For those of you who've probably been sleeping living not paying attention to anything while you're under Rock You might miss out on the fact that Crypto is ripping to Kingdom Come technically is Bitcoin at a new all-time high? No, but it's looking really, really strong. So to kick off the New Year Crypto specifically Bitcoin Ethereum Salana started out the year with a bang breaking Bitcoin breaks 45,000 So here's a look at Bitcoin right now as I'm filming this 45.3k for a while there. really? to conclude the year, strong, strong rally. Then we saw a bit of a consolidation fake out breakout of the initial trend line in late December.

But then recently, really like I said to perfectly kick off, the year exploded above the trend line. We're seeing a knife's fall through and in fact it got perfectly rejected at a resistance level from a long, long time ago that we saw back in February of 22. The next level I Have Up is a hair above 48,000 Obviously, if it retracts below this trend line it would be a fake outbreak out. But right now there's a lot of enthusiasm and I would argue it's for good reason.

But before we get to it, I Found this really, really cool graphic just because like a lot of the times at the end of a calendar year, the start of a new one we start to look at like yearly performance and how have things performed the year 5 years, 10 years that type of a thing. So this is a really really interesting graphic of basically a couple key things where people are like where should I put my money and let's just get this rock. So you have Bitcoin savings and gold. Uh, and it started in 2014 and it was kind of in 2016 that Bitcoin clearly started to outperform.

And as you're about to see, maybe some of you guys already have the numbers, you're going to realize that in terms of a safe haven asset, a fight against inflation Bitcoin has been the dramatic winner. The clearly dramatic winner. So gold slowly going up, savings slowly going up. And because inflation's worse, that actually kind of means you lost value.

not technically in Gold but in savings you definitely want Of the one where you really ahead in the past decade, you just have Bitcoin cripping, cripping, and doing a little bit more of ripping. Uh, recently obviously there was a pullback from the all-time high, but seems like we're kicking off the new year with quite a bit of a bang, so we love to see this orange line. If they ever update this particular graphic to uh, just keep going higher and higher and higher so just wanted to I guess set a little bit of a framework. A little bit of the tone of what's going on, but why is there enthusiasm right now? Pretty simple: There's two big things going down in 2024 this year.

If you believe in the Gregorian calendar, that should really, really favor Bitcoin one of them should be going down in January. So if you look at all the poll places, all the fancy fansy analysts colonists all that. they're saying about a 90% chance that within the first 2 weeks of of January the first spot Bitcoin ETF will be approved. That is very, very exciting to the point that some people are actually starting to clock it so they're thinking around January 10th.

So obviously lot of enthusiasm there. And just for those of you like, well hang on if we have the spot. Bitcoin ETF Why is that good? Because it basically just opens up exposure of Bitcoin to a lot of people who don't want their own crypto wallets or anything like that. just people who maybe have retirement accounts.

Don't forget that the retirement industry in the US is over $10 trillion. When you have actively managed money, we're now talking over $30 trillion. So even if a small small percentage decides to want exposure to Bitcoin, that's simply more demand. And we know Supply is either flat or going down.

So this is basically equilibrium where they cross over. That's price and price will be forced to go up. So lot of excitement there. I Think it gets even more interesting of the fact of we get more regulatory Clarity which I think will really just help the crypto World grow.

Uh, speaking of the spot, Bitcoin Etm F This is something that happened right to conclude the year and it really just shows the hypocrisy of the government of Wall Street particularly JP Morgan And really specifically I'm talking about Jamie Diamond So this is an SEC filing for Black Rock Black Rock is obviously one of the dozen or so companies that's looking to get a spot Bitcoin ETF And whenever you have an ETF you have this thing called an AP an authorized Participant I Don't want to get too much into weeds of it, but what an authorized participant is is you basically have the issuer or sponsor of the ETF the person who's kind of managing it like and in this case it would be Black Rock. But then you have these authorized participants and those are the people who go out into the world and actually get the things that's within the ETF. So an ETF an exchange traded fund. Think of it as a basket of something now in the spot Bitcoin ETF that is the ETF and what's in it is Bitcoin.

So JP te Morgan is actually saying hey, yeah, yeah, we'll be the person who goes out there and ensures that the ETF is kind of trading at the appropriate level based on what's actually within the basket. So this isn't something that they're paid to do. but they end up making money off of it because of Arbitrage so they know. Okay, where's the ETF trading what's actually in the basket and they could just Arbitrage it up or down accordingly to make sure that it's trading at the appropriate price.

This is actually a beneficial thing to have a lot of the times with the world's most popular ETFs you actually have multiple APS Just kind of monitoring the situation to ensure that the Etf's price is trading at the like fair value of everything within the basket. and if they need to buy some more, sell some more. They're the ones who keeps it transparent and within balance. And it's interesting that JP Morgan is doing this because not that long ago we had Jamie Diamond who happens to be the CEO of the company talking crap Bitcoin Etc You pointed out the only true use case for it is criminals, drug, drug traffickers, anti-money Laing Tax avoidance and that is a use case.

Uh, because it is somewhat Anonymous not fully and because you can move money instantaneously and because it doesn't go through As you mentioned, all these systems have built up over many years nor your customer sanctions. ofac it's they can get bypass all of that. I if I was the governments I'd close it down. if I was the government, I would close it down.

That is a direct statement from the CEO and leader of JP Morgan who obviously is now going to be listed as an AP for a spot Bitcoin ETF which I You just have to love the hypocrisy. You have to love it saying that it's so bad the government can shut it down, but hang on I Want my finger in the pie to make some money off of this opportunity So more than happy for my company. like they definitely make money off being the AP so more than happy to be trading it, helping managing it, help getting the resources into the ETF but also simultaneously thinks that it should be shut down. Folks, That's the definition of hypocrisy.

Black Rock Valkyrie Named authorized participants including JP Morgan for Bitcoin ETF So Black Rock Valkyrie they are the ones who are trying to manage it, be the sponsor of the ETF and then obviously they're reaching out. Really when it comes to APS these authorized participants just think the world's biggest banks JP Morgan Goldman Sachs yada yada yada that type of a thing. so they're naming them and I just I I cannot get over the hypocrisy related to it. So that's kind of why people are excited in the short-term in January and really in 2024 because when you have inflation running rampant, lack of trust in the government, and also more technical events like the having thing the having which should be happening within mid April of this year, that's the anticipated date.

Those are all bullish obviously. but I Want to take a step even further back and leave you with this video from Andreas Antonopoulos This is a big wig, genius dude and a tech entrepreneur in Europe who has been a big, big, big supporter of the world of crypto for many, many years now. and this is a little bit of a talk that he was giving back when Bitcoin was trading at $100 Once again, bitcoin's now trading above 45,000 and you can even see it before I Start this video of the popularity of Crypto. Back then, there's a couple people like Andreas who understand it.

They get what's going on and they're kind of talk. They're trying to talk about it, trying to get other people to see what's happening and as you can tell, just no one was caring at that point in time. But imagine if anyone listened to him getting in sub $100 how much money you would have. Now the topic I want to talk about today is Bitcoin Neutrality Bitcoin neutrality.

What does Bitcoin neutrality mean? neutrality in Bitcoin means being able to adopt Bitcoin in any culture, any language, any religion, any geography, but also any political or economic system. So Bitcoin neutrality is about making Bitcoin a standard that is independent of your desires and expectations. This isn't a Libertarian currency any more than it's a communist currency. It's a currency and it can be applied to any political system.

Whether it is the political system you like or not, it's a neutral currency. Through the last year when we learned about inflation, monetary policy, the FED central banks worldwide to me, it kind of dawned on me, of wow, this is crazy. In fact, it's insanely crazy that we rely on humans who maybe intentionally or unintentionally make mistakes. We've seen it before.

not just in the US, but on the global scale of central banks, the people controlling the money supply making blunder after blunder after blunder. Look what's going on in Argentina Look what happened to El Salvador Look at turkey. Look what's going on in the US Look what's going on in Europe Inflation is running rampant because of these central banks printing money like a drunken sailor. The issue with that is like yeah, sometimes I understand why they think they need to print it, but it's unpredictable because they are humans and humans make mistakes while on the other side you have Bitcoin Where the code is out there.

it is open source. It is a monetary policy that is perfectly algorithmically designed and it's known to everyone. There's no surprises. and if you ask me, when it comes to the world of currency, it's one of those things that we probably shouldn't be having surprises.

So I just wanted to quickly highlight this because it was talking about it when Bitcoin was sub $100 Obviously, from then until now, it's come a very, very long way. And if you ask me, yes, I'm invested in I Guess I should have said it at the start. So am I optimistic of course I'm optimistic and I just think that the world as it starts to learn about monetary policy. What? What's going on? Who controls money? I'm willing to bet that as the populace wakes up, they're going to start to demand something that's a little bit more reasonable.

and in my book, something that is open- Source where there's no surprises. To me, that is pretty reasonable. Hence, exactly why not only am I invested in Bitcoin but I'm pretty freaking bullish on it in the short term and then obviously also in the long term.