 Welcome to Digital Asset News, the top stories in crypto currency assets and break them down to bite-sized pieces. Today, we have some exciting stuff. First up, Donald Trump's former communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, made a shocking $300 million dollar Bitcoin bet as the price soars. What's really going on here is this isn't the whole story. The story is what was revealed to slide-backs to investors, which is going to show how big Bitcoin can potentially get. Also, the U.S. Federal Regulator says banks can conduct payments using stable coins. In the first glance, this isn't really a big story, when you take a look at what could potentially happen with payment processing and cross-border payments, then it becomes a whole new ballgame. And finally, the IRS, who transitioned from education to enforcement, says former division chief. We've been saying this happened as time has progressed, and I'm going to show you just how bad it's going to get. But let's take a look at the market and what is going on. Today we've got, what is it, January 5th, 6th, something like that? January 5th, 10.30 a.m., El Paso, Texas time. And if you've noticed, I'm going to do a little bit of something different. I'm going to try to do a little bit of a news every so often from the office because it's just good to change things up and do some new things. So what do we have as far as the price action? Well, let me tell you, let me tell you, Bitcoin just shut up 5% and we're almost back to where we were before. I think we're down like about 2,000 or so, so 32.4, but it's up 5% for the day, 20% for the week. And I know that when we went from 34.5 all the way down to around 29,000, 28,000 people were losing their minds, like, oh, this is it. It's all going to go back to, you know, 10,000 or 15,000 or zero, whatever else the word sounds like at the moment. But it just goes to show you that this isn't the traditional market. And if you're here from the traditional market, first of all, welcome. Congratulations. You made it to a much better place. It's just that there's a little bit more volatility. So you have to understand what is potentially going to happen as time moves on. You're going to see a lot of peaks and valleys three steps forward and maybe 10 steps back, but that is just cryptocurrency. And you have to understand that you have picked the perfect year to get into it. This is going to be, in a lot of people's opinions, not just mine, a massive bull run, so we will see. Ethereum, almost at $1,100, 7% for the day, 46% for the week. The problem with Ethereum right now is the fees are awful. And if you've been on the channel for a while, you know that I like the dollar cost average and I've been dollar cost averaging Celsius. What sucks is that I am in the United States. The only way I can get that is Uniswap. So good luck going to Uniswap to getting any kind of ERC-20 token like Celsius because you're going to pay through the nose as far as fees. Now, I thought Coinbase was awful, but let me tell you, let me tell you. When you go to Uniswap and you're looking for these different tokens to get and you try to buy them, it's ridiculous right now. It's ridiculous. And I thought Coinbase was bad as far as fees. Really, Ethereum has some of the worst fees out there and it's only going to get worse. So that's why I am also investing in the Cardano. So come on, Charles and the team, hopefully you can rectify this situation. All right, next up, USDT, nobody cares about that unless you're an auditor. XRP, watch out, down a percentage point and 22 cents. This will be interesting to see as things start to not only delist, but to stop trading on the American platforms and exchanges. So we'll see if Brad is right that 95% is done outside the US and how the price will actually happen. Litecoin, I don't care, 4.5%, sure. Dot is almost a $10, 7.5% for the day, 50% for the week, and Cardano coming in hot. What have we got? 20% in one day, 44% for the week. And there's a lot of great things happening. If you haven't staked with the DNews Stake Pool, there's a link in the description. It's 4% to 6% interest rates, and we have near 100% uptime and we're going gangbusters and we're getting up to that saturation point. But Cardano really is that third generation. If you didn't see, there was an interview between Charles Hoskinson and Alex Moshinsky, it was from the CryptoCrow, it was like an hour. And a lot of it was just, a lot of it was just kind of back and forth stuff, but there were some gems in there about what is going on. And it looks like Celsius is going to be converting over to Cardano. I don't know if it's specifics, but they're going to start to work together. And Alex is right, you know, he said Ethereum is just the fees to use Ethereum is ridiculous. And if Ethereum 2.0 comes in, sure, but they're still going to be playing with a lot of problems. Charles made it a really good point. He's like, look, you had first generation blockchain, which is Bitcoin. You had second generation, which was Ethereum, and you got third generation, which is Cardano. So hopefully it kind of rectified the situation, because if you're new and you try to buy anything on Uniswap or use Ethereum gas fees, it's ridiculous. You're like, what? This doesn't even make any sense. All right, Chainlink, 10%, Stellar, 26%. I don't know, sounds pretty good. There's doing something with the government. I think something in Russia, for sure. BSV, yeah, sure, 6%, 20% for Theta, 1.1, and Pazos 14 and 22. The big question, though, we always have to ask ourselves is, are we beating Bitcoin? So this is on coingecko.com. I'm going to switch it over to Bitcoin. And what it's going to show us is if we would have just invested in Bitcoin, how we would have done as far as for altcoins. So Ethereum, congratulations, giving you up 2%. USDTV down, so weird. 6% down, Bitcoin down, dot, you'd be up 2%, 6%. Cardano, you'd be up massively, 14%. Stellar, 21%. As we go down the list, you can kind of see there's some really good opportunities, synthetics, and VeChain, which is not a tear. VeChain was in their partnership announcement, so don't sleep with that one actually on myself. 16% for Uniswap, sure. And down we go. So when you're taking a look at which ones to actually invest in, always do this just to see what could potentially be the next big thing, or not the next big thing. How are you doing against Bitcoin? Because what's the point? I mean, if you just want to make some good gains, just invest in the Bitcoin. And here we are. Again, I think Bitcoin will be at 150,000 this year. That is my pretty much conservative prediction. And we'll see how it all goes, but I can only delicose average so much into it. I have my positions now. I'm turning more towards the altcoins, more towards Ethereum, more towards Polkadot, more towards Cardano, more towards VeChain, those types of things. Because if we're at 30,000, we can only fly back from there. But how unlikely is it that Cardano can't hit $1, $2, $3? Polkadot can't go to $50. I mean, who knows? So the goal is depends on that. All right, so that's what's going on the markets. Let's jump into today's top story. So this one looked pretty good. And it's a long-drawn story. It's from our friends of the show, Billy Bambraugh. He's a pretty good writer over there at Forbes. And he's talking about Anthony Scaramucci, and they're doing a Bitcoin fund, which is great, $310 million, fantastic. Anthony is a pretty connected guy. Looks like he knows a lot of people in the space, especially in the traditional finance market. And when you see someone like this go down, something like an Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch when he gets into it. And then you have other types of places like the Mass Mutuals, where they put in $100 million, which is an insurance company. They're very conservative. And all the rest of them, Fidelity Digital Assets, the Paul Tudor Jones, Paypal getting in the mix, MicroStrategy, we all know these things. But when you get somebody like really heavy traditional markets, and he says, you know what? I think Bitcoin's gonna be the next big thing. This is exciting news because this is gonna pull other people into the vortex. That is Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. But it's not just that. It's taking a look at who they're looking for. Who are they trying to get? Well, Skybridge Bitcoin Fund, which is the mooch's fund itself, is geared towards wealthy investors looking for exposure. Minimum investment is $50,000. You probably have to be an accredited investor, just how it feels right. And yeah, so if you don't have $50,000, don't worry about it. That's okay, because you've got other places to get it. You've got Voyager, you've got your Kraken, you've got every other different exchange. So the reason why people do this, because the question always is like, why would people do that when they just buy it somewhere else on the cheap? It's because people who are into the traditional markets, they need something that they feel used to, that there's no really surprises. So when you have like a fund, something like this, they're like, okay, so I don't have to store it. I don't have to do anything with it. You guys do all the things and then I'll pay a premium. Great, I'll make some money on the side. Because if you're multi-millionaire or even billionaire, the thing that's really important to you is not how much more money you're making, it's how much time you're actually saving and money too, I suppose. So when they do these things, they don't want to have to deal with it. There was a story we just did about a week ago. It was, I forgot the guy's name, but he's the second richest man in Mexico. And he got into Bitcoin in like 2013, 2014, like a long time ago. And it was through Grayscale. And he says, you know, I knew it would be big, I didn't really know how big, but when Grayscale came to me and said that you're gonna do everything for me, I said, sure, why not? It's a no-brainer. And then he talked about how he actually, the way he made the most money was because they had a lock-up period and he couldn't take it out. So he wanted to take it out, he wanted to sell it, he wanted to short it, but they wouldn't allow him because those are the terms of the conditions. And he made a ton of money because he couldn't get out in 2017. And this goes to show you that sometimes smart money isn't that smart. All right, so this is the crux of the whole article. I don't care about the rest of it. This is the interesting thing to me. And this is from, this is the quote from the Skybridge Chief Operating Officer, Bret Messing. He says, Bitcoin is leading a digital monetary revolution around the world, sure. He says, we believe the honest has shifted from why are you investing in Bitcoin to how are you not investing in Bitcoin? If you take a look at all the different treasuries and the public companies and ETF-like companies that are really getting into it, nobody wants to be first, but nobody wants to be last. So when you have these companies like a micro strategy who invested like $1 billion even more so now and they doubled their money in four or five months, imagine making, I mean, where else can you make a billion dollars legally if it isn't for cryptocurrency? So that's when other companies are looking at this going, wow, wait, we have all this money in our treasury and because the Fed is printing like crazy, the value of the dollar is going down. We're just losing money without really, I mean, without losing physical money, we're losing the purchasing power of money. What can we put it into? It's gonna be this. And I think this is why Scare Mucci and these guys get into it. So this was interesting. Slides from a leaked investor deck reveals Skybridge expects a tidal wave of institutional capital into the Bitcoin market. It predicts hedge funds, insurance companies and a long-awaiting Bitcoin ETF are coming. So everything's great about that statement except the last part. I've been hearing about this nonsense about an ETF coming and it's right around the corner. You can't miss it. It's gonna happen since, I mean, you can even look back in 2012 when Roger Veer was talking about the ETF was right on the corner. It's not right on the corner. Ryan Gorman, friend of the show, he made a statement when I was on Alex Maschioli's show. He said, you know, how can they actually approve an ETF, the SEC, no one really has addressed the main issue, which is all the manipulation that is going on, not just in America, but throughout the whole globe. How can they do that? Because nothing's really been done. And there was like, there was like the John DeGerion's, the Steve Erlich from Voyager, Ray from Paxos or Paxful or that exchanges I've got. And they all were silent. Like, it's a good question. And I don't think it's gonna be approved. So until they can deal with that issue, the ETF is out the window. Maybe, who knows, but I don't see it happening. Anyhow, let me know what you think in the comments section. Let's move on to our next piece. So this is good. And this is a big story, but not for us. It's a big story for cross-border payments in Swift and I'll get to that in a second. So US Federal Regulatory says banks can conduct payments using stable coins. And that's Brian Brooks. He's the czar of the OCC, Office of the Comptroller of Currency, makes all the things happen, right? And this is what happened. So the Federal Banking Regulator published in a letter addressing whether national banks and federal savings associations could participate in independent node verification networks or INVNs. I didn't know that was an acronym, so great. Otherwise known as blockchain networks and use stable coins. Letters said these financial institutions can participate as nodes on a blockchain and store or validate payments. All right, so that's a lot of jumbo. What does this mean? This was the quote. Kristen Smith, Executive Director of the Blockchain Association said on Twitter that the letter states that blockchains have the same status as other global financial networks such as Swift, ACH, and Fedwire. So what is happening here? And I don't want to, the rest of the article is good. Billy wrote it, but it's a kind of long one. So here's what happens. Banks are now gonna be able to use stable coins as payments. If banks can use stable coins as payments and you want to transfer money from your business to another business or a person to a person, we don't have to use ACH. We don't have to use Swift, which sucks when you have to use Fedwire, none of that stuff. I mean, you can if you want to, but why would you want to? Have you ever tried to wire any kind of money to another country? I have, and it's awful. Especially when, because I have my Amazon FBA business to wire money over to China, forget about it. If you wanted to wire money over to India or to Europe, you could do it, but it's gonna take a long time and the fees are crazy. So why would you do that when you just use a stable coin? When it's like next to nothing. So this, if I was Swift, I'd be pretty worried right now. This leads me to my next point. Every time I cross border payments and banks can use a stable coin, like a Tether, like a USDC, or like something else that hasn't even been invented yet, or RSR, what's gonna happen with XRP when they come out of this lawsuit with the SEC? And they say, okay, well, you're a security or not a security. Cross-border payments, what happened? Well, we're using stable coins. So how does it all work now? Now you can talk about on-demand liquidity, that is true. And that's a whole other topic from another video, but I think if you've got banks who are like, you know, we can use stable coins, it just kind of muddies the water. Anyhow, let me just think of the comments section. That'll be interesting. Let's move on to our last piece, which is, if you're in America, listen up. If you're not, you can go ahead and just take off because this doesn't apply to you. IRS to transition from education to enforcement says former division chief. No, you know why I take that back. If you're in other countries and you're not paying taxes right now, maybe this could come to your country, but that's a long shot. Really what it comes down to is this. America printed, I think America printed 30% of all the circulating money in the last six months to eight months or something like that. So the value of the dollar went down and the only way to really get this back on track is to tax the living hell on everybody. And that's what's going to happen. And what they're looking at here is, where can we find, where is the lag? Where is the problem where we've got some type of, crypts or some type of asset that we haven't really got our hands around and don't understand? Where is it? Where's the biggest one? Cryptocurrency, especially this year in 2021 when there's a ton of money to be made and a ton of capital gains charges to be brought. So this is what's happening. It only makes sense. So a former top investigator is warning that a high stakes game of chicken between the IRS and crypto holders will fail to properly report their earnings will be entering a new phase in 2021 as a tax collection agency begins to focus on pursuing civil and potentially criminal penalties. The former chief of the IRS criminal investigation division said it will now be turning to more stringent enforcement. He states the IRS has been not so quietly positioning itself for a smooth transition from education to enforcement in 2021 and beyond. So if you thought that the years prior weren't, we're kind of crappy just wait because it's about to get worse. So the article notes that the trail starts with Coinbase who entered a John Doe summons in 2018 and held it over account information on nearly 13,000 years. If you don't remember this, the IRS was like, hey, we need help getting some information so we can tax people on their cryptocurrency gains. And Coinbase was kind of like reluctant at first but then they, you know, complied. So here we are. The request the IRS made to Luxembourg-based exchange bit stamp for information on one American user also was followed through. So there's a far reaching implication if you're, you know, if you're America living abroad. The focus on crypto holders in the part due to a widening tax gap which is what I was trying to say in the beginning. The rift between a total income from taxes that should be pay the treasury versus what it actually receives. So they know there's a bunch of taxes that they need to collect. They just don't know how to do it. So how are they gonna do that? Well, they're gonna get into these exchanges. They're gonna get into a lot of AML and KYC and they're gonna say, where's our money? Pay us and just be aware that's what's gonna happen. Ultimately, the article concludes that major trends such as the addition of a question about crypto now probably placed at the top of form 1040 indicates that the IRS is gearing up for widespread effort. So what the heck are they talking about here? Well, they're talking about this. This is the new 1040 EZ form and before it was written or it was placed a little bit backwards. So you really didn't see this question which is if at any time during 2020, did you receive exchange send or whatever else, any kind of virtual currency? And if you said no to that and they had your information, you received a nice little letter. It looks like this. Hey, Pete, we're writing to tell you that I think you made an error on your tax form and you really did have some virtual currency. So once you just come clean before we bust you down that's pretty much the whole rigmarole of that whole letter. So this is what's gonna happen and it's gonna be an interesting year. So to finish this up, even though the IRS has not yet announced any kind of tax evasion or money laundering cases, you best believe they're gonna do that and the trend should change in 2021. So this is what I think. Every IRS division on the IRS, they need to make an example of somebody and I don't want that to be you. I don't want that to be me because guess what? I've been through an audit and it's awful. You have to bring in all your tax receipts. It takes weeks, sometimes months. For me, it didn't take that long. It was just a couple of weeks because I had all my receipts that I keep pretty stringently and I laid them all out. I questioned a lot of that information and it wasn't that bad. I ended up having to pay like an extra, like I think it was like $1,200 or something. It wasn't, it was just a non thing. But it is kind of harrowing because you have to take time off of work. You have to do all the things you have to do. You have to take time away from your family to get this rectified because if not they will garnish wages and blah, blah, blah. So I know some people in the comments section were like, hey, you know what? They're not taking anything from me because taxation is theft and I don't have to pay anything because this is cryptocurrency. And you're welcome to think that until they send letters, until they start garnishing wages, until they start taking liens and all those things. So it's, you can do whatever you want to. That's all I can say. There's two options for you. One is you can use iTrust. I have a crypto IRA. There's a link in the description below and what's great about that is that they can't touch your crypto gains. So that is one option. But again, you have to wait till you're 59 and a half to withdraw. That's just an option. And then the next thing, let's just deal with the here and now. And the here and now is you're gonna need some software because when you do your taxes, unless your CPA is super well versed in cryptocurrency, they're gonna make mistakes. And this is why I've been talking about crypto trader got taxed for quite some time and I truly believe in it. And it's what I used last year and it saved me like $16,000 because of all the different transactions. So if you're like me and you have a ton transactions from like way back in the day because I had to go back all the way like 2017, they got everything. They got everything from my Coinbase, my Binance, my OKX, my whatever else junk exchange that I used because they have an API. They put it all in. It took me like from the learning curve to actually doing it. It took me like 30 minutes. I clicked on a button. It sent it over to my CPA. My CPA reviewed it, sent it off to the IRS and I saved a bunch of money. So that's the simplest thing of all time. So there's two things. First of all, in the link in the description, there's a link in the link in the description. In the description, there's a link to crypto trader and you get a percentage off just for viewers of ban. Also, they're doing a pretty cool thing where they're gonna be drawing a free cryptocurrency tax report. I believe it's every week. I'm pretty sure it's every week. So they're gonna do that. And all you gotta do is just putting your first name in your email and they'll draw it up. And that's like between, it's actually between $100 and $300 for that report for the tax software. So again, there is a link in the description right underneath the link to sign up for crypto trader. So maybe you wanna win something, just put your information in there and see if you can win. And that is what I will be using again this year and that'll be due for me very soon. And actually, it's one of the programs that I use to figure out that there's this thing called tax loss harvesting and I was able to sell my XRP for an enormous loss, which I talked about yesterday, and actually buy all that in into tax savings. Of course, what's great about cryptocurrency is that there's no watch trading. So you can just buy that right back. If you want to, it's up to you. All right, so that is it. I know a little bit long, but there's a lot of things going on. I truly believe 2021 is gonna be a great year. It just depends on where you wanna be and what you wanna do as far as with your crypto. Me, myself, I'm not a trader, I'm just an investor. I just dollar cost average. I'll still dollar cost average and I'm looking at different projects, but right now I've got my position. So anyhow, everything's in the link in the description. Thanks for watching. If you like those types of videos, there's gonna be two more that's gonna pop up on your left and right. I'll let YouTube do their magic and that is it. So thanks again, appreciate it, and I'll see you on the next one.