 Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories and cryptic current digital assets. Now break them down to bite-sized pieces today. Got some good stuff. First up, Fidelity Digital Assets touts Bitcoin credentials as publicly traded companies. Now hold over 600,000 Bitcoin. Ergo, they have almost 3% of the entire amount of Bitcoin. And what does this really mean for decentralization also? The IMF meeting was just held and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, updates efforts to create the digital dollar, says risks and trade-offs being thoroughly evaluated. This is the same song and dance I've been hearing for the last year. But I will tell you, Jerome Powell did have a couple of good points. And these points were actually echoed by Rao Powell from Real Vision Finance. He's going to talk about timeline of central bank digital currencies or CBDCs and the end of cash in five years. And finally, Ripple CEO suggests Chinese President Xi Jinping could roll back Bitcoin. And this is a false narrative with a twist. So we'll go over all that, but let's take a look at what's going on the market. So today, hey, it's a good day if you own Bitcoin. Bitcoin is up pretty good, and it's almost hitting 12,000. It is, what is it, October 20th, around 1pm, Texas time. So Bitcoin, again, doing great. And I think it could blast through that 12k mark. And hopefully, once we get past that, it'll be a level of support, not a level of resistance, but we will see. 2.2%, 24 hours and in seven day, 3.5%. So fantastic, great for Bitcoin, and everything else is falling to the ground. So Ethereum is down, Teth is down, XRP is down, Bitcoin cash. I mean, everything is down, except for Tron. Tron, whatever, 1.3%. So for all you Tron holders, fantastic work, you got a percent. I'm just kidding. I mean, whatever you guys want to do. Tron could be a good project. I don't really know too much about it. I know Justin Sun is a heck of a marketer, and that's pretty much about it. What else we got? Hey, OKB is up 5.7%, although it is down 22% for the week, because OKX Exchange had that issue with their founder, who apparently is the only one that can approve transactions and holds the private keys, which is insanity. And of course, OKB is the token for that exchange. So even though it's down 22%, it does up 5% for the day. So great. And as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong in the comment section. I believe you still can't take any cryptocurrency original assets off of the OK Exchange. Let me know. But as far as yesterday, somebody who was actually a member said, yeah, I can't do anything. RepBitcoin up 2.5, Leotoken 1%. Sure. Everything else is just majorly down. Uniswap. Wow. It took a big beat in 10%. Theta Network down 9%. My new favorite place. If you don't know, I'm doing live streams over there. Usually around 11am Mountain Standard Time. I try to go over just what's going on the day real quick. And it's great engagement. It's not a lot of people over there. I get to answer a bunch of questions. We get into good discussions. So if you've got time, check the description of every one of my videos. And it's just as follow Dan. And the first one is Theta Network. And then, really, that's about it. I mean, look, if you're a dollar-cost averaging, this is a sweet day. This is a great day for you because has anything changed? Again, like I said before, has anything changed? Has, you know, Bitcoin been hacked? Has Vitalik Buterin come out and said, you know what? It's just a big scam. I don't care about you guys. You know, has Vladimir Putin come out and said, hey, I created Bitcoin? No, none of that's nothing's really changed. But there is what I think is going on as far as Bitcoin goes. And it's what we're going to talk about in today's first article. And I think it's going to continue as far as a trend into 2020. But there's bumps along the way. So let's just jump in. So that's what I'm talking about. Fidelity Digital Assets touts the Bitcoin credentials as publicly traded companies now hold over 600,000 Bitcoin. That's kind of a big number. So what exactly is this? So FDA, not the Food and Drug Administration, but Fidelity Digital Assets, says diversifying an investment portfolio with Bitcoin is essentially essential now when benchmark interest rates globally are near or below zero. Actually, Ralph Powell, in this video, it's very long, 34 minutes. There's just a snippet I want to talk about, which is CBD season and no cash. But he does talk about this very briefly and talks about how the dollar will strengthen. This is what he believes it to be. The dollar will strengthen over the next coming months. But as the IMF gets together and the global community starts to look at things and they say, hey, we need to actually get a better basket of currencies and not just have the US dollar as the reserve currency. They're going to start to look at a basket of CBDCs. And once it happens, things will greatly change. But the big thing was he talked about was stagnant interest rates or negative. Right now in Europe, they're looking at negative and they're stagnant right now. In America, they are just stagnant and they're talking about going negative. So once that happens, that is good news for Bitcoin cryptocurrency and general assets because, look, where else can you get a good interest rate? Well, you can get it on investing into Bitcoin and also you can put it on a place called Celsius, get a nice little APY between four and a half to 22%. So that's just something to look into. Anyhow, we'll get that later. But the opportunity cost of not allocating to Bitcoin is simply higher, explains FDA and its latest Bitcoin investment thesis. And it's very true. Look, you can lose everything in cryptocurrency, but the upside potential is massive. And that is called an asymmetrical investment. You put $1,000 in, yeah, you can lose $1,000, but there's a great chance, or there's a good chance, I'll just say, is that it could go up 2X, 10X, 50X, 100X, depending on what you're into. Look, if you're in the top 20 as far as market cap, it's a little bit safer. Now, if you're going to go into the 2,000 position, some kind of small cap gem out there, yeah, you're taking a little bit more risk. But really, what we're going to see over the next, I think next one to two years, when the bull run comes in 2021, I think it's going to be massive, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, FDA's assertions come as one survey, found that as many as 60% of investors survey believe that digital assets have a place in a portfolio. I personally believe it. That's why I'm invested heavily into crypto. And here's the interesting thing about correlations. The result from analysis of Bitcoin's correlation to other assets from January 2015 to September 2020, to the digital averaging 0.11. And what this really comes down to, I'm just going to blow this up a little bit, what it really comes down to is that if you have a perfect correlation, it's 1.00. The less correlated, the less the number. So if you take a look at Bitcoin to Bitcoin, of course, it's 1.00. It's perfectly correlated Bitcoin to Bitcoin. Same thing, US stocks to US stocks, US small cap to... So it's just going down this line here. So take a look at Bitcoin to US stocks. It's actually more correlated, which is kind of odd, but not so much than gold. I found that surprising. I thought that gold would be a little more correlated to Bitcoin, but it is not. It is the US stocks. However, it is poorly correlated. And we will see how that plays out as things take a walloping coming up as far as the traditional markets. But I found it to be interesting because they take a look at this all the way back five years, and this is what they found. So maybe. So moving to the meat and potatoes of it, in the meantime, the number of publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin as a reserve asset now has grown to 18. Let me read that again. 18 different publicly traded companies are holding a reserve asset of Bitcoin, which I found interesting because I'm like, well, right now I can really think of a handful. The big ones, MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, Square with Jack Dorsey. And then the new one, which was Stonebridge, which they put like 110 million. So I was like, what's the other 18? And it says here, 18 companies, they hold a combined 612,000 Bitcoin, which is equivalent to 3% of total supply. So if you take a look here, bitcointreasuries.org, and this is a great website, I'm going to link this in the description below. As a matter of fact, here's all the companies, and here's what's happening. So you got the big one that we've been talking about the last two weeks, MicroStrategy, they got in it. They spent around 425 million. It's now worth, as of today, 458 million. So they have 38,000 Bitcoin, and they made a nice little profit, as opposed to sitting on all that fiat cash. And that's exactly why they do it. And Michael Saylor now looks like a genius, because I mean, the profits went up. Galaxy Digital Holdings, that is Mike Novogratz's company. They've almost got 200 million. They have 16,000 Bitcoin, Square, which I thought was kind of odd, that they only did 50 million, but whatever. They've bought 4,700 Bitcoin, Hut 8 Mining Corporation, sure, they're in the market. Voyager Digital, interesting. They bought an 8 million, now they're at 14.8. Not too bad. Riot Blockchain, Bit Digital, Coin Citadel, and on and on and go. And then as we get down here, we see other big companies like Block One. They have 140,000 Bitcoin. This was odd to me. The Tezos Foundation, they bought in too heavily into Bitcoin. They have 24,000. They spent almost 300 million, which is, you know, hey, if I would think they would put that more in Tezos, but I guess they had enough, because they're the foundation, so sure. And then the new one, Stone Ridge Holdings Company Group, which is private, which is now held by NY Dig. They bought almost 11,000 Bitcoin at 150 million. Look at those geniuses. They just made 15 million, just like that. Good for them. And then we have, these are, this is a little bit different ETF-like. You got Grayscale, CoinShares, ETC and CoinShares. So don't be fooled by these numbers. Grayscale is not buying and holding. Grayscale is buying and then they're selling off to their customers and they hold them for them. So even though it says 456,000 Bitcoin, I mean, yeah, it is what it is, but it's in the hands of their investors. So if you tally it all up, it is 785,000, which looks like a lot, but in reality, I just got to take these first numbers here and we're looking at about 3%. So when we talk about decentralization, not so much when we're talking about 18 companies. And that's scary. I mean, it's good for the market. It'll probably make the price go up, but if we're looking at true decentralization, not the greatest thing. Then to finish up the article states, the ongoing embrace of Bitcoin by large investors is very much in agreement with the FDAs or the Dell Digital Assets. Earlier thesis, which asserts that digital asset, the digital asset, Bitcoin, is an alternative store of value. Look, it started off as a currency. Kind of figured out we couldn't do that right now unless there's better solutions, second layer, or they do something with the code to make it a little bit more appeasing as far as transactions per second and then the cost can go down. But right now, it is a great store of value. I've always said that I believe that Bitcoin is the new savings account. Gold, silver Bitcoin should be in everybody's portfolio. Everybody's portfolio, especially with what is going on. If everybody does that, we're going to see some moon time. And yeah, let me know which thing in the comment section. Let's move on. Next up, I'm not going to play this whole thing, but it's a great video. It's from Jack Chappell. And it just goes up as far as history goes. And what it really just lays out in 18 minutes, I'll just paraphrase everything in 20 seconds, is revolutions. And the first one, 1700s, was the agricultural revolution. And that was China-India, and they pretty much controlled the big lion's share of that. Then in the 1800s, we had the first industrial revolution. This was by Great Britain. They invented machine-powered factories, could work more than 1,000 people, steam engines, metal factories, military, et cetera. And just remember this, which whoever adopts the first technology wins for the next 5,200 years. Then in the 1900s, the US took over. The second industrial revolution. We had electricity, red roads, petroleum, combustion engine. Again, whoever adopts first usually wins for 1,500 years. Then in the 2000s, the third industrial revolution came about, again by the US, and some may say Japan, and maybe even Russia, but computers, electronics, nuclear power. And again, whoever adopts first wins. Now we're getting to, and things are kind of speeding up. Now we're in the 2020s, going into 2030s, the fourth revolution is here. And that, from what this video talks about, and I truly agree, is artificial intelligence and the financial system to paraphrase. So when we talk about who really wants to be the first one here, it's important to put your best foot forward and be the one in the lead, because you could be in the lead for the next 5,200 years. And this is what's concerning about the US right now. I mean, we've been in the front for a while. We have the reserve currency. That could be coming to an end, because we are dragging our feet. And let me know what you think in the comment section. That's just how I see it. And the IMF meeting was just taking place, and this is a great little snippet story which states that the Fed chairman Jerome Powell updates efforts to create the digital dollar, says risks and trade-offs being thoroughly evaluated. Of course, they're always thoroughly evaluating. This is the same song and dance I've been hearing for a long time, for at least a year, if not more. But I'll give the benefit of the doubt. So this is what Jerome actually said. He states, we do think it's more important to get it right than to be the first. And if we've just seen anything as far as history goes, it's important to be the first and to be right. And getting it right means that we only look at the potential benefits of a CBDC, central bank digital currency, but also potential risks. And also recognize the important trade-offs that have to be thought through carefully. Look, I'm a business owner, and my big thing is let's just stick things against the wall, or just throw things against the wall and see what sticks. If it doesn't stick, doesn't work, we'll work around it. However, I am not in charge of the monetary policy of an entire nation, so that's probably for the best. So for Jerome, I will defer to him in what he says. However, it is very concerning because I haven't seen the same things forever. Anyhow, he states we have a responsibility both to the U.S. and to the world that any steps taken for U.S. digital currency be taken safely. We're absolutely committed to soundness of the dollar and to safe and efficient U.S. dollar payment system, and blah, blah, blah. And this is the same thing he said six months ago. Excuse me, eight months ago. Right, then this was a, he states, you know, Bitcoin surges at the Fed chair Powell, declares that the U.S. is working on a digital dollar. And he was testifying before Congress is in February. He states, hey, we're working real hard. We have a lot of projects going on, lots of efforts going on right now. We'll get to it. Same thing. And here we are, you know, eight months later. Where are we? We're in the same position. I mean, it really hasn't really taken off. However, I will say this. It's not the government is really forthcoming with all their information. Maybe if they are doing things, they're just keeping under wraps. However, I don't have much faith in the current system. So I will just leave it up to the comment section and see what you guys think. I have to be rational, and he does make a good point, which is so in addition to assessing the benefits, and there may be benefits, there are also some quite difficult policy and operational questions that need to be thoroughly evaluated. Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of bad policy that's being put out there. And of course, not only do the central banks want this to maybe to happen, but if I was a commercial bank, this is not my best interest. He states, just to mention a few, I would mention the need to protect a CBDC from cyber attacks. All right. Counter-fitting and fraud. Well, if you do things in an open environment, decentralized, that's a Bitcoin can't be counter-fitted, and there's no fraud because it's never been hacked because there's so many nodes out there. So maybe if they do it in a way such as, I don't know, they take the commercial banks and like, look, we don't really need you guys because we're going to go straight from us to the consumer, just like China's doing. Maybe they use those commercial banks as nodes. I don't know. Something like that might actually help. But again, I'm not the policymaker. Thank God. The question, he states, of how a CBDC would affect monetary policy and financial stability, and how could a CBDC prevent illicit activity while also preserving user privacy and security? So I'll talk to the first part first. How could a CBDC prevent illicit activity? Well, I don't know. But right now the US dollar is what is being used for by terrorism. It's what is being used for by the cartels and all the other illicit activities. So you can't do much worse than what the US dollar is doing right now. But while also preserving user privacy and security, and that's interesting, because if you take away the dollar and everything is digitalized, as much as we like to say that the dollar is awful, let me tell you right now, in my sports facility, sometimes we take cash. And with cash, very hard to, I'm not saying that we do this, but I'm just saying that if we're so inclined, cash could be under the table because it's very hard to track in small amounts. Now, no one's paying us $20,000 a pop to go play in a league, but cash in that regard is pretty easy to be private and secure in all those good things. So it's gold if you want to pay in gold, but no one's doing that for me. So this leads me to Raul Powell. And he's got a great new video up and he talks about monetary policy, physical policy, what's going to happen. But for this context, there was a 30-second snippet and I want you to listen to it. He's talking about the timeline of CBDCs, which is interesting from what Jerome Powell just says and how cash is going to get phased out and the problems that come on with that. So let's take a listen. The central bank digital currencies, I think will come over the next two years. I think we're already seeing in China, we're already seeing in Sweden, Singapore's ready to launch a number of, and they'll go slowly. So you'll be able to open a wallet with the central bank. You'll be able to make some transactions and then you'll be slowly forced into the system and then the whole system will be upon us. So I think by three years, there'll be mass adoption. By five years, there'll be no cash. So that's a problem, because if you get rid of cash and everything is on this digitalized ledger, then the government, the central banks, and everybody else, I mean, really can take a look at what you're paying for. However, think about it this way. Do you use a debit card? Do you use a credit card? Do you think those aren't being monitored in some way, shape, or form? Well, it just depends on who you ask. I personally believe that they are. So in all reality, it's just easier for the government to actually or big brother take a look at you now. Cash, again, you can still use it in that transaction. Gold you can, but again, I'm not using gold coins. No one's using gold coins to me. No one's paid me in silver in, let me think, ever. So maybe those privacy coins like Monero and Zcash and others, maybe those could be the future. I haven't really checked into them, but after this little talk we're having between us, I think I really should. Anyhow, let me know what you think in the comments section and let's move on. Last up, Ripple CEO suggests Chinese President Xi Jinping could roll back Bitcoin. This is an interesting prospect. So there's one part here that I just don't agree with Brad with, kind of. And the second part I totally do. So this is what is going on. This was a virtual conversation during this year's DC FinTech week conference, and I'll blow it down. This is what Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple said. He says, what happens if Premier Xi, Xi Jinping loses a million dollars in Bitcoin? Let's just say he bought a million dollars of Bitcoin, apparently. And even though he's the president, for some reason, he loses his analyzer or he forgets his passphrase. I don't know. And he loses a million dollars. Brad states, you don't think that the Chinese Communist Party has the opportunity to affect the change to the Bitcoin blockchain and make a reverse Premier's easy, a million dollar loss of Bitcoin that might have been hacked. So what he's saying here is that if, and I get the context, right? He's just, this is hyperbole. This is his way out there. The president loses a million dollars. He's like, hey, I lost a million bucks. Roll that back. Roll the whole thing back. And the way that we're going to do it is because we have so many miners in China. Now just wait before you blow up at the screen. I'll get to that in a second. His arguments mirror the controversial op-ed by ex-Ripple CEO, Chris Larson, has been widely criticized by Bitcoiners. What did he say? Let's just get to it. So this was a little op-ed piece in the Hill where Chris Larson, ex-CEO Ripple, I guess he's moved on, but it's still probably an advisor. Here's what he said. He said, look, the Chinese government is also subsidizing the vast amounts of energy needed to fuel cryptocurrency miners in the country. Mining is one way to verify blockchain transactions where individuals or companies solve complex mathematical problems for crypto in return. At least 65% of cryptocurrency mining is concentrated in China, which means the Chinese government has a majority needed to wield control over those protocols and can be effectively block or reverse transactions. So if this was eight months ago, I would have totally agreed with this and I would have blasted Bitcoin for that. However, on this channel, I like to dig into the comments and I like to do premieres and I like to talk to people. And what I had was a lot of miners who were mining Bitcoin said, that's BS, man. And they told me this is what's going on because I'm not a miner. I don't know if you are. Correct me if I'm wrong. This is what the miners have told me and they've been telling me this for months. They say, look, our job is to find the mining pool with the cheapest electricity. That way we can get the best rates for selling our Bitcoin. Great. China has pretty good grates in Xingxing. I forgot which province it was, but they have a lot of hydroelectricity and it's super cheap. It's like less than a penny for kilowatt hour. So they go, what we're going to do is we're going to connect to those mining pools and we're going to connect our rigs to them. And then we can turn out Bitcoin and make a profit. That's great. But we can at any time, any moment disconnect from those pools and go to any other one that we want to. We can go to one in America, we can go to Kazakhstan, we can go to Iran, whatever, it doesn't matter. Wherever the mining pool is, that's where we can connect to. So when they say that, oh, well, China can definitely reverse these things, they can't. They can't because it's not where the mining pool is located, which they are. A lot of these mining pools are located in China. This is an old one, but you have to get the gist of it. So pool in 18% of blocks based in China, F2 pool based in China, BTC.com based in China, and pool based in China. So you're looking at a big wide swath, right? Looks like 63% or whatever it was. However, just like I said, the miners themselves, they can connect to these pools, but they can disconnect as well. So for them to say that China can do this, not so fast. However, there's two caveats. So I asked them this, well, if the job of the miners are to find the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is in China, why wouldn't everybody's go to China? And they said, yeah, I got a point, we do do that. Which is true, right? It's all about making a profit. So if you're looking at the place for the cheapest electricity, which is the biggest determining factor, then you probably go to some of these Chinese pools. So that's one option. However, they came back and said this, look Rob, if they are using our rigs to do a 51% attack and they are reversing transactions, that will destroy the whole system. If they destroy the whole system, then the price of Bitcoin goes way down. So all the different things that we're doing for mining, we're mining Bitcoin, we want to sell this for a profit. So if it goes from $10,000 to $2,000, that's not good for us. So we're going to disconnect and we're going to go someplace else. So I was like, that's also a good point. So anyhow, that's the whole mining situation that we have. Let me know what you think in the comments section. But there was one thing that I had to really think about with what Brad said. It comes down to play in the very end. He says, CBCs don't solve the problem. And he said, when asked to weigh in on the rise of CBDCs, which we just talked about, Garlinghouse called it a very positive dynamic. We'll also argue that they do not pose a threat to Ripple or XRP. Let me say that again. They do not pose a threat to Ripple or XRP. So you think, well, how is that? He states, just having a central bank, digital currency, still doesn't solve the problem of settling a transaction, settling a payment between the Argentinian peso and the Australian dollar. And he's right. He's right because blockchains are great for security. They're great for decentralization. They're great for censorship, censorship, resistance. They're great for the future. However, what they're not great for is talking amongst themselves. So you can't get the data from one blockchain or the blockchain. So if you have a CBDC and they're all on a blockchain, well, how are you going to have the digital yuan talk to the digital euro? How are you going to have the digital peso talk to the digital dollar? We're going to need something to settle those transactions. That something could be XRP. Could be, I will say. Well, there's another ace in the hole. It's called on-demand liquidity. Things with banks as far as the dirty fiat is a transfer that money all over the globe if you want to be in that corridor. So here's an example. If I want to send $1,000 to Mexico, I can do that. But my bank has to pre-fund those banks in Mexico with dollars or pesos or whatever. And it has to be done vice versa. So if you're a bank, you have to fund that all the way throughout the world if you want to be in those corridors, wherever you want to be. So with XRP, don't have to do that. It's on-demand liquidity, essentially meaning that since the transactions happened so quick, less than five seconds. I mean, they're very fast. I will give them that. You don't need to pre-fund anything and you can free up that money and do whatever you want to. Now, that is just one factor. I know some people love XRP and some people hate XRP. So I'm not going to get in between that environment. I just want to tell you what it is. Me personally, I still own XRP and I also own Stellar. I don't know which one's going to win. I exer- Stellar's got some great news recently as they are part of the IMF in the meeting itself and they just announced support for the USDC. So Stellar's going to be able to- or USDC's going to be able to use the Stellar network for transactions and that is big news, I think. So look, that's it. So I want to say, hey, thanks for sticking with me through the entire video. Really appreciate it. Also, if you've got time, sometime, come over to Theta. Take a look at the description below for all my videos. It's going to say follow Dan. There's going to be a link for my Theta channel and we do a lot of livestreams. We try to do one every day around 11 a.m., 12 p.m., Mountain Standard Time. And we just talk about things that are going on right now but also a lot of interaction. Get to ask questions. Get some great insight for what people are telling me. So stop on by if you've got time. Really appreciate that. So that is it. If you like these types of videos, there's going to be two months going to pop up on your left and right, not sure which one. YouTube kind of controls most of that. And check those out. So that's it. Thanks so much. See you on the next one.