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Jan 24, 2022

"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito." - Anita Roddick

Whale Reads

Bank of Korea Completes First Phase of Digital Currency Pilot (CoinTelegraph): For the last six months, South Korea has been testing distributing and issuing their own CBDC. Phase 2, which involves payments, is expected to be completed by June.

Investor takeaway: Consider investing in countries that are early leaders on CBDCs, like South Korea and China. This is like a "financial arms race," and an early head start may pay huge dividends to their economies over the next 3-5 years.

Your Money is Growing

Why is South Korea turning into a blockchain powerhouse? These stats from the World Bank can help explain it:

See How Did South Korea's Economy Develop So Quickly?

Investor takeaway: Don't confuse South Korea with its politically-charged neighbors to the North. The country is pouring resources into education and R&D, especially in emerging tech like blockchain and the Metaverse. Consider a fund like Vanguard's Pacific Stock Index Fund, which has sizeable holdings in South Korea.

Block Market Daily

with Mati Greenspan

Hi Everyone,

Hope you all had an amazing weekend, despite the poor price action in the markets lately.

With any luck, most of our readers may be able to avoid going to work at McDonald's, but if this momentum continues...who knows?

Of course it's absolutely no comfort to any crypto investors today that the stock markets are taking a hit as well. Apparently, misery doesn't really love company all that much.

Here we can see that the correlation between bitcoin and the S&P 500 has now reached a fresh, all-time high on Coin Metrics.

Even though a correlation of 0.3 is not an extremely strong one, it's pretty clear that we're all in this together.

In this article, we can see a slew of stock analysts who were previously bearish taking their respective victory laps.

I'm about to do the same, but please remember there's very little glory in accurately forecasting red market movements.

The reason for the sell pressure seems clear enough. The Federal Reserve Bank, whose policy makers control monetary policy for the U.S. dollar, is slowly but surely removing liquidity from the markets.

It's a theme we've detailed in these letters over the last few months. Even today's terrible euro zone Purchasing Managers' Index figures don't seem to have impacted investor sentiment.

NFTwitter

As any crypto OG will likely reaffirm, red markets are when stuff gets built. Bull markets are cause for celebration, but it's the bear markets that give us motivation.

Even though Twitter has still not delivered any update on last year's promise that they would be completely decentralizing the platform, they are rolling out features that have a certain level of on-chain integration.

When I say a certain level, we should be clear that it is minimal, but at least it's existent. Here's the announcement from last Thursday.

After trying to access the new feature, I was a bit disappointed to find out that it's only available for iPhone users at this time.

It does seem a bit discriminatory, but personal feelings aside, this is a positive step. Just know that if you see someone on Twitter whose profile picture is a hexagon instead of a circle, their profile photo is certified by Twitter to be stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

This is a great way to reduce the number of impersonator accounts who plague social media these days, pretending to be me or someone else and then asking people to send them money.

It's appalling that it's taken the tech giants this long to do anything about it, and even though I love blockchain, this probably isn't the most natural solution. It's simply the most popular.

New newsletter lineup

As we mentioned last week, we have a brand new lineup!!

Going forward, the schedule for the daily BMJ Newsletter will be as follows. ...

Monday - Mati Greenspan

Tuesday - Evamarie Augustine

Wednesday - Alexandre Lores

Thursday - Mati Greenspan

Friday - John Hargrave

Many thanks, as always, to all our readers. Your participation is what makes this possible.

Have a wonderful week ahead!

Mati Greenspan

Analysis, Advisory, Money Management

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Bitcoin Market Journal is a daily newsletter focusing on blockchain and crypto investing. It is created by Evamarie Augustine, Charles Bovaird, Mati Greenspan, John Hargrave, and Steve Walters.

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