How Safe is Your Crypto?

If there is one thing that the past 6 months have taught us about crypto, it’s that no matter how much you trust an exchange or lending service, your funds are never 100% secure.

That’s because, as long as someone else holds the keys to your cryptocurrency, you have no control over it. All you hold is an IOU in the hope that the exchange will make good on it when you want to make a withdrawal.

That is why I and many others have always stressed: Not your keys, not your crypto!

To that end, the only way to make sure that you control your own keys is to self-custody your crypto. That is to say, you move the funds into a wallet where you have full control of the private keys.

There are a number of ways to do this and they all come with their own pros and cons. In my latest video, I take you through Self-Custody 101, and share some essential hints and tips you need to consider when taking control of your crypto.

You can watch that here.

📊 My Personal Portfolio 📊

USDC 38.52% | ETH 26.04% | BTC 25.06% | ATOM 4.01% | DOT 1.72% | MATIC 1.26% | RUNE 1.22% | ADA 0.87% | INJ 0.74% | NEAR 0.50%

📈 Guy’s Forward Guidance 📈

For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a rare decoupling of the stock market and the crypto market. This is of course due to the FTX-Alameda situation, which continues to evolve. However, I think we may soon start to see the correlation returning, and this is because of an upcoming macro milestone: the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s most recent meeting. The Fed minutes are scheduled to be released on Wednesday, 13th November at 2pm, so set your alarms.

If you watched our video about the Fed’s recent press conference, you’ll know there’s speculation that Fed chairman Jerome Powell is starting to face lots of pushback from other Fed governors over his constant rate hikes. It’s safe to say that there is some disagreement there, and this is evident in the mixed messages we’ve seen since then. If it turns out that Jerome is getting lots of pushback, this could cause crypto and stocks to pump.

If there is consensus about the rate hikes, well, you know what’ll happen…

For what it’s worth, the BTC charts suggest that we’re already extremely oversold on the weekly and the daily. This means it’s unlikely that we’re going to be headed lower in the short term. I reckon this partially depends on whether we get more bombshells from the FTX-Alameda situation. A former Credit Suisse analyst happens to think that FTX was the last crypto company to blow up for this cycle. Given Alameda Research’s relationship with Tether, I can’t necessarily say I agree.

Still, this doesn’t mean that crypto couldn’t trade sideways for another few weeks. This has been the trend as of late, and it’s one that’s likely to continue, given the outcome of the midterm elections in the United States. The Republicans didn’t gain nearly as much ground as they were hoping. This is likely to lead to lots of political gridlock on a number of polarising issues, which will certainly take precedence over cryptocurrency. The war in Ukraine is an easy example here.

Speaking of which, we’re fast approaching winter. With many European countries expected to see their first snowfall in the coming weeks, the energy crunch that experts have been warning about for months could finally come. If you think that the claims of this energy crisis are exaggerated, consider that German banks are stacking cash in the event of blackouts. Funny how people ditch digital currencies in times of crisis. I suppose there’s a case for gold after all!

Jokes aside, there is going to be extreme pressure for peace in Europe as temperatures continue to drop. There have literally been hundreds of protests on the continent over the last few weeks that have garnered next to no media coverage. Everyone is upset about the cost of living, and it’s bad optics to be sending large amounts of food, energy, and money to a foreign country in the name of a war that nobody wants. It looks like Russia could use a ceasefire too.

Given all that, it’s not impossible that a resolution to the war in Ukraine could be imminent. The alternative is that the people of Europe revolt against their governments. This would be bad for both Europe and the United States, which has been leveraging the continent for this obvious proxy war. Then again, a ceasefire or even a peace deal probably wouldn’t be enough to restore oil and gas flows to Europe. This means that inflation will continue in the UK and elsewhere.

And the central banks will keep raising rates until something breaks…

🇺🇸 Is Twitter In Trouble? 🇺🇸

Not sure if you guys have seen the news, but hundreds of Twitter employees have reportedly started to quit because they refuse to comply with Elon Musk’s orders to do “long hours at high intensity.” Sounds like your average day at Coin Bureau. This has led to concerns that the social media platform could soon stop functioning. To paraphrase crypto analyst Eric Wall, ‘the crypto market can handle FTX, Genesis, and other crypto companies going under. But if Twitter breaks, then crypto really will be in trouble.’

And I think he’s spot on.

This is simply because it has been a war of information and always will be. Imagine a scenario where every single crypto project that’s in development reached its final form. Imagine that we had a decentralised store of value, a decentralised currency, a decentralised identity, and decentralised banking services. Would any of it matter if nobody knew that these technologies existed or how to access them? Obviously not, which is why governments censors so much.

Unfortunately for these governments, their citizens are quickly becoming aware of cryptocurrency, and its adoption has been rapidly rising. This is because the average person can see that the financial system is corrupt, that basically all the money in circulation is just debt, and that the central banks can print this debt money whenever they want. This is why you’re starting to see governments launch their own crypto education programs that paint crypto in a very bad light.

The thing is that, so long as Twitter and other open social media platforms are around, the government’s propaganda will be ineffective. It definitely doesn’t help that Twitter’s new big bird has been defecating on establishment journalists while elevating citizen journalism. This is something Elon has admitted the elites will get in the way of. It would be convenient if Twitter happens to collapse under Elon’s leadership. It’s easy to forget that he’s technically an elite…

Conspiracies aside, I find it very hard to see how governments won’t stop cracking down on information about cryptocurrency in the coming years. We’ve already seen them step up their censorship efforts for things like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Europe and others recently passed online censorship bills. From the outside looking in you’d think that they’re preparing for another wave of censorship. Their fact-checking of CBDC memes says it all.

If that didn’t make it clear enough, I personally believe that the upcoming rollout of CBDCs could be the catalyst for the next wave of censorship. I’m sure we will hear no shortage of chatter about accounts and transactions being restricted, only to have the media come out and debunk these claims. It will be hard to debunk your lying eyes, but news of Intel rolling out a deep fake video detector makes me wonder if real contrarian video content will be labelled fake. Spooky.

In sum, I sense that a dam is slowly being built around the free flow of information and money online. After all, those are the only two technologies you need to topple increasingly totalitarian governments.

This doesn’t mean that this censorship will come tomorrow. History suggests that it will be introduced in incremental steps. The downside of this devilish strategy is that it gives defectors time to build up decentralised defences. On that note…

📱 Decentralised Social Media 📱

Decentralised social media platforms offer users the flexibility to proactively choose the content or communities they wish to engage with. To put it simply, if a user doesn’t like the rules set by a particular server in a decentralised social media network, they can just hop to another one on the same network.

Contrary to crypto wisdom, a decentralised social media platform does not necessarily use a blockchain, though there are some that do. Mastodon is a great example of a blockchain-free decentralised social media platform.

Coincidentally, Mastodon saw a significant uptick in user registrations around the time Twitter lost a lot of its users. It is also similar to Twitter, in the sense that users of Mastodon can post 500 character long “toots” similar to the 280 characters long “tweets” that Twitter features.

However, unlike Twitter, Mastodon users can see a range of content such as pictures, videos, pdfs, books etc and not just tweets… sorry, toots. This is due to being built using the decentralised social media protocol called ‘ActivityPub.’

The ActivityPub protocol allows decentralised media platforms built on it to communicate with each other. Currently, there are a range of social media network alternatives that have made use of it, such as PeerTube, Plume, and PixelFed to name a few.

Though I have to say, this model does need you to place a lot of trust in the people hosting the servers. Because, provided they have sufficient technical skills, they can theoretically read all of your data on the server, if they are so inclined. This includes any DMs you send. Of course, this risk also exists with centralised social media platforms, but we can take solace in the fact that centralised media platforms (in theory) are regulated and can be prosecuted for misuse of user data.

Having said that, one might prefer blockchain-based decentralised social media networks such as LBRY and the Lens Protocol, which could arguably offer a more secure and private decentralised social media. Though, I have to point out once again that the US regulators are not exactly big fans of blockchain-based decentralised social media networks. In fact, LBRY just lost a case against the SEC last week.

There could definitely be some privacy-focused decentralised social media networks that I’ve missed out on. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the decentralised social media ecosystem is still at a very nascent stage. Though I’m confident that we will see significant growth and a resulting shift from centralised to decentralised social media in the next few years.

🔥 Deal of The Week 🔥

With Christmas just around the corner, many of you are probably wondering what to get that special someone.

The Coin Bureau store has everything that a crypto nutcase could possibly want - from crypto socks, to hoodies, to mugs and much more!

Also, by buying our merch you are supporting the whole Coin Bureau Team and helping us continue to make that educational crypto content. We’d certainly appreciate that support 🙏

👉 Check out the Coin Bureau merch store!

🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

• Saudi Arabia’s trillion-dollar city
• Blackrock’s ESG investing is over: what it means…
• SoRare Review: Fantasy Sports & NFTs
• FTX bankruptcy: What you need to know!
• An analysis into exchange reserves: Time to worry?
• Bullish crypto catalysts: Is there still hope?
• Goldman’s Latest Inflation Report

🏆 What's New At CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

✅ Trezor Model T Review: The Safest Way to Store Your Crypto!

✅ Trezor One Review: The Most Trusted Wallet for SAFE Crypto Storage!

That’s all for now folks! During these uncertain times, the Coin Bureau Team will continue to do our utmost to provide balanced educational content that you can count on.

So, thanks for your continued support and don’t forget to check out our merch store when you have a second.

Guy your crypto guy