In the world of crypto, there are a host of principalities and powers
that are vying for influence, control and history-changing amounts of wealth.
They see this as a moment to become the next Carnegie, Vanderbilt or Rockefeller.
But the power barons of the early 20th century have businesses,
and decision making was centralized in one person.
To grab a large slice of the pie today, it's better to operate as a cartel.
What's a cartel?
And how is the Digital Currency Group positioning itself as the first cartel in crypto?
I'm going to break it down for you.
Try not to get killed.
Let's get it!
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In this video, we continue our investigation into the Digital Currency Group.
I'm going to take a moment to show you the scope of what is at stake in crypto.
But before we get started,
if you haven't seen part 1 of this series, it's going to be tough to follow along with the details.
I highly suggest you click this link above to watch part 1 before watching this video.
What is driving all these power players into the cryptoverse as fast as they can get in?
This is a once in a millennium moment to acquire a new form of money.
But it's also a new form of commerce.
The American power barons of the 20th century
were in a position to corner the market on new forms of commerce and new technologies
to speed up commerce, railroads, cars, electricity, industrial production methods and so on.
This meant that if you were in the right place in the late 1800s and did the work,
you can make historical amounts of money.
These men had wealth beyond comprehension.
John D. Rockefeller had the ability to pay off the entire debt of the US government back in 1914.
Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller alone was worth more than two times the current richest man alive,
Jeff Bezos.
Jeff has a measly $200 billion.
Rockefeller would be over $400 billion.
And that's just in cash.
He owned a ton of property also.
Crypto is the new frontier but not just of the next age in commerce,
but in money itself.
That's why connected people are forming groups to influence, manipulate and bully the other players out.
It's easier to do this in a group.
It makes you harder to target by other groups and governments.
A group of business owners that are colluding to manipulate a market is called a cartel,
which is derived from the Latin word for card.
You hand in a written challenge to your enemies on a tiny cartel to do business.
It was a sign you wanted to collude.
Fast forward to 2011,
and you see the same game being played.
Barry Silbert sells his alternative investment platform, SecondMarket, to the Nasdaq company.
Yes, the Nasdaq that your parents have their retirement in.
That's not a government entity.
It's a publicly traded company.
So Barry and the Nasdaq have a pretty good relationship.
But the connection to the Nasdaq is very interesting when we focus on one man,
Glenn H. Hutchins.
Glenn was the director of the Nasdaq and currently sits on the board of the New York Federal Reserve.
But let's dig a little deeper.
See this.
Glenn is on the board of the Singapore Government Investment Corporation,
or the GIC.
Do you know what company is under the ownership of the GIC?
Temasek
The very company that bought Barry Silbert’s SecondMarket company
gave him the capital to start the Digital Currency Group.
It's important to understand that the Digital Currency Group has deep connections
to the highest levels of corporate and governmental power.
Glenn Hutchins himself worked in the Obama White House
and is serving on the board for the Center for American Progress.
And, oh, look.
He's part of the World Economic Forum, too.
Oh, goody!
It's the you'll-own-nothing-and-be-happy folks.
Nothing says freedom more than stripping property rights from the individual, am I right?
It's important to note that Barry Silbert, or someone working on his behalf,
has put considerable effort into scrubbing the internet for anything related to his past.
Online, he's a ghost.
Nothing outside of SecondMarket or the DCG shows up.
Even after digging.
You can’t even find his date of birth.
When were you born, Barry?
We can go further down the rabbit hole on the web of the connections behind the DCG,
but that would take a long time and would involve one of those boards with strings and thumbtacks
that they use to track serial killers in the movies.
You know, like the one from Se7en or Zodiac.
Let's take a look at some of the simple and not so simple ways
they are influencing the market right now.
First of all,
if you aren't in the DCG, you are their enemy,
or, at the very least, in their way.
They use their mouthpiece, CoinDesk, to push the narratives they want,
silence the voices they don't like.
If you're a project like Cardano, they really don't like you.
DCG hates Cardano and its founder Charles Hoskinson.
That’s no more apparent than how the other week they had one of their senior editors
write an article comparing the work that Charles and IOHK are doing in Africa
to being a European colonizer.
They downplayed the effects of smart contract technology like Cardano would have
on struggling African nations.
It was pure FUD propaganda.
That's just one example.
If you look at a DeFi project like our buddies at THORChain,
CoinDesk is happy to run article after article about the hacks that they suffered this year,
with no positive news coverage at all.
I wonder why that is.
THORChain has had great price action this year even through the hacks.
The community is solid, and they're continually updating their platform.
Oh, wait.
It's not in the DCG.
And it supports Ethereum and is a full-blooded DeFi liquidity pool provider.
It's everything that DCG hates.
In fact, if you search for THORChain on CoinDesk,
you'll find article after article about THORChain FUD
and then boom!
And a glowing review about Conflux, a crypto liquidity protocol run out of China?
This is intentional.
Don't forget that.
We've shown you the ties DCG has to China in part 1.
But let's look at the more subtle approaches that DCG takes when it comes to messaging.
XRP is the crypto from Ripple Labs.
It's also controlled by the DCG.
But Ripple has had a lot of drama happening over the past few years.
After they got sued by the SEC,
all the major exchanges pulled XRP from their list of tradable assets.
To save face, even Coinbase took it down.
And they're part of the DCG portfolio.
CoinDesk never did that.
The ticker on their website, the most traffic crypto news site in the world,
has never taken XRP off their ticker.
It's been right next to Ethereum and Bitcoin the whole time.
That's a subtle but important detail.
CoinDesk knew that XRP wasn't going anywhere
because the DCG is working with Ripple Labs to make XRP and the projects from XRPL
tokens become the cryptocurrency standard between the financial institutions.
Remember Glenn H. Hutchins from earlier?
That’s not a coincidence.
I believe that this whole SEC drama is a smokescreen
for Ripple Labs to continue development out of the public eye,
secure all their deals well ahead of the competition.
That's how a cartel works.
They collude and manipulate.
Connect the dots, BitSquad.
You're swimming with the whales.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.