 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the good top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets, and break them down into bite-sized pieces. Today, interesting stuff. First up, Vitalik Buterin admits that an ETH 2.0 is much harder to implement than he initially expected, and the statement that he has goes a little bit deeper than just that, so that's kind of just scratching the surface. Also, developers release a fix for Ethereum 2.0, and if you don't know, it actually crashed this weekend, so hey, what are you gonna do? Can't make a noblet without breaking a few eggs. Also, new Link Marine Dave Portney states that Link is going to the moon, and this was a it was a pretty long video that I watched. It was Dave Portney and the Winklevoss Twins, and they pretty much convinced this guy to buy $250,000 worth of Bitcoin and Chainlink, and this guy is all in. And finally, I'm going to expand on an article we covered this Sunday, which was yesterday, so we'll go over Warren Buffett and his investments into gold mining. But before I do all that, let's take a look at what's going on the market. So today is August 17th, Monday, about 12 o'clock, Texas time, and it looks like Bitcoin is doing pretty hot, 4% up. Man, I thought today that Bitcoin might actually get $13,000, because it was fluctuating that high. So I think I think it hit like 12, 4%, so not too shabby. I like that. Ethereum 437, again, I thought Ethereum was going to hit like 475, but it just kind of came down back down, but it's still up 1.4%, 12.2%, over the last seven days. XRP Watchout. Everybody asked me, not everybody, but somebody will ask me, hey, Rob, do you actually say XRP Watchout every time for XRP? And why do you say that? Well, this is why I say it. It's because I invested heavily into XRP when it was pretty much at its all-time high. And like I talked about, I did not know about dollar cost averaging back then. I just bought when it was like super high, and we're talking above $2. So people are always, so somebody asked me, they said, well, why don't you just dump XRP and then get into something else and then go, you know, just go that route? It's because there's two reasons. First of all, I'm stubborn. And second of all, I'm not in the business to lose money. And right now, I will lose if I sell. I know there's going to be different things, different theories out there. That's fine. But here's the thing. I've already lost 90% of my position on XRP. I'm just going to be honest with you. So if I lose it and it goes all the way down, 10% of it is going to kill me. I could care less. So right now, I am just holding, sticking to my guns and going, you know what, I'm going to write it out. I'm just so stubborn. And that's just how it is. So when I say XRP, watch out. It's a little bit of love, hate in that relationship. And I know some people say, hey, you shouldn't talk bad about XRP. Why not? Why shouldn't I? I mean, it's, I mean, look, it had nothing but good news and it does nothing. The price hasn't changed. It is essentially a stable coin to me. So again, if it goes all the way down, I could care less. And that's why I say XRP, watch out. Tether's tether. I say tether's tether because tether is tether. It's not going to fluctuate. Chainlink is a little under 19. Like that. Chainlink is one of my, one of my holds. Really happy with that one. 36% up. Bitcoin cash. Sure. 5.7. Good for Bitcoin cashholders. Cardano up three, still hovering around 14 cents, but hasn't gone down, has gone up. And then really, ooh, Litecoin up 7%. Fantastic for your Litecoin holders. Pretty good. Tron up again, 10%. 47.5% for the week. Congratulations, Tron holders. You guys are doing a fantastic job there. And not too much. AVE the D5 platform. Token there, 6.3%. NEM 7.3, sure, whatever. And that's about it. So that's all I got. Let's jump into today's articles. First up, Vitalik Buterin meets ETH 2.0, is much harder to implement than he expected. And when I saw this, I was like, what's kind of a negative type of thing to say, but it gets interesting. So what's going on here? So Bitcoin, a maximalist, Peter McCormick hosted Buterin and Blockstream's Samson Mao on his podcast show. What Bitcoin did? And McCormick posed this question to Buterin. He says, do you ever feel like Ethereum has become a much more challenging project or idea than you originally envisioned? And potentially, you've bitten off more than you can chew. And that it gets to the point where there's no turning back. And Vitalik said this. He goes, you know what? I freely admit that Ethereum 2.0 is much harder than we expected to implement from a technical perspective. So right there, I mean, if you look at it, you can look at it two ways. You can look at it, someone who is just honest and just says, hey, this was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be. Or you can just look at and go, oh, this guy's already defeated. Me personally, I appreciate honesty. I appreciate when people can tell me, you know what, this is a little bit tougher than we thought. However, we realize that and we're going to push forward and we're going to do this, this and this. I can appreciate that type of talk. What I do not appreciate is when people behind the scenes are like, you know what? No problems. We're good to go. 100%, you can count on us, Jack. And then everything crumbles. Those are the types of things as an entrepreneur which crush me. And I got to tell you, if I have more honest people, I will take the honest people all day long because then I can fix the problem, redirect and move on. So with Buterin, I'm good with that. And then further on, he states, and this is the part that I think is kind of bullish. He says, I definitely don't think that we discovered any fundamental flaws that make it impossible. And I think it will be finished. It's just a matter of time. And it's actually been progressing quite quickly lately. So right there, fantastic. Let's see how it does. And then further on it states, despite Buterin admitting that ETH 2.0 could face multiple bumps along the way, the off delayed upgrade is inching closer to deployment. Ethereum developers launched Medela, which was the final test net before the main launch later in the year, which is coming in November of this year. So we're looking at a couple months away. According to Buterin, the development was quite exciting. And we'll introduce phase zero of ETH 2.0, which will bring about the proof of stake consensus algorithm. Very exciting stuff. But just so everybody knows, it doesn't include charting. And that's going to happen in phase one. So right now, they're just going from proof of work to proof of stake, which I think is a plenty big project to get out in front of. And I wish them all the best. And lastly, it states the Ethereum crater estimates it will take a couple of years to fully complete the ETH 2.0 roadmap. So again, if you're just into this space, you have to understand how super early you are. This is a long game, my friends. It's a long game. There's going to be peaks and valleys. There's going to be ebbs and flows. But I see only bright things on the horizon for Ethereum. And then and then the very last thing he says, something pretty smart, he says, although it's an awfully long time, he believes it's less time compared to the amount of time already spent getting to this point. So getting just getting here all the way back and early 2013, I think it was like proposed 2014, 2013, then it came about 2015. So I mean, looking at five years, and then he's like, Hey, look, to get us to our goal is going to take another two. But just to get to this point, we're way ahead than we were. So great. And I gotta tell you, I believe in Ethereum, I believe because everything is built upon it, it has a highly active group of developers, highly active community. There's a lot of people with a lot of things with Ethereum. So I believe in it. And I also believe in Cardano. I think one of those is going to and not to win, but I think they're both going to be successful. And that's when I actually take a step back and look at it, I kind of look at like Hoskinson and Buterin as kind of like the Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates back in the 80s. Because those guys, if you're around those times, those guys really, you know, duped it out for superiority. So at first, you know, Bill Gates won, Microsoft took over everything. And then later on, you see Apple everywhere. So I think there's room enough for two of these types of players in the space. But again, only time will tell. And I think it's it's an interesting thing to think about. I mean, is that how you see it? Let me know in the comments section, but I'm going to see it that way. That was interesting. Over on top of that, to build Microsoft, to build Apple, you have bumps along the way. So what's going on with this test net? Well, here's what's happening. So this was interesting. The developers released a fix for Ethereum 2.0, because it crashed this weekend. So what the heck happened? So Prismatic Labs has put out a fix for Ethereum 2.0 is Madella test net after a bug on August 14th, brought it the test net to its knees. That's never good. The Madella test net is a public network designed to implement Ethereum 2.0's proof of stake blockchain upgrade. Just last week, it had 26,000 people. That's a lot. Keeping the network running with more than 830,000 test net Ethereum in play. So all in the test net, I'll just see what kind of bugs they can find. And what they did find was a simple bug crashed the entire network in just a few hours. So on Friday, cloud fair, cloud flare, rough time, it's a public measure of time developed by Google was off by four hours. Cloud Flare is a third-party web infrastructure provider that Prisma relies on and uses to adjust users' clocks if they are skewed. And the same type of thing like for your deadless wallet. Like if it is off by a couple of seconds, it will not sink. So it has to be these types of clocks and time keeps. And of course, I am not a developer. So hopefully they just all figured that out. But what actually happened was this. Different parts of network were shoring time lags of up to four hours. Networks validators, participants who are known to propose and validate blocks began incorrectly proposing future blocks. And only that they could no longer process the blocks properly or receive rewards and transaction fees. And as a result, the validating blocks dropped significantly from 75% to nearly 5%. So quite a big dip there. But fortunately, the Prism team developed out whatever alpha 0.22, which is the main bug fix for the Medella test net. It's designed to provide, it's designed to provide initial sync improvements that may assist in resolving ongoing sync issues in the Medella test network. So this is all great news. And I've always in the past have been very critical of if they remain Cardano for being so slow, because they do things differently. They do things differently than than how I do things. And of course, you know, we always kind of assume people are like us, but you have to do all these things to get everything right. It's kind of like airplanes, you know, I don't want to be on an airplane where they're like, you know, I think we're about 90% good on that engine. We think we should be okay. You probably won't crash. I just want to be, you know, 100%. So it takes a little bit longer. Sure, fantastic. I want people losing their money, like we see in DeFi spaces. Not that it's all the place. Just saying it does happen. And yeah, so take all the time you need, because I got to tell you the project that they're going to spit out should be pretty fantastic. All right, let's move on. This next article, Link Marine, Dave Portney, link to the moon. You don't know who Dave Portney is. So Portney, internet celebrity blogger and founder of Barstool Sports. What's Barstool Sports? Some kind of blog thing for all different things that having to do with sports in the sporting industry and what's so great about that is this guy sold it apparently for $450 million. So congratulations to that guy, not too shabby. So he was the one a couple years ago who was just this viral tweet, this video where he just talked about Bitcoin is like, I don't understand it doesn't make any sense that he's very outspoken guy, pretty entertaining, good, you know, good for him. But so over the last weekend or so, this is what happened. Dave Portney, founder of President Barstools, invested $50,000 in Chainlink on Thursday, August 13th, seemed excited earlier today as Link broke through $19 to an all-time high. And then this is a video where, because what he did in one of his videos, he said, hey, I understand Bitcoin, do you want to gain? And he said, bring those Winklevoss guys up here to help me explain, because I don't understand any of this stuff. And Winklevoss twins actually went to his house and, you know, said this is what it is. And of course, he recorded it and put it on social media because that's what he does. Good for him. And so he did the whole thing. And then they said, they were going through the whole rigmarole and spiel. And so Portney goes, so what's his Bitcoin? They explained what it was. And he goes, okay, well, I got $250,000. What should I do? They're like, well, you know, getting that. And he's like, but I also heard this thing called Chainlink. What about that? And the twins were like, yeah, you know, it's pretty good. And they tried to explain to him. And he's like, well, should I do like a 50-50 split or what? And they said, I think, and of course, these guys are big, you know, they're having a Bitcoin, they bought Bitcoin back when it was like nothing. So like, you know what? But the majority of Bitcoin. So you put 200K Bitcoin, 50K on Chainlink. And of course, what happens? Chainlink goes up, you know, you know, majorly over the weekend. It went over way more than Bitcoin did. We'll just say that. So what made this interesting was down here, it says, what makes Portney's interest in crypto significant is that he's the leader of an army of day traders on US trading platform Robinhood. And this promotion of crypto assets could help to increase their adoption by over 1.7 million Twitter followers, many of whom are US millennials. And he pretty much just put it out there on a Twitter feed. He said, link to the moon. And then someone says, I didn't get in early enough and da da da. And he just talks about Bitcoin now and cryptocurrency. So if he's talking to these traders who are millennials who have a good amount of money, and he's like, you know what, maybe, you know, 10% or 12% or something like that. And can you imagine what's going to happen over the next month or so, as people start to maybe have a little bit of increase in the traditional stock market, and then we're going to see cryptocurrency, I personally believe go up way higher than that. When he starts tweeting these things out to all these people that he has on Twitter, and then that one person tells two people, most people tell 10 people and so on and so forth, it's a big network effect. Now, it's not just one person that is going to be a catalyst, obviously, but it's all these different dominoes that start to fall, which will lead to another massive bull run. And I think this is just one more cog in the machine. And speaking of that, let me go on to my next piece, which talks about Warren Buffett. We had covered this yesterday about Buffett getting into gold, specifically a mining company of gold. Let's jump in the office so I can explain myself. All right, everybody, welcome back to the office. So today is going to take a little, little quick segment and talk about two things. The first thing was, I want to talk to you about yesterday, I had posted, there was a scam video that had been put out. So when you need to know me about it, I did a post real quick on the community tab. And within five minutes, it was eliminated. So thank you so much for helping me out. And I know it doesn't take too much, but this could be a big thing. And as people start to get more and more into digital assets, which we are seeing happening right now, there's going to be more and more scams. So it's important that we try to do what we can do with what we got when we can and protect these new people. So thanks so much for helping me out. And just so you know, this is not specific to our industry. We don't just see scams as far as as far as cryptocurrency assets, just with us. If you take a look throughout the whole board, you can see different scams being brought about like, you know, with big YouTubers like, Tootie Pie, where we had free gift cards and I don't know how many tens of thousands were lost there. This is the Franco, same type of thing where it was like, hey, you know, in the comment section, you know, give me something and I'll give you something like that. And those are one thing. And those are ads. But then you have like even bigger ads for things like Roblox, which a game that's very popular right now. And you see these types of ads coming up, people getting scammed out of their money. And also just as big as like Fortnite, which is enormous. So you're going to see ads on there and the same type of thing. So don't just think that it's just our industry. I mean, YouTube has these scam ads all over the place. And it's like cockroaches. Once you have, once you see one, there's a thousand behind the wall. And that's pretty much exactly what's going on. And the second thing I want to talk about is that we did an article yesterday on Sunday, where we talked about Warren Buffett investing into gold. And I want to make clear because there is a little caveat there. And it is that it's not that Warren Buffett invested in the gold. He, Berkshire Hathaway, actually invested into a company called Barrick. And Barrick is a mining operation specifically for gold. So people are like, what is that? And who cares? He's investing into mining, not gold itself. But you got to understand that's gold. It'd be like, if you were going to invest into a subway, and then someone says, do you believe in that people will eat sandwiches? No, but I just want to invest in subway. That's ridiculous. The same thing here, like with Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Berkshire Hathaway, if they're going to invest into a mining operation that mines into gold, I'm pretty sure they think a lot of people are going to use gold and they want to have gold for a safe haven asset. Just my opinion, I just think that's how it is. So when you take a look at this, you're like, okay, what does this mean? Well, that means that this Berkshire Hathaway, they are not day traders. They're not here for the short term. They're going to do this for the long term. And when they invest into something like this, they're essentially signaling to the whole industry like, look, we are going to have a lot of gold that people are going to want to buy so we're going to invest in Berwick to help them pull that out of the ground. Some people can keep buying it because of what is happening with the economy and the stock market. Now, look, I don't know what's going to happen with the stock market or anything else, but I can tell you right now, if you've got an enormous billion dollar company going, you know what, we're going to invest in a company that actually mines everything because we think there's going to be a ton of use for gold. That's actually a bad sign for the economy itself. And if you take a look at the history of Berkshire Hathaway, I mean, they pulled out of the airline industry after being in there for five plus years, maybe 10 plus years. I don't know how far it goes back, but it's been a long time. And they pulled out of there because they knew what was going to happen. And they knew what was going to happen was the airline industry was going to go down. However, it didn't. And actually, they pulled out around March and it actually the exact opposite. It went up and people were laughing at Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett going, what a bunch of idiots, those old fools. I don't know what they're doing. Well, guess what? There's just an article just today where the CEO of JetBlue says, hey, the day of reckoning is right upon us as far as not just for JetBlue, but for the entire airline industry. And if we don't get a bailout from the government again, then we are in a very tough place. And really, he's alluding to there's a lot of different airline industries that could just be out of business. So maybe all those different things that all the different lessons that Warren Buffett has taken a look at, he can actually say, you know what? I think I see the running on the wall. I think I know what's going to happen. I think we're going to go this way. So if that means that more people are going to want safe haven assets like gold, so much the better for us. Because if that's the case, then what are they going to do? They get gold, they get silver, they get digital gold called Bitcoin. Oh, and also, on top of Bitcoin, what's this other stuff called Ethereum and the smart contracts? Everybody's built on that. There's this thing called decentralized finance. That sounds pretty good. I'm going to get into that. This is a guy called Portney, David Portney. And he just for bar stools, and he just got into it and dropped $250,000. And now he's a real big link marine. Okay, sounds pretty good to me. So again, I don't know what's going to happen. I have no idea, but I just take a look at what I see around me. And that's what I got. So thanks for sticking with me. Let's jump back. All right, awesome. Hope that helped out. And thanks again for sticking with me. Also, this is the end part. So I would like to do a little random shout outs to all my members. If you don't know, there's a join now button. You don't get anything special. It's just like a tip. And I just want to say, you know, hey, shout out to all the new members. Jesse Kirkland, Lincoln Echo, and see who else we got. David Worm. David Worm. Jarky. I'm going to try this one. Jarky Burgesson. I think I nailed it. Mr. Black. Okay, I got that one. Joe Griffin. Fantastic. Dan Hagerty. David Mills. Sally's W. And, uh, oh, Doug Burke. That's a good name. So thanks everybody for signing up. We appreciate it. Spending that $99. Fantastic. Also, if you like these types of videos, there's going to be too much going to pop up on your left and right. Don't know what they are. YouTube controls it just like the junkie ad that you probably saw in the beginning, which probably was a scam. So don't shoot the messenger. Talk to the big guys. They'd love to hear from you. And that's it. So again, check those videos out and I'll see you on the next one.