Bitcoin is fiat money in France, new AML rules are making crypto more attractive for companies and more… | Crypto Market News

Thrilling market news with CoinMetro’s CEO, Kevin Murcko in This Week in Crypto!

Crypto Market News Highlights

Will the Fed’s Massive $1.5 Trillion Injection Send Bitcoin Skyrocketing?

No it won’t. Bitcoin has proven to be correlating with traditional markets. Will the $1.5 trillion injection send the stock market skyrocketing? No. Why? Because stocks are buoyed by sentiment. Sentiment right now is shit — globally.

There are two types of markets. Fear and greed. We are now in an extremely fear-based market, and that happened almost overnight. But it is not going to clear up overnight.

Bitcoin is doing on par, or worse, than the worst indices around the world. And Kevin does not expect that to change in the short term.

Bitcoin is fiat money in France; court ruling

Kevin doesn’t think it is saying that it is fiat money, but it is akin to. It’s a small ruling, and it’s not talking about the country as a whole.

All these precedents that we make, simply mean that the same restrictions and rules, — and the shitty things — about fiat, can now be applied to Bitcoin.

Not necessarily a win, depending on what side of the fence you sit on. An anarchist or a “this is going to be a tool in traditional finance”.

Japan’s Financial Regulator Launches Global Blockchain Governance Initiate

Japan is definitely on the forefront of regulation when it comes to crypto, one of the first to apply basic standards across the board. Now they are looking to use blockchain as a governance vehicle.

That can enable automated governance, which might mean that the regulator is not as needed.

Kevin thinks we are probably 10–20 years away from actually seeing some type of “consensus mechanism” that runs governance, and reduces governance and regulation. Not because it takes that long for the technology to evolve, that may happen within 2–5 years, but once the technology works, it will take time to sell the government — and the populace — on it.

Bitcoin Is Money Printing Protection as US Bond Yields Hit Lowest Ever

Is it really? Really? Can anybody really make that argument right now?

Based on the last week, can you really make that argument stick? What is your argument for how fast it fell, how it fell in correlation with other markets, and how Bitcoin tanks every night the Asian markets open, levels off during European/US markets, and then tanks again.

People always talk about this “printing of money”. Yes, that button-pushing is pretty much one of the only things that modern economists have thought off to be able to steady the boat in a crisis.

But fiat money is still here. Fiat money still has a relative value. You can look at the 95% loss over time and a dollar could buy more in the past. But that’s only one aspect of buying power.

Anyway, Bitcoin has not proven itself to be printing protection, at least not during the past week.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Criticizes Bitcoin and Ethereum’s Energy Usage

Because when they sell off 100s of millions worth of XRP, they don’t use much energy. Both sides have things they can criticize.

One thing Kevin can say about XRP in general, is that XRP has more of a direct correlation to other markets. They have several services marketed as a type of credit clearing house mechanism, that uses XRP. They have a specific use case, and a specific market they target. Bitcoin doesn’t.

On Ethereum, DeFi (Decentralized Finance) has been under strain this week. The whole DeFi movement is kind of in an uproar because the underlying asset of the entire decentralized financial push can’t maintain price stability during times of crisis, and brings the question if they are really building the new platform for finance on the right type of technology/asset?

Kraken Announces Plans to Expand Indian Operations As Crypto Ban Lifts

This is probably on everybody’s radar, and definitely on ours too. Lots of people in India. Still, not the easiest place in the world to do business. A specific strategy is needed. Kevin thinks it makes sense for Kraken, and everybody else, to move into India. The one question is how seamless you can make that move.

Bitcoin Still No Match for Gold in Terms of Store of Value

Kevin would say gold itself is not the best store of value, but it has definitely held up a thousand times better than Bitcoin over the last week or so. That doesn’t mean it will hold up.

No matter what goldbugs say, or what Bitcoin maximalists say — in times of pure crisis, cash is still king. We’ll have to see if that ever changes, but Kevin is not sure about that. It comes back to human nature, being that if you are holding a bunch of gold bars, and not everybody accepts them if you want to buy toilet paper. But a bunch of cash would be accepted.

Tether gets into DeFi with flash loans protocol Aave

Flash loans… “great” idea during market crashes like these. Speaking of DeFi, as Kevin said in a previous AMA, there is a risk to giving staking and giving collateralized loans using crypto. Bankera gave collateralized loans of a loan-to-value ratio of up to 75%. That means that a week and a half ago, if Kevin gave them one million worth of Bitcoin, he would have received $750,000 in some other asset.

It underscores that we are still in a very immature market, with very immature products, built on very immature infrastructure in many ways. We are not ready for this type of global catastrophe.

The idea of Bitcoin was built out of the last catastrophe, in 2008. We have proven now, 12 years later, that we spent no effort to make sure that hypothesis was correct, and now we are getting kicked in the face because of it.

Europe’s New AML Rules Made Crypto More Attractive to Institutions, Says Boerse Stuttgart Exec

No. It doesn’t. At all. It makes it more accessible, but the only thing that made crypto attractive to institutional investors was non-correlation. This week, bye-bye.

Russia Seeks to Block ‘Darknet’ Technologies, Including Telegram’s Blockchain

“Seeks” is probably the most important word in that sentence. Good luck. Having said that, almost every single technology that provides “some form of privacy”, is already hacked.

Stopping people from using a technology is often almost impossible.

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