna be, right? Bitcoin has had several 75% drops as you point out rightly. And this won't be the last. When we drop from 2 million to 250,000, is that correct maths? In 10 years time, we'll be there to support you and to make sure that you're okay. Great analysis, really appreciate that. And it's cool to see the worlds of, you know, TradFi and crypto sort of come together to some extent. Great, we had a couple of comments there in the chat. Yeah, Dan Smith, I agree. The global adoption of crypto will be a psych to see. I mean, I think it'll be Bitcoin first and then other stuff, maybe. But, you know, that's also dependent on what all our behaviours are like. And someone else is asking about what the TVL on Saana, Solana is looking like right now. Ryan, TVL on Solana is not looking good. Solano, as they say. Right, the next segment is all about, oh, it's me, I'm talking to you about the markets pro, which is the place you need to go to if you're taking trading up as a hobby, as a passion or as a career, who knows? Cool, so always trade responsibly before I get into that. And trading is definitely not for everyone. But if you're gonna do it, then use the markets pro app, 20% off in the description down below. Now, markets pro, if you didn't know, is a data intelligence platform that is designed to enhance investors' decision-making with industry-grade analytics. One of these analytics tools is called Newsquakes. And this week, there was a newsquake about the token that's called MANA, M-A-N-A. So as I'm sure you know, having been in the crypto space for a little while now, news moves the crypto market. And the Newsquake service by Cointelegraphs Markets Pro helps traders to stay on top of important developments. Newsquakes are automated alerts that instantly notify users when market-moving events happen. Thanks to them, markets pro subscribers, like yourself, I hope, beat the crowds to the most important news of the day. Here we've got a WeGraph showing the MANA token, which is, of course, of the Decentraland Metaverse. Fun fact, I used to host meetings in the Metaverse, a company I used to work for. We used to go there every Tuesday afternoon and meet up in the Metaverse. It was really quite strange. Anyway, the Newsquake showed that MANA saw strong price movement, especially after a listing on the crypto trading site, BitSamp, and when the news went out, the token was trading at 0.31 cents. Just two days later, the price had jumped to 0.34 cents, or 34 cents per dollar, an increase of almost 10% or 9.7%. Had you subscribed to the Cointelegraphs Markets Pro, you would have seen this Newsquake. So get yourself 20% off in the description down below and check out Cointelegraphs Markets Pro. Now, the second point of interest this week is regarding the Vortex Score. And now Loom, L-O-O-M, that's its ticker that you'll find it on CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko. Loom is another crypto we're going to look at and put under the microscope this week as the Vortex Score on it spiked in a direction that we're going to discover very shortly. Now, a Coin's Vortex Score is a comparison between its current market and social conditions of the past. A high score means that things are looking good and the current outlook could be bullish for the next 12 to 72 hours. So of course, very short trading timeframes. A Vortex Score of 80 and above bullish, conversely, a lower Vortex Score and particularly 30 and below would indicate bearish. So take out your short and write that thing to zero. Just kidding, just financial advice. Now, high Vortex Scores are rare, especially in these unprecedented bearish times, but Loom's performance this week shows that it's still worthwhile to keep an eye on the Vortex notifications. Scores as high as 97 lit up late in the week, which we know now is bullish, and the asset rose 6%. So you could have got in on that trade. How do you subscribe to CoinTelegraphMarketsPro? This price action is nothing crazy, of course, in times where most tokens are plummeting or going sideways, modest gains are nothing to be laughed at and make sure you're taking those games and putting them into a hard asset. Maybe like Bitcoin. Fantastic, thank you very much, video team. That was our CoinTelegraphMarketsPro tips for the week. Don't forget to like, subscribe and subscribe to this video and of course get your 20% off to CoinTelegraphMarketsPro. We are coming to the end of the show, gentlemen. That was good fun. I am happy to do Christmas specials for you guys. What do you think about, or is there any sort of takeaways, anything you see that we haven't covered today that we should really bring up? Marcel, let's go to you first. Anything we've missed from this week's show? Well, Joe, I think we haven't covered the subject and we shouldn't even cover Hex, the Ponzi from, I forgot a guy. I saw a lot of people commenting and some of them trying to define it on Richard Hart. Yeah. So I think if you're still in 2022 very early, expecting to get some yield from your coins, you're just crazy. It doesn't work, yield is you, you're losing money, stop doing that. Okay, fantastic, great advice as ever. Yeah, Richard Hart, he's the man that dresses head to toe and Gucci and shows off his fast cars and is still managing to convince people to buy into Hex, which I mean, I don't know how to prove that it's a Ponzi, so I can't, but I can tell you it's a Ponzi to avoid. Sam, Hex to avoid, anything else to avoid or maybe things to pick up, especially as we go into the new year? Well, we mentioned back to basics earlier and I think that 2023 we'll see that Bitcoin is gonna continue to be the asset of choice for anybody who wants to invest in digital assets. And I just think that go with what's proven and right now there's not a lot of that in the crypto industry. And Bitcoin, as you mentioned time and time again is block after block. Don't expect, don't buy because you expect it to rise at a certain date, but a certain percentage of your portfolio in Bitcoin is probably a good idea. Again, not financial advice at all, but anybody who's interested in getting to the decentralized finance or the digital asset space, I think Bitcoin is gonna be the first lifeline to kind of create alternative wealth in a system that just does not work for the common man. And the fiat system, the monetarism that we have here, we talked about $1.7 trillion packages earlier, doesn't work for the common person, Bitcoin does and has the potential to, that's my takeaway. Fantastic, yeah, Bitcoin is the people's money. Get a little bit and just leave it aside, take custody of it, write down your seed phrase, maybe punch it into metal, make it an afternoon activity, and then bury it in the ground somewhere. I think that's the best self-custodying advice I can give. Thank you so much for tuning in, everyone. The only thing left to do is to give away our $50 swag bag, let's call it that. And I've just been informed, yeah, this is live, that Cardano Green is the winner. I hope you didn't hear our comments about Charles Hoskinson earlier, Mr. Cardano Green. And of course, congratulations, round of applause. There is plenty of crypto swag in the Cointelegraph store. I don't know actually if there's any ADA or ADA, Cardano swag, I've not actually seen it there, but that $50 gift card is on its way over to you. If you just drop as a message on Twitter or any of the social media accounts, congratulations, spend it wisely. And yeah, maybe also start learning about Bitcoin along the way. Thanks so much for tuning in, everyone. Have a very merry Christmas, enjoy this weird period between Christmas and New Year. If it's not your religion of choice, then enjoy the festive season. I hope you're getting some time in with loved ones. And yeah, best of luck for 2023. It's gonna be a hell of a year and it's got to be better than 2022, hasn't it guys? It's got to be better. We hope so. Yes, we do. Fantastic. Have a very happy new year and we'll see you in 2023.