56 – November Market Update, Elon Bought Twitter and how Ethereum is helping to fight cancer!

Tracey: [00:00:20] Welcome to the Crypto Curious podcast designed to help you navigate the dynamic world of crypto currency. We're here for anyone who is interested in crypto at all. Maybe you've already dipped your toe in the water, or maybe you don't know anything about it. And this is the very beginning. But we recommend heading back to some of the early episodes to get your footing. However, if you think you're ready to dive in headfirst, then let's do it. On this week's episode, we'll give you a quick market update on what to look out for during November. We'll talk about Elon taking over Twitter and what that means for crypto. And we'll also talk a little bit about the Bloomberg crypto story. We'll also talk about how Etherium is helping to cure cancer. True story. My name's Tracey, and this week the gang's back together. Craig is back from holidays. Craig Welcome back, buddy. 

Craig: [00:01:08] Thanks, Trace. It was great to have a break from you both. And the crypto market didn't even look at the price for like two weeks. It turns out the market actually jumped a little bit, so maybe I'm. Maybe I should go away more often.

Tracey: [00:01:23] Yeah, well, look at it. If you did, it's nice to have a break. To be honest, it is nice to have a break and not look at the market for a while and get refreshed. So, yeah, a lot has happened, but let's have a little look at what's going on in the market now. We did have that bit of a pump and there's been no major pullbacks from that little bit of a swing. And we've got a new month on the horizon. October is behind us. And let's have a little look at what's going on in November. So at time of recording, we've just seen the FOMC be announced and that is a 0.75. right move. And what I mean by that is the interest rate rise which happens in the US. Usually we see a bit of a market move when that happens. And there was a small move to the downside last night, Australian time when that happened. What we've also got to look out for is the US midterm elections on November 8th and we know that when that happens is usually, you know, it's not a good time for crypto. If we look back to the 2018 midterms, then BTC plummeted 36.5% and also crashed 42.8%. So not good. What else, Craig?

Craig: [00:02:36] As I was just reading an article that midterms are historically actually good for the stock market, but you're saying it's not good for crypto? 

Tracey: [00:02:45] It hasn't been good for crypto. No, I look back on that. But historically it depends on what their policies are and what they're saying and what you and you write though, because normally what this promises is all great, fantastic things. They're all saying, I promise to do this, I promise to do that. So a lot of things do get priced in. But historically for crypto, it has not been good looking at the last four.

Blake: [00:03:05] So do you think if there are policies being put forward by your particular candidate and there's either alignment or misalignment, would regulation result in your bullish momentum? Or do you think that deregulation would result in potentially a sell off? 

Tracey: [00:03:24] Your guess is as good as mine on that one. I mean, all we've got to go on is the history and crypto has not liked it. But in saying that, who has got some, some positive stats on crypto, who's got some regulation that they're happy to bring out that favours us right now? I honestly don't know. 

Blake: [00:03:39] I think the STABLECOIN regulation is a big win for the sector. You know, if that's regulated, I could see, you know, trillions of dollars coming across just to that particular sub asset class within crypto. And that just makes it much easier to trade crypto and it obviously supports a lot of the infrastructure and you know, also things like exchanges as well, you know, because at the end of the day, exchanges support these sorts of products where, you know, other financial institutions, their infrastructure isn't as mature yet.

Craig: [00:04:10] But also, as you mentioned, this FOMC announcement. But there's also a CPI announcement on November 10th, which is the inflation announcement. They reckon that'll be 8.2% and that will most likely impact the market as well, if that's a bad sign. So I'm refusing. I don't even know what these were. Now everyone's watching it like everyone is. When I say, is that like quarterly? That happens. 

Tracey: [00:04:39] No, it's been monthly. So that's the Federal Open Market Committee that gives you that one. It's the same as here. So it's like the RBA with their interest rate, right. So it's every month. 

Craig: [00:04:48] Yeah. 

Blake: [00:04:48] Crazy people are waiting to inflation's finished. You know I think if we still had a little bit more to go but hopefully we're coming to the end of the price increases that we see day to day moving on from that history. November is a volatile month for crypto FM Bitcoin of both had their best and worst performing months during that time. And I think that really follows on from what we're saying just a couple of weeks ago, Tracey, how the volatility index was so low. And then moving on from that, you know, we expect to see more price movement. So in November and 2019 Bitcoin were both up over 40%. And let's say that that was in a bull market or leading into a bull market in November 2020, s and Bitcoin were both down 20%. So really it could go either way.

Craig: [00:05:37] We have CPI, inflation, midterms, Elon, punting, doge, we have a little bit of a pump at the end. It's going to be like four or five different events that are happening this month. So that's why you should DCA and maybe not worry about it exactly.

Tracey: [00:05:54] You get too caught up in these things and it's too stressful. Honestly, we have never seen a better case for dollar cost averaging in slowly and taking the stress out of it. There you go. So a lot of chatter through the bamboo office this week and on WhatsApp speculating on Dogecoin and the recent pump. Now all of this is coming about due to one thing really Twitter and Chief Twit, as he aptly named himself. Mr. Elon Musk took over at Twitter headquarters and shook things up a little bit. Firstly, he walked into the building with the kitchen sink. I'm assuming that's like sink in. I don't know. And then one went on a bit of a firing spree, letting most of the upper management team go. So we know Elon is prone or very pro crypto. Sorry. So this is a big deal in our crypto world, which is why we're all chatting about it. Like you've got a bit to say here. 

Blake: [00:06:44] So Twitter has approximately 450 million monthly users and of course you're implementing a crypto wallet. I don't know how many would use it depending on its functionality, but it's a big play, you know, are they trying to, you know, potentially compete with WeChat? You know, it's a social media platform where you message one another and it has an embedded wallet so you can pay your bills and transfer money to one another as well. And, you know, that's one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. So, you know, potentially a lot of growth opportunities there to compete with other products. Fascinating stuff. Elon has also talked about Twitter crypto payments and even hinted at Dogecoin being an option. So yeah, doge is 95% up for the week and I think we were just talking about this a couple of weeks ago. Tracey, what's the most sure thing in this ecosystem? And the conclusion that we came to was doge was going to pump, which is an unfortunate conclusion to come to and it just describes the state of play. So that's where we are folks. 

Craig: [00:07:46] Craig Everyone knows that in a bull market doge pumps yeah he's those linked messages because for the twitter lawsuit there was a few messages that were leaked and he was chatting to Jack Dorsey about, you know, Dorsey, as you know, is a Bitcoin Maxy. And he was saying, you know, training to be decentralised needs to be private. So that's you know, it's a conversation happening in the background. But he also said that he's mainly focussing on eliminating the bots. And, you know, it will focus on free speech and just, you know, just lightly. He said that he's going to make it $8 a month if you want a blue, blue tick. And that will get you you know, you can use an NFT profile picture and, you know, you can assume that that little feature there will be where he puts in the payments, where he puts in all of his new releases. So he's moving pretty quickly.

Tracey: [00:08:34] Yeah, definitely.

Blake: [00:08:35] It's like it's like he's throwing the kitchen sink at it. 

Tracey: [00:08:38] But I'm punching. 

Craig: [00:08:39] Literally.

Tracey: [00:08:41] He's also floated the idea of a monthly 1999 payment to get that blue tick. I think that's what he was saying, not 999.

Craig: [00:08:48] I think again, I think he said 20 and now he's back down to eight because everyone said 20 is too much. He literally just changed his mind. But also I was thinking this yesterday, I'd probably actually be better if he does nothing with doge but just hints with memes because if he actually does something then that's the news and then dogecoin will drop. But if he just has memes of his dog.

Tracey: [00:09:07] I just thought the big news for me though was him saying that he's coming back with or bringing back vines. So apparently 69% of 5 million voters were in favour of bringing this back that he polled. And I think like I said to you guys, it may be taking on Tik-tok perhaps. 

Craig: [00:09:23] Well, the US government wants to ban tech talks. If he brings back fine vamos like tik tok before tik tok. So he's a genius. He could be a genius, but debateable or it could go to zero. Who knows? 

Tracey: [00:09:37] Just to change that too. He has changed his bio. Now to Twitter complaint hotline operator. He likes a bit of a laugh though good all day long and also with doge is 95% jump. It's had a big rally over the last six months, to be honest. It's actually replaced Cardano as the sixth largest cryptocurrency in the world. 

Blake: [00:09:55] So but word has it, it has more functionality than Cardano, but you know, that's yet to be seen.

Tracey: [00:09:59] Let's leave that one there. There was a great deal of buzz this week and last week around Bloomberg Businessweek, his latest issue. It was a cover to cover issue on crypto. It's only the second cover to cover issue ever released by a single author in Bloomberg's 93 year history. And the first one was about computer programming. So the parallel right there I thought was pretty interesting. It was a really cool issue. KGO And tell us a little bit more about this one. 

Craig: [00:10:25] Yes, I just said I see this guy, Matt Levine, who's the author, he's a pretty big deal, apparently. I don't know any finance writers going around, but a Twitter user said that you just know every regulator and your uncle is going to be quoting Matt Levine tag. So personally, he is a big deal in the finance world. So he wrote this story called The Crypto Story. So it was 40,000 words and he's pretty much going through the whole story of the space and it was kind of interesting and got a lot of feedback. What did you think about it, Blake? 

Blake: [00:10:54] Yeah, I didn't read the whole story, but I did read some articles that covered off on the topics that were outlined and discussed in the article. And, you know, what he really talked about was the decentralisation, the proof of work, consensus mechanisms and other consensus mechanisms as well as DEFI and how important those things could potentially be in the future. Levin also explained how crypto is poised to shape the future of finance by letting investors use blockchain technology instead of brokers and trade equity platforms. And now this really centres around the philosophical pillars of crypto with the peer to peer philosophy that it embraces. And we really love his conclusion. You know, he highlighted the fact that so many smart people from traditional finance or trade fire, from computer science, from all these disciplines are moving across to this sector. You know, eventually that these really smart people are going to figure out how to make it work for everyone. So it's going to take time. Folks just on the Internet took 23 years. So we're going to see the same thing here. And I think this is a really big, you know, flag in the sand.

Craig: [00:12:04] Yeah, he gave a great, impartial rundown, but he's also made a lot of, you know, made it clear about the downside as well, pointing out that this model and at this stage, as you said very early, has often led to wrath of scams, Ponzi schemes, people getting people losing their money. I think there was a story, Tracey, that we didn't put in here because we couldn't find enough sources to fact check it properly. But it was like approximately 95% of the tokens on uniswap. Yeah. Scams. So when you give people the ability to enable peer to peer trading for assets that aren't regulated, most of it is shit. Excuse my French.

Blake: [00:12:45] You know, just pulling it back to our previous story about, you know, Twitter, potentially a majority of the accounts on Twitter bots and, you know, scam profiles. So it's just suggesting when you open these platforms up for anyone to use, it's going to attract a lot of bad actors.

Tracey: [00:13:01] Absolutely. But I wanted to round out this story with an amazing paragraph, again written by Levin, which I think really sums it up. He said, My goal here is not to convince you that crypto is building the future and that if you don't get on board, you'll stay poor. My goal is to convince you that crypto is interesting, that it has found some new things to say about some old problems, and that even when those things are wrong, they're wrong in illuminating ways. So I loved that, that particular thing. I think that was really cool. So a bit of my moment and I will leave that story there. But if you can get your hands on it and you've got some time, then give it a read. And with that, we'll take a break and we'll be back with some information around Etherium helping to cure cancer. You're back listening to the Crypto Curious podcast. This story started on Twitter last week and soon made its way all around socials and everyone was talking about Etherium and their blockchain curing cancer. Obviously, that's a stretch, but there's a really interesting story here, and I, for one, really love it. Craig Give me another reason why I should be going and buying some more of your image.

Craig: [00:14:13] So yeah, this is a really cool, real world example of how blockchain can be used for good. So earlier this year, a bunch of researchers wanted to study if artificial intelligence could help detect cancerous cells in the body. But they ran into two problems. I'll go to the first one now. So researchers can't just share sensitive medical data with other researchers because, as you know, confidentiality, there's laws around it. So instead of sharing raw medical data, they decided to run our models separately and share those results instead. But they were doing it through the blockchain, so verifying the data through the blockchain. But this led to a second problem like centralisation. 

Blake: [00:14:52] So the researchers couldn't run separate AI models, but I assume that they were still storing the data on centralised servers and they had to bring the data together under one lab. And the lab controls the learning process on all of the eyeballs. And this is the centralised process because it can lead to an exploit of the data being hacked. Now, you know, this is pretty unusual because you know, the way that people store data is done in platforms like IWC and Google, which is extremely secure and if it is hacked, it's used because if you're a bad actor wanting to have a look and see what they're doing. So apparently they secured the data on the decentralised network and used smart contracts to govern the access. And apparently this was quicker and more precise for cancer diagnosis. 

Tracey: [00:15:38] I think, you know, this is a really amazing story. And like I said, I did a bit of digging on this this week and I think it's, ah, you know, two big powerhouses coming together, Etherium and A.I., which is super cool. And I really think this is a win for anyone when they ask you what Ethereum actually does. This is a real world case that we can say now. It's actually helping to cure cancer and it's actually doing that. So big tick for Etherium in my book. Now to our short, sharp news bites. Craig's back this week, so we'll let him kick off first. 

Craig: [00:16:11] Yeah, another NFT partnership. Well, it happens every week, but exclusive will go five miles to build a luxury NFT platform so that with Formula One and Bugatti they are going for the luxury, the luxury big. 

Tracey: [00:16:24] Brands see how that goes. 

Blake: [00:16:26] Cool. So Mexico is launching another metaverse and it's called the Island Shopping Mall. So it's going to have 80 brands. Super exciting stuff. So check it out and maybe go buy some stuff. 

Tracey: [00:16:38] Next, we've got our Global is an NFT project from Rick and Morty. Co-creator Justin Roiland has done over 16,000 ETH in trading volume in under 24 hours. To put it in perspective, it is the highest trading volume in the last 30 days and it did so in 24 hours. So this is pretty awesome. Rick and Morty, it's got a huge following. There's something tricky about this one, too. I think there's a.

Craig: [00:17:03] Very controversial this one, Tracey, because this was actually a free mint. 

Tracey: [00:17:09] Wasn't it?

Craig: [00:17:10] And now another four yesterday got to like 12, eighth floor. So it's completely pumped. But this whole thing is talking about it. This whole story is going to be a sub story about NFT influencers because people have gone through the data and all the influencers that have been shilling this project got like a bunch for free. Like you can maybe only mint one or two for free, but these influencers got maybe ten or 20 and people are tracking back and saying, Well, you're clearly giving the influencers. 

Tracey: [00:17:42] I won't mention who pointed it out to me then on this channel, because someone we know pointed it out to me, I didn't actually get one. 

Craig: [00:17:48] Did he get one? 

Tracey: [00:17:49] He probably did. I didn't grab one at the time. I probably should have. But he's been pointing it out himself and his channel again. But anyway, I thought there was something else to this as well. Then it was regenerative art which I know is coming back to be quite favourable again with NFT is something that it's actually like forget the hype around what's happened there, but the art itself, isn't it regenerative? That changes as well. All right. Let's put a pin in that. We'll come back to it later. 

Craig: [00:18:11] Let's put a pin up and talk about the influencers, because this is like a big deal, because what happens is these influencers get the right of way, they get the waitlist, they get ten times more than anyone else. They tweet about it and they use everyone as exit liquidity. 

Tracey: [00:18:26] That is dodgy. 

Craig: [00:18:27] It's completely rigged. It's not right. 

Blake: [00:18:30] It sounds like the Oscar boom once again.

Tracey: [00:18:32] That's not good. 

Craig: [00:18:33] Literally is the Oscar boom again. This is happening again. It happened with Goblin Town and it happened with Bloomberg's as well. 

Blake: [00:18:39] So I think it's really important. Then, you know, what we ended up seeing in the Oscar space was that there was very clear disclosure about who was getting what percent. Nature of the network or the percentage of the tokens. So you could see if, you know, 40% or 50% of the tokens or NFTs are going to, you know, a group that may not you may not have a vesting schedule and may not be aligned with the rest of the community, then, you know, that's a bit of a red flag to not participate. And you maybe NFT projects aren't under enough social pressure to do this right now, but if this keeps happening, people are going to expect it. 

Craig: [00:19:19] Yeah, 100%, I guess. Some advice to avoid. Being influenced. Exit liquidity is to not blindly follow and influence. 

Blake: [00:19:27] Do your own research for. 

Craig: [00:19:29] Your own research because that's you know, I used to do that in the US, you know, boom bay all three of us had done that before. We had one influencer that we trusted and no matter what they said, we just jumped in and we would 100% exit actually once upon a time. So do not blindly follow an influencer, especially unless Tracey Shilling a thing because, you know, that's that's fine. But these are illiquid small projects. 

Tracey: [00:19:55] All right. Good info. What's up next, Craig? 

Craig: [00:19:57] What's up next? Burberry. Luxury brand, so they announced a collaboration with Minecraft. 

Tracey: [00:20:03] Oh, interesting collaboration. 

Craig: [00:20:05] A lot of brand synergy there. Same target market already. So an in-game adventure in Minecraft. From Burberry, they're going to do a capsule collection and extensions and experiences and. Yeah, make it make sense. 

Tracey: [00:20:20] Yeah. What is going on there? 

Blake: [00:20:21] Yeah, that makes me cringe. But moving on. Visa files with three trademarks, four crypto wallets and NetEase trademarks don't mean that much because it's just a brand that, you know, they don't want anyone else to copy, but it shows that they're developing your new products and things in the space. So yeah, definitely more to watch here and see how they roll out. 

Tracey: [00:20:45] And that's it for this week. Please join us again next week. If you have any questions, please hit us up via our email, which is a podcast@getbamboo.io or you can find us on our social media channels. The links to those will be in the show notes below and please rate and review us wherever you're listening to your podcast now. See you next week. 

Craig: [00:21:06] Bye.