 Welcome to Digital Assets News to get top stories in Cryptocurrent Digital Assets and breaking down to bite-sized pieces. Today is another great day as far as a fantastic week. First up, Cardano successfully initiates Shelly Hardfork and things should get easier moving forward, states Charles Hoskinson. Also, even though Itoro is not my favorite platform, that is for sure, I've been getting a ton of requests for following because of the pretty good gains that I've had over the last two weeks or so. And just as a public service announcement, do not follow me in Itoro, I do not do trading, I only do investing, and even though I am up massively, I have nothing to teach anyone about trading because all I do is invest and dollar cost average. And finally, Bitcoin is a form of money in BC, federal court rules, and why at first glance this looks fantastic, but in reality it means absolutely nothing. So here we are. It's Sunday, July 26th, it is around 12 o'clock Texas time, and hey, can't ask for anything better. What a great day. And this is right now. I haven't refreshed this, so let's see. So it's at Bitcoin's $9,800, Ethereum's at $305, Tether's Tether, XRP, $21, Bitcoin Cash for sure. Let's just do a quick refresh to what we got, and pretty much about the same thing. So Bitcoin just below $10,000, even though it had passed over that $10,000 mark. Ethereum's looking pretty strong at $305, up 3.4% for the day. So there's Tether, XRP. You know, as much as I make fun of XRP, and I always say watch out, XRP, I, if you don't know, I've invested into it, and to me it's like that really talented kid on your football team that just has a lot of potential, but just kind of underperforms, and you kind of make fun of them because you're like, come on, you can do better than this. What the heck's going on? And that's how I see XRP, and I'm like, what are you going to do? But funnily enough, as far as the market cap goes, Tether and XRP are pretty close and I was actually watching it this morning, and it was flipped. XRP for a brief amount of time, and we're taking Tether, and actually Cardano for a very brief amount of time had overtaken Bitcoin Cash. So we will see how this plays out. I do not see Bitcoin Cash saying at number 5 position, especially with what's going on with Cardano, and we're going to go over that in depth. There's a lot of really great information, really exciting times, what's happening with Cardano. So I don't see Cardano. Cardano will be in the top five this week, guaranteed. Bitcoin SV still don't understand why it's in the top 10. Litecoin, there was a big push this week. Looked like it was up 13%. So if anybody knows exactly why that is, I don't know if they're doing more with privacy and they're trying to do these types of things. But sure, just let me know why that is. Chainlink down 4%, 7%, so if you're like me, this was a great opportunity to pick up some cheap Chainlink. As we had talked about yesterday, I believe this is going to be one of the linchpins for decentralized finance. So go ahead, if you're into that, this is what I did. I picked it up. You can do whatever you want to do. Obviously, not financial advice, and so on and so forth. So not too bad. And before I move on, I want to say that I think what's happening with Bitcoin, because once it hits that 10,000 mark, I think a lot of people just like me may have had some limit orders on the books, and it just toppled down a little bit. And it's been fluctuating between 9,800. Actually it was down to 9,400 at some point today. And then it goes like 10,1, 10,2, and it kind of goes back and forth because of all these different sell orders. And I didn't even realize that I had an actual sell order because I had it for a while ago. I actually put it on my Voyager app. Now if you don't know, I'm a huge proponent of Voyager. It's super easy to use. I use it all the time. It's my one, two punch. I buy everything through Voyager. And then when I can, I will transfer things to Celsius because I like the interest rate. And then when I want to hold the bulk of my holdings, I will put it into my nano ledger. I do not hold a massive amount in Celsius or Voyager. I try to get them off the exchanges and into my personal bank vault, which is my ledger. But when I woke up today, I'm like, why do I have 100 bucks in my Voyager account? I mean, dollars. I don't have dollars. I have cryptocurrency. And I was looking, I'm like, what the heck? It's sold. How'd that happen? And I'm like, oh, that's right. Like a month ago, I was just playing around with the app and I actually put in a liminal order. I didn't know I could do it. And here we are. So if you're not aware, in the description of every one of my videos, there's a link. It looks something like this. And it'll link you to my exchange and reviews or wallets and everything else. These are all the things that I've actually have used or I'm currently using or absolutely will not use. And I break it all down from Coinbase to like my, like I said, my one, two punch Celsius C-Fi or yeah, C-Fi, D-Fi, Voyager wallet, Gemini, Gemini ProTrader, Binance, Uphold, Abra, Kraken, Cash App and eTor, which I totally don't recommend for anybody. And I just kind of break it down like, here's the fees, here's how much it cost, here's what's going on, here's the different things that it has and then Celsius and Voyager at the very bottom I talk about the interest rates that you can earn just by holding in your cryptocurrencies. And yeah, I've had zero problems with it so far. Zero, which is amazing. Cause when I had Coinbase, nothing but problems, especially with customer service. Customer service to me is big. A company that has great customer service usually has a great customer base. Unless you're the only game in town. Like if you're the only game in town, then it doesn't matter. You could have the worst customer service and you're like, well, I gotta do it anyhow cause it's the only game in town. Coinbase was kind of like that for me until I found out these other options. And that's why I put this together for everybody. Now at the very top, if you want to sign up you can go right to the website and sign up. That's fine. You don't have to use these affiliate links but if you do, you can get $10 for like, for Celsius you get like 25. Voyager you get 25. Gemini, I think it's like 10 and then different ones are all over the place. And some don't even have affiliate links but you can do whatever you want. You can use them or not. So to actually set up a limit order, if you aren't familiar with the Voyager app, I'm gonna show you real quick right now how that all works. Okay, so you're on my phone. I'm just going to click on Bitcoin. I'm gonna click on the trade. I'm gonna say sell Bitcoin. And from here, I'm just gonna put it in. Let's go for, I'm gonna sell 1,000 Satoshis. 10,000 Satoshis, 98.77. Again, I'm gonna click, well first I gotta click on at what the limit price is. So I don't want it 97.7 or let's go for like 11,000. Who knows? Maybe it'll go to 11,000 tomorrow. And that'll be my total, I'm gonna get 110 bucks. I'm gonna click on the or slide to sell Bitcoin. So what that means is once I hit 11,000, then it sells and I'm done. So it's like a set it and forget it type of thing. Easy peasy. All right, and that's it. So let's break in today's story. So first up, Cardano successfully initiates Shelley hard fork, things should get easier. And yeah, I like to hear that. And it states the Cardano network is well on its way to the skeletal hard fork from Byron to Shelley on July 29th. The updated proposal run for five days during which the team will have multiple chances to abort the update up until Monday. During the weekend, Cardano's engineers and the QA team will be conducting a 72 hour session to exhaustively test the performance of the update against their pre-launch checklist. So right now, everything seems to be going pretty good. I haven't seen any types of information out there that says that there's a problem. They're gonna, they're gonna abort everything. And this is Sunday. So by tomorrow really they should be moving forward. And that'll be the 27th. So on Wednesday the 29th, I mean, boom, everything's good to go. So I think with all the different times and things that they've actually put in this, I'm hoping everything goes off without a hiccup, but we will see. And yeah, Charles Hoskinson also said that this update will probably be the last of Cardano's gigantic disruptive updates. The next phase will usher in an era of more subtle implements like native assets, smart contracts, overlay protocols and new capabilities. And one of those things are like decentralized IDs. And if you wanna bank the unbank, you're gonna have to use some kind of like identification system. So a decentralized ID might be pretty good idea. So we will see how that all works out. I think it's one of the most fantastic things I've heard about because I'd like to see that also things happen as far as like decentralized voting, but hey, person of dream. Moving on, the first function of the update will be to implement a fundamental change to Byron's code base and migrate it to Shelley, which will in turn initiate the hard fork combined to deploy the Shelley hard fork. The second step will involve the endorsement of the first step, as well as minor amendments to the initial proposal after which the green light for the hard fork will initiate. The Cardano team is confident of the progress so far, but as they exclusively stated, they are not afraid to delay or abort the process in case they run into a major roadblock. And they pretty much say the same thing. So I mean, if you follow Cardano or Ethereum for any length of time, you know that they're not the most fantastic as far as like hitting milestones, just how it works. And I've been critical of that, but lately Cardano has just been hitting these markers amazingly, I can't believe it. And then Ethereum, there was actually even rumors that the ETH 2.0 launch was going to be pushed back to next year, and that was actually squashed by Vitalik Buterin, so we will see how that works out. But as far as like Cardano, they're actually hitting all their milestones and I'm impressed. I mean, I've been the most critical of Cardano. I'm an investor, but I'm like, I always have said, I'm like, can you just do things, just get things going, just throw things against the wall and see what sticks. That's how I've always run my business as far as an entrepreneur. I'm like, hey, let's just see what works and if it works, we'll use that. If it doesn't work, 10 things fail, I care less. Just I just need that one thing to work. But when you're trying to build a massive, massive project that's going to have global implications, especially in the financial system that could disrupt multiple industries, you probably want to get it right. So I maybe have been a little bit too rash in my assessment as far as how critical I was when I'm getting things going. And like I said, I want certain industries to be precise, like 100%, like the people like Boeing, when I'm up in an airplane, I do not want them, someone to say, hey, you know what, that new engine we use, we're kind of shaky on that. So it might not work out. I want you to be 100%. So in this regard, I'm like, hey, I'll give them a pass. But I just like to say one thing and that is that, I mean, these are exciting times. These are the exciting times in the very beginning. This is when everything happens and it's just fantastic. Like when you're building businesses, it's not so much fun to get into the minutiae every day and like management and, you know, doing all these different things just to incrementally grow. The real fun is in the very beginning, when you see all these different things that are happening around you and you're like, oh, that works and this works and everything's going good. And, you know, okay, we have some failures and we'll do this. And that's what really drives me. And I don't, to me like these types of times, cryptocurrencies, assets, these are the exciting times. And for you sitting right there watching this video, I'm just gonna say it, you're probably gonna be a millionaire, okay? And that's just the truth. You're probably gonna be a millionaire. Now, I can't tell you what to invest in. And I will just say, if you invest in the right things over time, you will probably be a millionaire. It just depends on, you know, how crazy you get. If you're gonna go and, you know, put all your money on the 3,628th coin, then maybe not work out for you, right? But there's different strategies you can use. Like I use dollar cost averaging, I have my picks. I, you know, buy into these every day or every week. And it just kind of let it ride. Just like all those early entrepreneurs or early adopters of Bitcoin, you know, all the way back a decade ago, when they're all sitting around and no one would pay attention to them and like, that's just nerd money, that's so stupid. These people, that was the most exciting time for them. I can guarantee it. I'm sure nowadays it's not as exciting because it's like, well, people already know about it. But, you know, just think about this. Where will you be in 10 years? Hopefully, you will be talking to your kids or your friends or your family and be like, you know what? I remember when Cardano was a nickel. I remember when Bitcoin was under 10,000. Remember those days? That doesn't happen anymore, my friends. So I just think that's how it's all gonna be. And then to talk about, and just to give you context like where you could be or we could be in 10 years, there was a video that was sent to me by Samad. So I wanna say thanks, Samad, for sending this out to me. It was a really good insight into a person who was there from the very beginning. This is, what was this guy's name? Why is it for his name? Nicholas Nicolson. I probably butchered that, it doesn't matter. But he was one of the very first investors into Bitcoin. He was talking about, and I'm just gonna have you listen to it, but the most interesting thing is that, you know, he talks about like how it was in the very beginning. And then he talks about like these are the exciting times. This is what is, you know, fantastic right now. And it was just, it was an eye-opening experience. So it's like a minute and a half, just take a listen. What was the Bitcoin price when you bought your first Bitcoin? Actually, there wasn't a Bitcoin price. It was, I think in September or October of 2010. And back then there were very few marketplaces. I think there were one called Trade Hill. And they didn't really know actually, they first operated later. So the Bitcoin price was zero. The first Bitcoin I ever got was 50 Bitcoin from a friend for paying his coffee on a cafe. Later, when I made my first personal big investment, it was 1000 Bitcoin and I paid $770, so 77 cent. You got really rich with Bitcoin. You made millions with it. The audience could think he's rich. Why isn't he retiring? So I'm asking you, why not retiring? I don't work to pay my rent. Many people go for a job that they don't really like in order to cover their expenses. My work is my life. So I'm doing exactly what I want. So in a sense you could say I am retired in the sense that I don't work for money, but I work for what I want to do. But that is to bring forward the crypto financial revolution to see decentralized systems improve the world, to build services that people appreciate, to spend time with the people who are at the company who is like my family, and to do all the adventures that we do at Bitcoin Swiss. Why would I retire to go on an adventure trip to, I don't know, the Amazon or whatever when what adventure we have here is 10 times more exciting. Why is it more exciting? Because it's real. You can throw a lot of money after a canoe trip down the Colorado River, but you are setting yourself in an artificial situation. The adventures and the experiences and the fighting against the system and getting the banking license and filling the ball with Bitcoin and providing services and trading. And then there's a scandal and a hack and then there's a, that's real adventure, right? That's not something we pay to experience. It's not like going to the cinema. It's like living the movie. And that's just it. And that's why I'm involved. I think that's why you're involved. I think that's why a lot of people are involved because they know that this is the beginning. I know some people say, now it's not the beginning. This is, you know, we're halfway through. That's crazy. That's crazy. Go out in the streets and not the people you've been talking to for a while about Bitcoin. Just ask them, you know, hey, do you know what Bitcoin? They might say yes, they might say no. Okay, well, do you know about Cardano? Do you know about Ethereum? Do you know about Chainlink? Do you know about Tomato Coin? Do you know about, it doesn't matter. No one's going to know that. Nobody's going to know that. And this is why it's so fascinating to be right here at this moment because for the ups and the downs, it doesn't really matter. The trajectory is going to go up at some point because that's the way that this technology is going to work. That's just how I see it. Now I could be totally wrong. Let me know what you think in the comments section. But there is something to note here. And that is that when he talks about, you know, this guy is a multimillionaire, my name is Billionaire, who, I don't know. But you have to think about this. That's something that me and my wife talk about. You know, when we make so much money throughout, you know, because what do you do with all that money as time goes on? You know, what do you do with that? Because there's a point where you're not going to need money. You're going to have enough money to pay your bills, to have no different types of debt, to have everything that's, you know, you just have it. You have food, you have shelter, you take care of your family, everything's set up, right? So then the next step really is what do you do? And to me, really you have to really think about what is important for you moving down. I think that's probably the bigger question to think about. Anyhow, but this is a question that you're going to essentially start to think about at some point because like I said, if you're here now, I think that you're going to be a millionaire. Anyhow, moving forward in this article, there was a quote by Charles and he just talks about how Cardona will fulfill the 2009 Bitcoin promise. I gotta tell you, Hoskinson, he does not spare any words. He doesn't mince it. He's just like, look, this is what I think is going to happen. This is why we're awesome and da-da-da. So I gotta take my act of that. And instead of me just reading it, I'm going to have you listen to what he did. He did a live stream and it was pretty interesting about how he just said, hey, this is what's going on. And I know that some people in the comments section, they think that Cardona was a scam for some reason. Sure, I just don't see that. There's different things that you can point to this, point to that and they say, well, Charles is an A-hole and blah, blah, blah. Well, yeah, well, so is Steve Jobs. He was a super jerk, but guess what? He gave me an iPhone and he gave me this awesome Mac that I'm working on right now. So sometimes you gotta be an A-hole to get things done. And if that's the case, hey, I could care less. If I'm going into surgery, I don't care what your demeanor is, just make sure you fix me. So let's just listen to Charles. He's got some interesting things to say. Oh, from warm and sunny Colorado. It's been a long day, very, very long day on the back of a very long week. And on behalf of Input Output Global, our product team, our engineers, our scientists, and each and every employee and contractor that worked with us to get us here, it is our pleasure to announce that a little after 5 p.m. mountain standard time today, Samuel Leathers, our director of DevOps, initiated the update proposal to the Cardano main network. And we have now begun the countdown over the next five days to hard fork Cardano from Byron to Shelley. Our last chance to abort will be sometime in Monday. During the weekend, the engineers and QA team will be conducting an exhaustive 72-hour burn-in to go through all the checklists that we have. We did a pre-launch checklist, and now we're going back through the second one. Should nothing come up, the update will be endorsed and the fork will occur without delay or disruption on the 29th. Every indication we have is the sky is blue, the weather's good, and we are now counting down towards launch. I'd also like to thank all the state pool operators who tirelessly over the last few months worked with our team to help us get to this day. They tested a lot of software. They found a lot of bugs. They really pushed us and we were better for it. I'd like to thank all the exchange partners who have worked with us for the last two months. They've done an unbelievable effort and job, giving us great advice, everything from Rosetta to things as trivial as some nuances on the APIs. It's been a long road to get here, a lot longer than just the last few months. Cardano began in 2015 as a dream. We wanted to build something that could deliver the promises that Bitcoin had back in 2009, not as an experiment, but as a system that could evolve over time to meet the needs of billions of people and provide an economic identity to those billions of people with power pushed to the edges, always getting more decentralized and always getting faster, more capable, and ultimately better for us all. This is in many ways a small step towards that vision. And in other ways, it's a giant leap forward because unlike every other update in the history of the project, we are now moving from a static and federated system to a dynamic and decentralized system. And our community has proven beyond a reason of a doubt over the last six months that they are well more than capable of taking custody of this dream and taking it to the next level. It's always a stressful time when you go through these transitions, but I am stunned by the profound effort, wisdom, and capability of those that stepped up. Thank you. It really means a lot to me. It really means a lot to all of us. If this is the army we have to go and win the war with, I don't even think it's a question of whether we're gonna win or not. It's just a question of when. Each and every one of you earn this day as much as everyone else and some of you more so than others. So it's a long road ahead, but this is a great moment. And it's one that long overdue, sorry it took so long to get here, but we did our best and it looks like we hit every deadline we set back in May, which is a new thing for the project as a whole. I gotta agree. So congratulations to Cardano, everybody who's holding Cardano and has stuck with it. So I think there's a much bigger things on the horizon, but only time will tell. All right, move on. Next up, my eToro account. I had actually opened this up four or five months ago because I was trying to do, what I wanna do was it was called a dollar cost average. It was called DCA versus TA. And what I wanted to bet was one Ethereum that I could make more gains, more of a percentage gain as just a investor as a dollar cost averager versus somebody who traded. And I wanted to use eToro and actually talk to some people in the affiliate department and actually had a different conferences and it just didn't work out for some reason. They just never got back to me. It never, I don't know what happened, but I thought it would be interesting just to show the benefits of dollar cost averaging because it's very, people are like, that's boring. Why you do that? Once you trade, once you just go and max out your leverage and 100X leverage and make a lot of money. I'm like, well, I don't do that. But I've noticed lately that I get a lot of different requests like 22 or something like that this week for people who want to follow me because you can copy traders on eToro. And I just hear to tell you that I didn't do anything. I didn't trade. I just opened up a position. I bought a while ago and I just kept adding little bits here and there. And then after a while, I mean I put in 550 and now I'm up to 1308. And it's just investing. It's just all the cost averaging. So I know people like to talk about like trading is great. And if you want to trade, that's fine. I just can't get into it. That's just not my thing. That's your thing, it's your thing. But I'm just here to tell you that if you're on eToro, don't follow me because I have nothing to teach you on trading obviously. Also, if you get an email from Dan Digital Asset New at Gmail, that's a scammer. That's not me and he's gonna promise, he or she's gonna promise you that I can teach you how to trade. Just don't do that. That's so crazy. So that's it, that's all I wanna say. And last up, Bitcoin is a form of money and this actually happened, what was it, two days ago? Three days? Two days ago. And this was, there was a case. It was a United States versus Harmon. And he had this judge, Judge Howell, wrote that money is commonly means a medium of exchange, method of payment or store of value. Defining Bitcoin as money was integral to the court's decision to not dismiss criminal charges against Larry Harmon, the operator of an unlicensed Bitcoin trading platform for laundering money under federal law. And basically this guy, he screwed people out of money and he said, hey, you can't charge me for money laundering, because Bitcoin is not money, it's not a currency. And the judge just ruled, yeah it is, now we're going to, now you're gonna be put in jail. And then, so that was the legal statement and of course for cases and court room that sets precedent so they can kind of look at things moving back. But you have to understand, this is the last sentence here. The court's comments mean that Bitcoin is treated as money in the context of money transmission, licensing in DC. Nothing more, said Naraj Agrawal, Director of Communications at Coin Center, a cryptocurrency public policy think tank. So you have to understand, just because in one case says, okay, it's currency, it doesn't really mean much for Bitcoin as a whole. Now right now, Bitcoin is not a security. The SCC is determined that it's not a security. It hasn't said it is a commodity. I mean, the CFTC hasn't come out and said that. And so some people say, well, the current law is that cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin is deemed as property. So maybe we can just have it as currency and we won't get taxed as property. It's not how it works. So just because it's here like this, they can do it either way. But the IRS is gonna say, nope, sorry, we're still gonna tax you. And same thing with gold. And real quick, the IRS classifies gold as precious metals, including gold as collectibles like art and antiques. And the weird thing about gold is that you pay taxes on selling gold only if you make a profit. It's the same thing with cryptocurrency assets. You only pay taxes if you actually sell them. If you hold them, it's okay. If you transfer them into something, if you go from like Bitcoin to Ethereum, you're gonna pay tax on that as well. That is a taxable event. But this is the, I didn't know this, a long-term gain on collectibles is subject to a 28% tax rate though, instead of the 15% rate that applies to most investments. So interesting. But anyhow, how we will be taxed, the IRS is always gonna get you in some way. Let's just be honest. So they're not gonna say, oh, it's just a currency, it's no big deal. No, it's gonna be, it's probably gonna be just property for a long time because the government's gotta get their money and that's usually how it works out. So let me know what you think of the comment section, but I don't see this is too great of a ruling. Hopefully as time goes on, we will see, but I think it's that fantastic. All right, so lastly, I wanna say thanks to all my subscribers who have joined up. If you don't know, there's a join now button underneath. It's a buck 99 and it's kind of like a tip and some people sign up just for saying thanks. So I wanna say thanks, Kate Neumann. Really appreciate it. Mr. Black, I am not I. Chuck C. Let's do some random shout outs. Ned Murta, M.A. Ooh, Gene Holland, who else we got? Neil, Sandra Panduro, and Robert Christensen, nice. So that is it for today. I wanna say thanks for sticking with me. Really appreciate it. And if you like those videos, I'm gonna be tumor is gonna pop up on your left and right. Don't know, YouTube does that. They choose those things just like the ads. I have no control over the awful ads that you see that are usually scams. I don't pick those, YouTube does. But if you wanna watch some more videos than me on your left and right and that's it for today. Thanks for sticking with me. See you on the next one.