Did The Government Just Make Bitcoin Legal? | Mark Moss

But the governments are just going to make Bitcoin illegal, right? Well, that’s the number one thing that I’ve heard. For any of you that don’t believe in Bitcoin’s future, it seems to be the most common excuse or objection, I would say. And you know, it’s understandable because, of course, governments hate competition. But as I’ve argued for years, who are they? Like, the government is not a monolith. And there’s some governments that are not on the US dollar that are more for it, like El Salvador. And there’s certainly ones on the US dollar that are certainly against it.

But even inside the government, there’s differences of opinions. And so we’re seeing this play out in real time. Just last week, the US government, the house, passed a bill that changes all of this. It takes away the mystery, takes away the debate, and the risk of owning Bitcoin is now gone. So in this video, I’m going to break down the specific threats Bitcoin has been facing, what the US government just did to secure Bitcoin’s future, how this impacts the future of Bitcoin and its users. And of course, how you and I should be thinking of this as Bitcoin investors.

So let’s go. All right, welcome back. If you’re new to the channel, my name is Mark Moss. I make these videos to, of course, change the way you think about money. And I started this channel to talk about Bitcoin. I’ve been talking about Bitcoin nonstop since about 2016. You see me talking about Bitcoin on all the biggest stages around the world. And as I’ve talked to thousands, tens of thousands, I’ve seen thousands of comments just a week coming across my videos, almost the number one comment is always that the government, they they will ban Bitcoin.

And like I said, it’s understandable. But like I said, first of all, who are they that are going to make this illegal? So is it they who have control over the dollar like the US? Okay, but what about they who don’t have the dollar, right? Which government is going to win the race for the dollar? So there’s a lot of this, right? But we’ve seen that there are specific attacks. And so it’s easy to understand who they are, the people who are attacking Bitcoin. And so for example, in the United States and most of the West, we saw in 2017, what was called chokepoint 1.0.

It’s actually what got me on YouTube in the first place. I was writing a cryptocurrency newsletter, I was running ads on Facebook and Google for it. And as Bitcoin went from about $1,000 in January of 2017 to about $20,000 in December of 2017, simultaneously, in a coordinated attack, instantly, we had a couple of things happen chokepoint 1.0. One, we saw banks and credit cards were not allowing money to go from your bank to cryptocurrency exchanges. So if you can’t buy it, that’s that’s pretty bad, it’s going to go down. Number two, again, running ads on Facebook and Google at the time, they banned all advertising about cryptocurrencies.

So that was chokepoint 1.0. And now we’ve seen chokepoint 2.0 coming, which is sort of the same thing. In my fund, I have a fund called the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. And because Bitcoin is in the name, as investors were sending money to our fund, a lot of the banks block that because Bitcoin was the name, I even had somebody working for me, a contractor and in the name of their corporation had the word Bitcoin. And I was using a payment service called Veeam. And Veeam shut down my entire account, because I was sending money to somebody had Bitcoin in their name.

So we’ve seen plenty of attacks, right? I’m not, I’m not saying there’s not chokepoint 1.0, chokepoint 2.0. Those are real. We saw the FTX scandal, all that that happened there. And more recently, we’ve seen Elizabeth Warren inside the government and Gary Gensler on both basically the sort of tech czars in the bite administration have been very anti cryptocurrency. As a matter of fact, Elizabeth Warren is literally running on an anti crypto campaign. But just like there’s lots of dark spots, there’s also been lots of bright spots going on as well.

And so we’ve seen the political winds sort of shifting, if you will, and we’ve seen them happening from a local level, a state level, and all the way up to a federal level. So sort of like it’s supposed to be done in the United States, we have a decentralized form of governance supposed to be a republic. And the states are supposed to be independent. And this is the way we’ve seen it happen in other areas. So let’s just take a take an example of like marijuana. It was it was legal federally, it was legal in every state, but then one state in the US decided to legalize marijuana, and then a second state and then a third state.

And now we’re at the point where President Biden is saying that they want to legalize it. And so we see the state starting to adopt it, and it moves up to a federal level. And that’s exactly the path that Bitcoin seems to be taking. So when China banned Bitcoin mining, all of the Bitcoin miners had to leave China, a big majority of them came to the United States with Texas and other energy rich states being the big beneficiary of this. So they moved into Texas with cheap energy across the bacon shell, we saw them up into Oklahoma, North Dakota, Wyoming, etc.

And of course, they liked that and that started to shift the political winds. We saw Governor Abbott of Texas, he was quick to jump on this in June of 2021. He tweeted out that Texas will be the crypto leader. And most other of the red states seem to follow. We’re paying attention, we seem to have red states and blue states doing almost the exact opposite, whether it comes down to banking or pandemic laws and even cryptocurrencies like this. So the red states are all following suit. We saw Kentucky offer tax breaks for miners to come to the state.

We saw Virginia signed groundbreaking bill clearing the way for banks to hold customers crypto assets. In Idaho, they passed the digital assets act that created a broad framework for cryptocurrency regulation. We saw in Idaho that new law specifically excludes virtual currencies from regulation under state securities laws. So they’re putting laws in place that basically prevent the government from encroaching. We’ll come back to more on that in a minute. We saw Washington, the state of Washington signed a new law establishing the Washington state blockchain work group, and they aimed at new technology and establishing partnerships between the state and the industry.

In Utah in March, Republican governor Spencer Cox signed a bill that allows state and local governments to accept payments in cryptocurrencies. I mean, there’s a lot of things going on in a lot of those states. I don’t want to go through them all, but North Dakota, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Nebraska, they are all getting on board, but it wasn’t just the states. Then we saw the finance industry get involved. We saw BlackRock, we saw Fidelity, two of the largest asset managers in the world jumped on and started offering Bitcoin ETFs. Now, I’m no fan of BlackRock.

I’ve been very vocal. I call them the evil empire, if you will, they’ve done lots of things like ESG policies that I don’t agree with using your money against you, if you will. However, BlackRock is sort of this semi quasi arm of the government. And if they’re launching a Bitcoin ETF, what do you think the chances the government’s going to make that illegal and shut them out? Almost none. So what if BlackRock was really put there by the government to start pulling in a bunch of Bitcoin? A lot of people think that now BlackRock has some control over the network, and maybe it sort of was.

It started sort of to seem like that in the sense where maybe they want us to own Bitcoin through BlackRock, through an ETF, but we don’t actually own it. We don’t actually have custody of it. You see, in a debt based monetary system, like we live in this world today, they don’t want you to own anything. As a matter of fact, we really can’t own anything. For example, pay your house off free and clear cash. Well, if you don’t pay your monthly payments to the government for your taxes, you’re gonna lose it.

What about the money in your bank? Well, you don’t own that legally. Legally, that money is owed to you by the bank. It’s a big deal. Big difference. What about stocks? You own Apple, Tesla, Google, whatever. No, you don’t. That stock is owed to you from your broker. And the gold in your ETF is owed to you from the ETF. And they want the Bitcoin in the ETF to be owed to you as well. So we’re seeing this happening. We’re seeing increased attacks by again, Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler. And it seemed like to me, the latest attack is going to be on self custody.

Okay, okay. So we’re not going to outright ban Bitcoin. But what we could do is we could take away your right to own it outright, just like they do with all the other assets. Okay, but here’s where things get good. So the state of Oklahoma came out with a brand new bill called OKHB3594. This bill now protects the fundamental Bitcoin rights. This bill was signed into law by Governor Kevin Stitt and it’s going to go into effect this year, November 1st, 2024. And basically under the bill, Oklahoma bans the restricting of, let me break that down.

They ban the government being able to restrict or outlaw the use of the self custody of digital assets using a self hosted wallet or hardware wallet. So basically, they’re guaranteeing your right to own it. Now let me break this down. Now, if you’re not in the United States, maybe this doesn’t make sense to you. Basically in the United States, or as we call it the land of the free, we are free people. This means we are free to do what we want. Laws do not give us freedoms. Laws do not tell us what we can do.

Laws take away our freedoms. Laws tell us what we cannot do. And so when it comes down to like the United States Constitution, the Constitution of the United States is not laws that tell us what to do, but rather their laws that prohibit the government from encroaching and taking away our laws. And so in fear that the government could try to take away our right to have Bitcoin or custody Bitcoin, the state of Oklahoma passed a bill to prevent the government from taking away that right. But that’s just the state. Now, remember, just like marijuana, we talked about going from states to federal, and this is exactly what’s happened under now, what’s called FIT or fit 21 21.

I don’t know, maybe for the 21 or the 2.1 for the 21 million Bitcoin that we have, but it was just passed last week in the U S house. This is H R four, seven, six, three. And it’s basically what’s called the financial innovation and technology for the 21st century act. And surprisingly, it seems to have many provisions for again, self custody. As a matter of fact, in section one, oh five D one is called the self custody maintenance. And it basically protects our ability to self custody. It says, quote, this section explicitly prevents fence and financial crimes enforcement network from issuing any rule or order that would prohibit us individuals from maintaining hardware or software wallets.

So basically what this means is that you can securely store your digital assets without any fear of new regulations forcing you to rely on third party custodians. In section one oh five D one transactional freedom, or basically it’s freedom to transact, it ensures that individuals can freely conduct transactions with their digital assets for any lawful purpose. Now this protection is vital for maintaining the fluidity for the autonomy of personal digit asset management. Okay. So as you can see, your rights have now been guaranteed. Well, not a hundred percent, but they’re almost there.

I mean, at least in Oklahoma, but in the United States, the house has passed this. It hasn’t quite got through the Senate yet. So we’ll see how that goes. I’m going to keep you updated. Now while I’m at it real quick, I do just want to shout out to the show sponsor, which is Trezor hardware wallets. If you want to secure your Bitcoin, which is now guaranteed your right by Oklahoma law and hopefully soon us law, you should custody your own Bitcoin. Don’t trust it on an exchange. I’ve lost up to now millions of dollars of Bitcoin by doing that.

You want to custody your own with a hardware wallet like Trezor, basically it secures your key. You plug it into your computer when you want to sign a transaction, you unplug it and put it in your safe when you’re done. I’ve used Trezor for ever now about seven years because I think it’s the easiest one. I think it’s the safest one. It’s open source code. So you can trust what’s on there. So check it out. There’s a link down below. If you want to save some money on a Trezor, which I highly recommend, check that out.

But I do want to let you know this isn’t all the way through federally yet, but it’s not the most important piece. What’s important is the direction that we’re going. All right. We’ve seen it go through the States. Now we’re seeing it go through the house and now it has to go through the Senate. But at this point, we’re chipping away and more importantly, we’re not just chipping away. What we’re doing is we’re what’s called crossing the chasm. Now, what does that mean? Crossing the chasm? Well, you’ve probably seen this upside down chart or this bell curve that you see on the screen right here.

And basically this is called the diffusion of innovation. And so when any new innovation comes out, it has stages of adoption. So you have the innovators, the people that invented it, then you have what’s called the true believers. These are the nerds that adopt the, adopt the new technology first. But before the early majority can come in, there’s a, there’s a gap. It’s called the chasm. And that has to be crossed before the early majority comes in. And that chasm is where something has to change mentally, where people, their mindset shifts about it.

So today, a lot of people still think that the government will make it legal, or that it’s just a fad that’s going to go away, or that there’s no use case, but now the government has made it legal, but it’s going to go away. Well, then why have BlackRock and Fidelis spent billions of dollars to bring in these ETFs? Oh, but there’s no use case. Then why do we see the most uses cases of Bitcoin being done in third world countries where they need to get around sanctions. So all of these arguments are basically out the window at this point, which is crossing the chasm, which then means the early majority is ready to start pouring in.

So what does this mean for us? How should we be thinking about this? If we want to buy Bitcoin, we’re a Bitcoin investor, we save in Bitcoin or whatever that is. Well, the way I look at this is that there’s the way professional investors look at this is as a risk adjusted return. What does that mean? You see, most amateurs just think about how much money can I make, but if you’re on Wall Street running a hedge fund, you don’t think about it in terms of that. What you think about it is in terms of a risk adjusted return.

You see a hedge fund will never enter a position without knowing what their loss is. That’s the term hedge fund. They’re hedging their positions. And so to be a more sophisticated investor, you have to start thinking about not just the total return, but the return based off of the risk that you’re entering into. So what do I mean by that? For example, when I started buying Bitcoin in 2015, it was $300. Now that sounds great. And you’d be like, dang, if I could just buy it at $300, I’d put so much money into it.

But at that time, it was so risky. We didn’t know what it was. It had just gone to $1,000 and crashed all the way back down. We didn’t know if it would ever become anything. We didn’t know if Bitcoin or any of the other 50,000, well, there was about two or 3000 cryptocurrencies at the time would win. We didn’t know any of this. And so the risk was so high, you could only put a little bit of money in. By 2017, we had the launch of futures by the CME futures, it had got a lot bigger, had recovered from that crash.

So the risk went down, but you couldn’t buy it 300 anymore. Now you’d be buying at 5,000 or 20,000. And so what we’re seeing is as the risk goes down, the price goes up. Now we have a saying in Bitcoin that everybody will buy at the price they deserve, which sounds a little bit mean. But basically, the way it’s working is that as the risk goes down, we pay higher and higher. And at this point, if you still think there’s risk of the government making it legal, if you still think there’s risk of no use case, if you still think that the public won’t catch on to it, then you haven’t been paying attention.

And that’s fine, you can wait until it gets to a million dollars, which I think it’ll get there by 2030. The risk will be gone. But so will the alpha so will the premium. And where do I think it’s going? Well, if you want to know where I think it’s going to go and the math in order to get there, then you might want to watch this video right here, I’m going to break down exactly where it’s going to go. And you’re not going to believe it. But that’s what I got for this video.

Let me know what you think in the comments down below. Give me a thumbs up if you liked the video. If you don’t thumbs down, that’s okay. But at least tell me why in the comments down below. And that’s what I got to your success. I’m out. [tr:trw].

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