Daily: SEC commissioner "We don't need to be helicopter parents" (Sep 18th)

Hey everyone and welcome back to BoxMining. It's really great to have you guys back again and I'm back in my old studio with my nice green screen behind me and I thought why not do a daily update. Let's catch up on what's the latest happenings on the news and also let's do it old school BoxMining style. We got a outline of what we're going to discuss. So we're going to start off with the market analysis. Then we're going to take a look at SEC Commissioner Pierce as she says, you know what? The SEC needs to take some risks. Let's ease up on the regulations a little bit, especially because it's a currency, not a security. So we're going to look at her article. We also have eFinex. eFinex is introduced by Bitfinex and what they're trying to do is they're going to try to fill that gap, a decentralized exchange that doesn't need KYC. And I really think this is taking a stab at ShakeShift, which is now requiring KYC. So they're like, you know what? Bitfinex is like, you know what? Let's fill in that gap for people who don't want to go through that lengthy KYC process. We also have Steemit. So Steemit was down for a few hours after a issue with the hard fork, but now it's back up and we're going to take a look at what's happening over there. And finally, we're going to take a look at CEOs and blockchain. We have two kind of quotes, one from Jack Ma and the other from Elon Musk asking for some help in the crypto sphere. So everything and more on today's Box Mining Daily. And I hope you guys enjoyed this episode with me. And of course, if you guys like daily updates as well, too, click the subscribe button and like this video as well. And as of always, everything covered here is my opinion, not financial advice. All right, let's start off by taking a look at the markets. So the markets aren't really good today. In fact, we have Ethereum dropping almost 10%. Bitcoin, we're back down to 6,200. So it's mostly a red day and the market cap is $192 billion. So what is it seeing right now? Well, it does show quite a lot of volatility as well. We have this kind of sideways trading for the longest amount of time and we're still in the depths of the bear market. One thing that I kind of noticed is of course, over here, they're talking about this, this article is here that says Bitcoin slips back to its critical support below the market cap of 20 billion. That's a crypto market. And what is quite important here is they're pointing out very thin volumes. And it might even be a little bit thinner because what we're seeing is the reported volumes from exchanges. And that might not really be the real volumes because there's of course, this issue of watch trading, which we discussed previously on this channel. What we asked quite interesting as well, this is an article on MarketWatch. What's interesting is that in comments here, there's still a lot of misunderstanding. We have Ray Batts says, long term, it's going to zero. I love how there's so much FUD right now and misconceptions in the general market space about cryptocurrency. And we have Cherry Love who says, this kind of cryptocurrency should not exist. Pure created by money laundering people. This idea that it's used just by money laundering. This has been kind of debunked over the past year. This is no longer true, but there's still a big misconception to this. And I feel like this is something that us as a community, we need to work to get to fight these people who have this negative idea of cryptocurrency. And in fact, why should fiat currency exist? I mean, that is the bigger question. This randomly, random currency that's not connected to say, go with the gold standard and just created by decree and can be wiped away at any given moment. In terms of regulation, everyone's been looking towards the SEC because right now at the end of this month, there is the ETF. And well, right now the SEC has a very pro-regulatory stance on it. So even though that the futures has been approved last year, the Bitcoin ETFs that were, you know, millions of applications for, that hasn't been approved yet. And it's pretty interesting to see SEC commissioner Hester Pierce's comment on this. So I read through her speech and I highlighted a few important points about this because she's an SEC commissioner, one of the commissioners. So she doesn't represent all the commissioners, nor the view of the SEC overall, but her stance is quite firm on a sense that, well, a helicopter mother moves and hovers over children to ensure her child's success. Although the strategy often backfires. So she's kind of drawing the analogy between the current SEC stance and helicopter mothers, mothers that really hover over the children, hoping that they would not make a mistake, but that strategy isn't very successful. That's what she's saying here. She's essentially taking the role and say, you know what? Regulation over regulatory, over regulation is a problem. And what's important is that in this speech, she refers directly to cryptocurrencies. The focus on the lack of regulation of cryptocurrencies particularly troubled me. So this is referring to the fact that the SEC is, well, focusing on the fact that there is not enough regulation and hence they're not approving the ETF. What authority do we have to require that assets underlying securities be regulated as if their securities. Even if we have the authority, private markets can and do regulate themselves. The crypto community includes a lot of people who are willing to speed up, speak up rather, criticize one another and bring light technological corporate governance under perceived weaknesses in cryptocurrencies. So this is quite important here. She's just basically saying, yeah, you know what? Let's let's stop trying to over-regulate. Let's let the markets be markets. Let free markets be markets, right? Let private markets do the regulating themselves. There are people in cryptocurrencies that are trying to criticize each other, that this needs to be governed by crypto, not by the government. And in very much sense saying, you know what? We should allow ETFs to go through. And one final bit that was quite interesting is that because most of us regulators are neither entrepreneurs or technologists, we should respond to attempts to bring innovation solutions in the financial markets with appropriate degree of humility. Basically saying, you know what? The SEC doesn't know best when it comes to tech. Let the tech people deal with tech and don't over-regulate this. So it's very, very, I definitely feel that she's on our side, but at the same time, she's finding other people who are trying, other commissioners, of course, who are trying to overly regulate this space. And right now the current stance, the current kind of, uh, wait is for the September 30th announcement of whether the CBOE ETF can get approved or not. But at this current point, it might be the case that they might wait a little bit further. There aren't any kind of developments pushing and saying, you know what? That ETF has been approved or has been insured. So it might be the case. And that's my personal opinion that right now there might be a further delay on that ETF. And once that's through, that's going to be a big change because, well, that's going to kind of officially announced that, well, the SEC is going to kind of allow this to happen and going to pave way for additional ETFs. And that's why everyone's excited and looking to this announcement now. Okay. So even though there's positive news and positive people coming out from the SEC to say, you know what, let's not overregulate the crypto markets are still tumbling. And one of the reasons why I think this is, I posted this out on Instagram and talked about this, which is the mysterious 720 million Bitcoin that's moving. Well, this giant wallet, which has been in hibernation for some time and it's moving, it's going to exchanges and people are afraid of a large sell off. So this has been a fear in crypto for, especially Bitcoin for a long time because, well, there are these huge whales in crypto. And if they move a lot at a single point of time, that might potentially crash the markets, especially if our volumes that we're seeing are not as big as they are. So on top of that, I want to say, of course, because we're in a bear market, any news like this kind of freaks these traders out. But what I want to say is that this is very hard to time just because you see that money moving. It doesn't mean they're selling and you don't have comprehensive proof that they're dumping or buying other coins because you're not in control of the market. So just because we know this, we know that there is this potential risk doesn't mean definitively that this is exactly what's happening. So my two cents on the market right now is because we have pretty much what is very paper thin volumes. We have these huge spike price changes. If you look at it, we tend to have like, if you look at this past whole month, crypto shoots up and down, especially if you look at Ethereum and Bitcoin as well. It's happened right now. Everyone's trigger happy. Everyone's fingers are on the triggers and it's extremely, extremely hard to predict what's going to happen. It's very clear. Just look at that, like six to seven of September, that huge dip. And all of these are spike changes. And what that tells us is that there are big movers causing big changes. But the problem is to predict which direction is going to go. It's extremely hard because if you're not the one in control, then you don't know what's going to happen. That's the the only person who knows is the person who's buying or selling because we can be prone to manipulation so-called. So what's important right now, and I've stated this before, is pacing. Instead of going balls deep all at once, pacing yourself, considering this as a marathon rather than a sprint. That's what's going to be important here. And that's the strategy that I'm personally following. All right, looking at Bitfinex as well, this is kind of a slap in the face to Shapeshit because Shapeshit recently said, you know what, we have to do KYC. It used to be the way that everyone exchanged the coins easily. Right now, Bitfinex is launching a decentralized Ethereum trading platform, Iffinex, and they explicitly don't require KYC or signups. So this is kind of interesting. They're moving into a space that they know people want. They know people want to trade without someone spying on them, especially on some exchanges where you don't really might not even want to trust those exchanges with your information. So what Iffinex is trying to do is it's trying to fill the gap that Shapeshit is leaving. And what we see is that, and this is why I'm not too concerned about exchanges. There's always, if an exchanges goes too far and requires way too much regulation, there's going to be another one that tries to take its place. The market naturally corrects itself. All right, moving on to Steam. There was a little bit of FUD on Steam earlier this few days, because what happened was that the Steam blockchain and Steam itself was taken offline due to a problem with their update, with their hard fork. So this was an announcement made by Steam. They're saying, yeah, we were aware of the problem with the Steam blockchain and hard at work to get it resolved. Right now, I do want to say that the witnesses are coming, that the newest update is that the witnesses are coming back online and producing blocks. The network is becoming more stable. We are working to get our node back online with a fix. So it seems like one of their updates, it didn't go as well as planned. So that took the witnesses, which are the block producers offline. But right now it seems like it is moving back. And this is something that we noticed with Steam it and sometimes with EOS as well, because they're created by the same guy where the sense that there is this potential threat to a network, if there's upgrades. And what we can see here is that, well, you know what, let FUD be FUD, things do get fixed. So that's why today, if you look at CoinMarketCap, surprisingly, the biggest change is actually Steam because now it's back online with the newest updates after all that FUD. So what does this tell us? It tells us that we still need to give blockchain time. Not all updates are going to be very crisp and clean, especially if they rely on a few kind of delegated block producers, just like product producers or witnesses. If that is the case, it might be that some updates don't go well. But the good news with that kind of update system is that hard works, forks, or upgrades can come very quickly and the network can fix itself fast. So it's always a compromise. The more decentralized, the more people who are producing and participating in block production, the harder it is to upgrade the network, the smaller number of people there are. That means, well, it's going to be more drastic changes can happen more quickly. But the side effect is that, well, not many people are participating in block production. Lastly, I want to talk about from CEOs and crypto, because I want to highlight this point, which is that what's happening this year is that more CEOs are paying attention to cryptocurrency. So we saw Elon Musk come out earlier this year reading a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency book. And now he's going to ask Jack Parmer, the creator of Dogecoin, that he's asking him, you know, how do you combat those annoying cryptocurrency scammers on Twitter? So what's quite obvious here is that, so what we can take from this is that Elon Musk is actively looking at the cryptocurrency space. They're definitely not thinking this is a scam. You know, the fact that he's asking people in the crypto community for help shows that he definitely doesn't consider crypto scam and he looks at crypto as an opportunity, but he hasn't announced anything major yet. So yeah, he's reading this book, but he hasn't announced anything major. And this is what we're seeing with CEOs worldwide. It's, uh, they're taking notice of crypto, but they haven't jumped right in yet. But the keyword emphasis is yet. And let's look at another comment as well by Jack Ma. Let me just, so Jack Ma recently gave a talk on blockchain and he's basically saying it's meaningless without proper integration. And I think the keyword is about deliverables here. What can blockchain technology deliver and improve? And we've been talking about a lot of potential applications, but of course, a lot of these applications and adoption takes a lot of time. So we've seen previously, especially with enterprise integration, we've seen a lot of what the chain is doing, but a lot of criticism comes from the actual use cases. Okay. Which companies are actually using it right now and how many and where they're applying it, but the problem with corporate integration takes a long ass time. It's one of the saddest parts where we as enthusiasts and people who are looking at the space, we see announcements come up, but we don't realize how long it actually takes to get those products running. For example, anti-counterfeit or tracking cars on the blockchain. These are all application use cases, or even Alibaba payment based or Alibaba product tracking. All of these things take a lot of time. And unfortunately we still have to kind of bear through and wait for those changes to come. Markets can move in seconds, but technology, even developing that technology takes months and then fully integrating something takes maybe even years. So that's the stage right now. We're trying to bring value through proper integration and people are looking at it. So Jack Musk looking at it. Elon Musk is looking at it. They might be doing something in the background. We just don't know what, but at the end of the day, it's kind of a change in paradigm before people didn't care about crypto. Now it's about how to apply it properly. And that's our story for the rest of this year. How do we apply it? And also, how do we apply it safely? Coming up, just consensus in Singapore. So what's happening is I'm not going to go to consensus in Singapore this year. New York was pretty huge. I did a big report on that. And what's really important about consensus in Singapore now is that I want to use this as a way to read the current market situation. So I have a friend that's going to consensus and we're going to maybe get some mini updates from him. I'm trying to get him some video footage and I'm trying to get some kind of just general comments. You know, are there long lines waiting for tickets that will show a healthy amount of new people coming in or are the, you know, talks being packed? Are the events at night, are they filled with new people or old people? These are information points I want to take in from consensus and you can get those updates. We're going to update you guys on Instagram on Twitter. So whilst I'm not going there personally, one of my friends are, and he's going to try, he's going to provide that information for you guys. In terms of upcoming events as well, I'm going to be away for three more days. So I know that's another little gap between the news updates, but I'm going to take a personal vacation to get a little bit of sunshine yet again. So I'll be back next week formally, and I'll try to update you guys on Instagram and Twitter during the meanwhile. So be sure to follow me on Instagram. It's at box money. I'll put a link down below and I hope you guys stay safe. So at the end of the day, I really hope you guys enjoyed this episode. What do you guys think about this current stance on the SEC? Are you kind of looking forward to ETF or are you bracing yourselves for another potential delay? I'd love to hear what you think in the the comments section below. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. See you next time.