January 23, 2020 — Bloomcast is a weekly web show by BSP-licensed virtual currency exchange BloomX where its host Luis Buenaventura, Ramon Tayag, and Justin David invite local crypto personalities to discuss the important news and developments in the industry for the week.
The first BloomCast episode for 2021 aired on January 19, 2021. To discuss the news, host Luis Buenaventura showed on the screen BitPinas’ Monday Market Post, which discussed the news for the previous week. (Thanks!) This article is meant to provide a few highlights from the show.
(Note that anything pertaining to price predictions is not investment advice.)
Table of Contents.
On Bitcoin Price
Every week, the show’s hosts and guests will try to guess the price of Bitcoin the next time Bloomcast goes live. While they try to make rational price predictions, of course, most of the time these predictions are not based on anything and are more “gut feel”. Just for fun.
But they couldn’t have been more wrong this time around because their predictions in the last December show were way wrong .
Justine: I was predicting where we were, maybe a bit lower but not at this level.
Ramon: I remember I said “$23,500 and you were like whoah wait that’s impossible. (The price was around $17k the last time the show went live in December)
Justine: I think at that time there was a hard dip so maybe everyone was a bit scared.
Price Prediction for Next Week:
(Again, note that anything pertaining to price predictions is not investment advice.)
Luis: I’m gonna go with $47,000 because I think we’ll be testing $50k next time. But it’s mostly because I’ve already got the illustration ready for $50k!
(Luis, when not managing Bloom, spends his time as the artist behind “CryptoPop!” who illustrates every Bitcoin price milestone. Here’s his illustration for $40,000 and $30,000)
Onto the news:
Making Sense of Lindsay Lohan’s Bitcoin Shoutout
The story: Lindsay Lohan got quoted saying Bitcoin is going to go up to $100,000.
Luis: On that day, Bitcoin went up 12% so I don’t know if her shoutout has anything to do about it. But it’s an example wherein the news is not what you think.
It appears Lindsay Lohan was paid $350 on the website Cameo to say whatever the payee wants her to say. It happens that she was asked to say something good about Bitcoin. “Bitcoin is gonna hit $100k and Ethereum $10k”)
LAPU-LAPU Php 5,000 bill
The story: BSP unveiled a Php 5,000 Lapu-Lapu bill
Luis: It might be commemorative but they designed it as legal tender.
Luis believes the Philippines needs a $100 equivalent bill ($100 = Php 5,000 if $1 = Php 50). “The fact that we never had that, our largest bill was $20 bill, it means that it’s very very difficult to move sums of money that are more than the normal sums.”
On the New Head of U.S. SEC and XRP
The story: The new head of SEC is knowledgeable about blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Luis: Here’s the most important part here, he (Gary Gensler) believes XRP is a security.
Mark Vernon: Definitely is.
(Why is this important?)
Luis: A lot of people are buying into XRP this week because it’s still doing well, believe it or not.
Mark: It’s definitely a security and people are buying on the dip, etc, for speculation purposes, but I don’t think it’s going to survive this (legal issue with U.S. SEC) because it’s too obviously a security with people at the top who made a lot of money out of it and they are the ones that are promoting it.
Justine: The U.S. SEC has a strong case that it is a security. I mean if you look at the people who are in charge at Ripple. They have this argument that if XRP is a security so do every other altcoins out there. These guys deserve this.
Mark: There’s a reason why Stellar exists and its founder is the same guy who created Ripple.
Cities and Crypto
The story: Miami mayor wants to put a portion of the city’s treasury into Bitcoin.
(The question now is, will there ba Philippine city that will follow? Someone cited Legaspi. Kookoo said Cebu.)
Comment from the viewer “Eren Kereci”: There are cool local governments arising in the Philippines. They need someone to approach them properly before any shit coin creator goes there and mak them lose faith in crypto before they even have it.
Bitcoin Core Update
The story: Updates to Bitcoin Core
Ramon: We have Taproot and Schnorr which I don’t know if they’re going to arrive at the same time. The miners, I believe around 90% of them are signalling that they are okay with Taproot. What these upgrades allow is more privacy and I don’t think there’s gonna be a limit to multi-sig anymore. You can have a hundred participants and they all come out as one signature.
Luis: Just a quick review, when Bitcoin core releases a new version, the miners and the nodes all have to agree to accept this version. It is not a dictatorship. There needs to be some majority consensus before we move to this version.
Axie Infinity
(KooKoo was asked what’s the latest in Axie Infinity)
(It was noted that there was a decrease in SLP prices as of late. What is the reason?)
KooKoo: Because of the spike in gas fees, the breeders are not keen to breed new Axies. (So in Axie Infinity, the farmers earn SLP when they win a match. This SLP can be sold for Ether or the breeders will buy it, because SLP is needed to breed new Axies). “So the price keeps going down because there are more farmers than breeders or burners of tokens.”
“But right now the price appears to be going up again, because the gas fees are lower so we are able to burn SLPs by breeding Axies and list new Axies to the marketplace.”
“When the gas fees are high, we can’t do anything, and that’s the reason why the team is working on the Ronin sidechain. We’re very near, we’re looking forward to it.”
Luis: I have a question for you, let’s say the Ronin sidechain is up, where all the in-game stuff happens (breeding, selling etc), but if you want to turn SLP back into ETH or move it into Binance, you have to go back to the mainchain right?
Mark: That’s the token bridge so that people can go in and out into the mainnet. But for a lot of people, they don’t need to go back out. 97% of the trading could be just between the players and the breeders, so just like in USDT, when we liquidate BTC for USDT, we can take out USDT (to USD or PHP), but we can also just let the USDT stay on our wallet or exchange and just keep it in the system.
Luis: But if you want to take your SLP earnings and turn it into GCash? Now you do need to go back out right?
Mark: Actually they do not need to. Bloom or us can just have an account on the sidechain, we just “we’ll give you cash for your SLP, and we won’t need to go back to Ethereum so we save ourselves fees and so on. If I got a lot of money on the sidechain, I can always take it out of the system.
KooKoo: There’s a possibility that there will be a stablecoin inside Ronin.
(Luis thinks the problem of gas fees will be around for as long as ETH 2 is not yet out. “It is going to take a while.”)
Luis ended the show highlighting that he wants Bloomcast to be the place where everyone in the crypto PH community can go and talk about and represent what they are doing.
Source: https://bitpinas.com/feature/bloomcast-2020-ep-1-recap-brand-new-year/
