I think the big question is which one gets, gets recorded. So we'll find out in a bit. I'm actually going, hold on one second. Going on your channel right now so I can see the live chat. Yeah, we'll be there. Everybody, welcome to Digital Asset News. Take the top stories and cryptocurrency and digital assets. Big amount of bite-sized pieces. So today, let me pop out the chat so everybody can see what the heck I see. Hello, everybody. Oh, no, I got it. Look at this. How does that mean? Perfect. Okay. Let me put this in real quick. Looks like audio is good, video is good. Everybody's good. Is this Rob's wife? Almost. This is almost Rob's wife. Alex Massioli. So. I just bought BitConnect. You know what? Solid play. I mean, for everybody that's out there that's making all these fantastic games, why not BitConnect? BitConnect 2.0. Just kidding. That's all I scan. Good morning from Texas. How you doing? Hello, hello, hello. Fancy shirt. Super fancy, right? I thought it was appropriate with what's going on in the market. So, everybody welcome to show Alex Massioli from the Alex Massioli show and of course, trade the chain. And he is coming on just to give us a little insight into what smart money does because he knows some of those people. Not to say that specifically that Alex is going to give us financial advice, probably a lot of financial opinion because nothing that we talk about here could be construed as financial advice, right, Alex? That is absolutely correct. Right, so let's start off, huh? Let's get going. I love the whole ADA army is in the chat. Go Cardano. You know, man, everybody's got an army these days, right? And if you don't have an army there's something wrong with you, it seems like. But everybody, and it's good to see and sometimes it's not good to see. It's good to see if you're in that army but if you're outside the army and you talk S about that army, whoo, watch out. The army gets it. I excerpt the army's someone goes, hey, let me, I'm gonna allow that. Let's share this. Let me bring up the rights thing, bup, bup, bup. What I wanna talk about today. Hope everybody's Saturday's going well. Yeah, it's always good to be on the weekend. I know, because no one's doing anything. And I just, I was supposed to go play volleyball today. I just didn't really feel like it. So I'll probably. Yeah, Saturday's, that's your volleyball day. Come on, Rob. It's my volleyball drinking day. Really, I really just drink more than I play volleyball these days, it seems like. Everybody looks forward to that Saturday, El Paso evening live stream. Yeah, so I can make the most ridiculous comments and backtrack the next day. Yeah, that's usually how it works out. So today, I wanna just, because there's been some interesting things going on in the market, right? I mean, with everything that happened with Elon Musk and that whole catastrophe, Alex had a great show which talked about how Elon Musk tweets, put the whole cryptocurrency market into the big S show and what's gonna happen next. So check that out, I'll link it at the end if I can. And I just wanna see just where the market is, where potentially it's going. And then maybe what's gonna happen over the next six months and what's the best, the best investment you can actually pick from. Because this is what I get everywhere, God dang, and Alex, you get this too, right? Everywhere you go, hey, what should I invest in? Hey, what should I invest in? Hey, I see you on YouTube. Hey, what do I invest in? I go to this, me and my friend Jordan, we go to this place called B52's in El Paso and it's got great wings, you guys should go there.  So I got her into crypto. Yeah, it's going pretty good. She's like, so this guy came in and he was telling me about Ethereum and that I should just go all in on Ethereum because it's gonna go up to, she said, oh, is it $30,000 by the end of the year? And I was like, wow, I don't think that's true. But I don't know if you should do that. And then of course my wife's always like, you know, what should I invest in?  So today, let's demystify some of these things and just talk about where things are at right now and where I think they could potentially be going in the next six months. And which one is like risk to reward ratio? We'll go from there. First of all. You have this formula down pat. Two things that the audience wants, what do I invest in and give me a prediction? If you leave either one of those out, shame on us, right?  And so I'm gonna, here's, so we can't get financial advice. So I'm gonna lump, I'm gonna pretend that the entire audience is Rob three years ago. That's a good one. So I'm just gonna be talking to my former self. And Alex will do the same thing. Cause we can't give anybody advice, but maybe we could talk to our former self and tell that person what to do. But first let's take a look at what happened to them.  We're two, I thought we were like 2.4 trillion. Now we're at 2.27 and Bitcoin took a dump again. Yeah, I think from what CJ said on the show the other day, that 47 low, where are we at right now? 48,000, 40,000, 40,000, 40,000. Jesus, how many times has CJ been right? And Monty? Yeah, they both said it. I mean, Monty came out 47 and change is the support, so. Shoot, yeah, when I heard it, I'm like, I can see that, but I'm like, you know what, I always do the same thing. That sounds reasonable, but nah.  Did Ryan give any prediction on Ethereum? Hopefully, I know he didn't give any prediction on Ethereum. The overall consensus on our side of the fence is that we're not gonna see 10,000 anytime soon. 5,000's possible this month with a then a retracement of about 30, 35%. That makes sense, let me see here. Let me hold back, did I miss anything? All right, hold on. Okay, and then let's see, everything's in the red, except for, well actually everything's in the red, for the hour, except for Tether, who cares, nobody cares about Tether. Cardano up 16%, Polkadot up five, but Polkadot was up massively. And let's see, what anything else? Matic, have you guys talked about Matic? Layer two solution? Hey, you know when the Matic, click on Matic.  Look at that, there's price over sentiment and then to the left of that, where's this crypto watch is charting. But yeah, I mean, you can see Matic, a lot of Matic people happy. I think so. What is this? Oh, that's cool, you have the sentiment score. Oh yeah, now you get a visual. You slick son of a, yeah, good for you. You know, I gotta tell you, when Trader Chain first came out, it was a good product and you guys made it better. Pretty nice, okay, well that's enough bragging. I didn't say anything. One major speaks for itself, so Matic's doing pretty good. So good job for all your Matic holders. Ave, your boy Stani, but that's 20% but down 10 or 24 hours. 23, who will be token? No, he cares. Kusama, that is the platform for Polkadot, right? I think, correct me in the comment section. Everything else is pretty much down. So the question then is, what happened to Cardano and what happened to Polkadot? Why are these the rare unicorns out there that are pulling up some big numbers and the other ones are falling to the wayside? Well, let's take a look. First of all, let's start with this little article. So the big question is, just like what I showed you, I have so many tabs open today, just like I showed you with a thumbnail. What would I tell my wife? Well, I'll get to that, but let's take a first. Let's take a look at four crypto projects and some of the stories that are going on. So right now, BlackRock Chief Investment Officer, Rick Ryder thinks Bitcoin is durable. So why do we care about BlackRock? Who is BlackRock? We reason we care about BlackRock is because we got a boatload of money as far as assets under management. We're almost looking at nine trillion- Largest in the world. Largest in the world, that's right. And that's with a T, not with a B, that's a T. That's a trillion, trillion dollars. So their big guy, Rick Ryder, BlackRock's Chief Investment Officer and head of the global allocation team says this, I think is durable, which is cute. That's nice, thanks. He says, I think will be part of the investment arena for years to come. And then this was on, I think it's CNBC Squawk, yeah, CNBC Squawk box. And they pretty much just ask him because of the tweet that Elon put out, which was like, hey, Elon's like, hey, I'm not going to, or we are not going to accept Bitcoin. And we can debate that thing all day. Although, before I get onto it, Alex, did you see Pompiliano's answer to, what's her name, Julia Chatterley at CNBC? Yeah, he took the, I guess in early morning slot, throw him in, he explained the whole renewable energy bit and it's broken down the numbers. It's pretty impressive. Yeah, it was pretty impressive.  Which fair point. Some people will talk trash about anybody.  I personally think he's a pretty smart guy and when he's talking, there was this one question when Chatterley was asking him about, she's like, well, you know, there's other cryptocurrencies that we can use right now that use essentially no mining and absolutely nothing. And the answer he gave was the same answer that I would give when I'm in an interview and I know what to say. I just kind of like screwed around the whole thing and just go, well, you know, this and this and the space rockets and Christopher Columbus and da-da-da. And that's pretty much. And she's like, all right, sure enough. And then, of course, everybody lamp-bastin' but I will say this, you can't know everything because in all honesty, because he and even Chatterley got it wrong because she said, well, we can use Ethereum. And I'm like, no, that's not true because, you know, Ethereum is still a proof of work and tell a year from now. And then she brought up XRP, XRP Army, everybody to rejoice. I know you're out there. And I think she even brought a cordon. I can't remember. And he's just like, just kind of side skirt. He's like, no, no, Bitcoin and energy and things like that. I just thought it was interesting how it was brought about and whatever. All right. He's a reformed maximalist now, I think. You think so? I don't know. I think he's interesting guy. So this is also what he says, writer says. He goes, there's some hurdles to overcome. I think Musk was mentioned one of them. Challenges he currently sees are volatility, regulatory dynamics and fiat currency concerns. But he did say the challenges are real. They will be overcome over time as Bitcoin gets more mature. And he sees Bitcoin as an asset rather than a potential to fix some of the world's current monetary problems. So when I see something like this, I don't know what you think, Alex. When I see something like this, I'm like, this is good because if BlackRock gets into it, it's not just, I mean, it's BlackRock and the people that they talk to and the influence that they have sway over. And when they start talking positively about this, I think it's good for the entire market as Bitcoin comes in. So what do you think? Yeah. First, I just, well, I think when it comes on these large asset managers in these banks, the one thing that they need to do, the more momentum that this gets, and we can pretty much say that Bitcoin is full force momentum, the world knows about it and things like that this year. But one of the things that they can't do is ignore it. So they have to address it no matter what. And right now the momentum is in positive light. So to have the CIO of BlackRock come out and be positive about it, he has to.  Whether the asset burns them in the butt and all of us in the butt at some point is a different story. But I think the demand is largely too far there that they're gonna need to incorporate this into some of their investment products. Yeah, it makes sense, right? So Alex, when you were back at Bequant, Head of Institutional Services and you were talking to all these big institutional players, what was the sentiment then? And then how do you feel the sentiment is now? Is like a total 180 or is it kind of like they were always there doing this thing? Oh, they weren't always there. There was no one there back in the day. And I really do think is whether you like them or you don't like them, Michael Saylor did really take it to the next level on the corporate side with the Bitcoin purchase for his balance sheet. And from there, I mean, I've even shared some of the emails that I've gotten where people are inquiring, how does my business buy Bitcoin for treasury and stuff like that. So I think over the last year, we've actually made leaps and bounds. I would say from this time last year to now has been the biggest move forward in crypto in a long time. Yeah, it's crazy is that to me, I think we're like 40 to 60% through this bull run. And then what's great about it is if you believe in the four year cycles, we got another one right around the corner. So like, I know everybody thinks that they have to get rich today, but that's not how you don't. I mean, let me rephrase that. Let me rephrase that. If you are, let's say you're 95 years old and like you're running out of money, maybe today would be the day that you wanna get rich. But for most people, and I can't speak for you, your goals aren't my goals. You don't have to get rich today and depends on what you wanna do. So- If you're running out of time, you gotta do something now. You gotta do something now. Yeah, you know, put it all in the Shiba Union or whatever else. I'm just kidding. Don't do that. It's crazy. Unless you want to. All right, so that is that part. So I wanna bring out Bitcoin because if for me, like when I tell people what to invest into, look Bitcoin for this cycle, I think the best it can do is maybe a 2x, maybe a 2.5, maybe, I don't know, maybe a three. That's really stretching. I think it can hit 150, but conservatively probably 130 this bull cycle. And then we go from there.  So that's the first one. Second one, let me share my screen. So I wanna move on to Cardano and Polkadot because the whole thing was that, you know, we just talked about how much Cardano went up. Man, I remember when I first started buying Cardano in 2018, it was like pennies. It really was pennies. And then of course, as a reminder, if you haven't gotten one of these called the Stonebook, I still have lost 20,000 ADA from my test net deadless wallet because I didn't write the damn pass raise down. So don't do what I do, link in the description, get one of those books and write everything down. I still can't get that 20,000. And if it goes to five bucks, which I think it's going to, then let me do some quick math. It's like $100,000. Okay, so that's a lot of money.  So the question then is what happened? Because I mean, now we're over $2, Polkadot's pumping. And then this article is pretty good, but it's kind of boring. So I just highlight the good stuff. So because of what Elon Musk said, he said, hey, we're trying to go for an alternative, the Bitcoin's energy, just so you know, Polkadot and Cardano. They are a proof of state consensus algorithm right now. Ethereum is moving into that. Do we know when that's going to happen? ETH 2.0? ETH 2.0? Oh no, ETH 2.0 was already supposed to have happened. It's every year it goes on.  Yeah, I mean, look, everybody misses goals, right? It's just the fact of life. But hopefully Ethereum can keep theirs, it's all a say. And then the last part was, and this is the all summary with Decrypt. They said, well, possibly the thing that wiped out 10,000 from Bitcoin and put it into these proof of state coins like a Cardano and Polkadot is because of just what Elon Musk said.  But I don't think that's it because there's a lot of other proof of state coins that are still in the slum. So to me personally, this is what I think it is. And I've talked about this a lot. And I'm gonna talk about it a lot more until it actually comes to fruition. So this is the ecosystem. Not all of these are gonna make it. You're gonna get some failures. But remember, for Alonzo, for that to come out in August for smart contracts, these things are gonna hit. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a look at all of them. And I'm not gonna put it on Digital Asset News channel because this is just for news and for me and Alex to shoot the bull every so often. What I'm gonna do is put it over on Dan Clips and break these projects down. Things like Sunday Swap, which is the DeFi exchange, PolySwap, another one. I'm gonna take a look at CardStarter, which I think is pretty interesting, just the whole launching platform for Cardano. And then the oracles that they have with Charlie 3 instead of using Chainlink and the other ones. So they got something like that. And, which I thought was interesting because Charlie 3, it even has a, you know, it's already listed. So I'm like, I didn't know that was even a possibility. Then I wanna take a look at as far, what was this one? Blockfrost, where they just, to get actual data into Cardano from all these different apps that they can pull through. I wanna take a look at, what was this one? This one was crazy. The Nifty platform for NFTs, where they're using AI and robots and things to create these NFTs and things like that. I was like, that's interesting. But Nifty is actually owned by Gemini. So I don't know how that actually works out into. And then I wanna talk about Cody. And I think I've listened to a couple of different people out there and Cody Pay looks like one of the real deals. So you're pretty much just bypassing everybody. And as far as like a payment system on top of Cardano. And as far as I know, Cardano system is pretty darn cheap so far. So we're not using these incredible, huge-ass gas fees. And that's what I got for that part. So that's in essence this. And then there was, nah, I don't wanna, there's so many things that I need to go over. But I can't go over here. Oh, and then with like Polkadot. First of all, they got things going on. What is this one? Polkadot decoded type of, what is this? Oh, workshop and bringing everybody together. And since it's coming up, made 19th to the 20th. What is that, next week? And then they've actually deployed the first parachain in the Permit Testnet. And that was just on May 14th.  And I think this makes a lot of sense. Alex, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things from there is, one, I got the team from OCAM, which was on that graphical, coming on next week, they're an IDO. And then two is, you know, when you talk about parachains, way back when, when it was just a sprinkle in somebody's eye, I had the CEO and founder of Moonbeam on. And I think we should get him back. Moonbeam is just, it's just hit popularity now with all the parachain stuff out there. So maybe we'll get him and we'll get to have him on your channel, on the Clips channel or something. So people can, you can grill him. I can't grill anybody. I just got to, first, I got to understand what the heck's going on. And then I can grill, but that's... There's so much tech. It's so hard to understand everything that's happening in the ecosystem these days. There's so much good stuff or interesting stuff at least. It's true. That's why I like, I don't want to overwhelm people on this channel. I just want to put it on Dan Clips and just break it down. It's like the simplest possible thing that I can possibly, I can do and then go from there. And hopefully you can drink all that water from a fire hose as much as possible and get it going. All right. Let me, before we move on to Ethereum. Let me take a look what's going on in the chats and let me ask Alex his price predictions. Cause that's what everybody's here for. Price predictions. Okay, Alex. Give me a price prediction for Bitcoin, Cardano and Polkadot and give me a timeframe too. And no pressure. No pressure whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, I'll do two of those three. I won't do Polkadot. I'll do Cardano. I'm not so sure, I'm not quite sure myself with Polkadot. I'm thinking a timeframe is end of the bull run. My bull run timeframe ending is a couple of months before they're there by elses and November going into December. I think Bitcoin has a strong chance to be around 125 to 130 and that's down from my original 150 a month and a half ago. And I think that Cardano has a great chance to be around the $10 range, to maybe even higher by that time.  You shill. You know what the thing is with Cardano. And by the way, I own no ADA. No kidding. So I'm not shilling ADA at all. I own none, but what's so important for Cardano to succeed and get to that level is exactly the graphical that you showed previously, which is up until now, there's been no rush for people to create an ecosystem around it. And now all of a sudden, there's a spark under everybody's butt. People are protesting Ethereum fees. Cardano, it actually, people, you have a whole slew of IDOs on there. So people are gonna build now that they can get launched and maybe things will change. Yeah, maybe things are, and that was the big, and I remember I was on your show and Ryan, Ryan Gorman, he even said, he goes, Rob, what do you like Cardano so much? He goes, anybody building on it? And I was like, well, no, it's not the point, Ryan. I was like, no, no one's doing anything right now. I go, but it's the future. He's like, but no one's building on it. I'm like, yeah, you got a good point. And it was true. And it actually holds true right now. Nobody's really building, building, but they're getting ready to launch a lot of different things. And I think that's what pushes everything up because if we take a look at what happened with Ethereum and their DEXes and all the things they're doing and the NFT platform, look, you can't even have an artist create something really fantastic and then release it without paying it through the nose because of those gas fees. So if you can do that over on Cardano, I mean, heck, why not?  Do I hold the theorem? Yes, did I sell a theorem? I sold a little bit, but I don't know because it's just, it moves so fast, right? It moves so fast. And these guys, this EIP 1559 could come out and they could solve the gas fees and everybody could get together and sing around a campfire and angels could come down and sing, I don't know. But do I think it's really gonna happen? Who knows? ETH 2.0, is it gonna hit on time? Well, just look at the past and we'll say hopefully. A lot of competition, a lot of competition, Rob. You got Avalanche, you have- Avalanche. BSC, you have Solana projects. These people, and those are by the way already being used and built on. So if ETH 2.0 and Cardano wanna stay in the game, they gotta keep it up. Yeah, they got it. I mean, they're trying. I don't think they're all just gonna sit on the wayside. So I think they're going good. So here's my prediction is as always, I think on the high end for Bitcoin 150, low is probably 110. And I'm gonna probably just agree with here with Alex and hit 130 and I'll be happy with that. And then for Cardano, I had an original price prediction of $3 because I'm super conservative and everybody's like, yeah, I know, well, you know me, I'm not gonna be like, it's going to 30 million tomorrow. I say three and then I did a revision. I thought it could be three to five. So right now with what's going on and what I just saw with all those different projects and once I really dig into them and put them on Dan Clips, I'm gonna say five is a pretty conservative number. And think about this, so five. So like when my wife asked me which I invest in, I tell her the same things all the time.  And I told her this at 80 cents, 90 cents. And I've never pretty much wavered. And then I say also poke it out because I think it could be a hedge. Avalanche, perhaps, I don't really, I don't really mention Avalanche even though I think it's a good project. And I still talk about StormX and Voyager. I know people give me a lot of S about that, but I still believe in teams and that's how I see it. So the last thing is Ethereum. What do you think about Ethereum? Should I invest in Ethereum? I don't really have, I don't, because here's a, it's just like Bitcoin. The best they can do is a two X, right? I mean, if you're really, really pushing things. So let's take a look at what could potentially happen as far as upcoming things. And Alex, did I miss anything in the chats? No, I've been looking at them. Everybody's pretty chill right now. Everybody seems to agree with most of what we're saying. So I'm happy about that. Oh, just wait. Just wait till we hit Twitter. You see those two morons? Ah, all right. So I want to introduce you guys to CoinMarketCal. If you're not familiar with this, CoinMarketCalculator. It's kind of slow to look. I think more people know about it, but what you can do is you can take a look at what's happening, what's going to happen. And actually I learned this one from JRNY Crypto. He's the one that I saw it on first. So I'll give him all the credit on this one. And this is, that's kind of weird. One, two, three, four, four, six, six. Sure enough. Okay. Don't want to give that XRP the number five position, huh? Okay. I just like to rile up the XRP army to see what we're doing. So like, you will see here the number of upcoming events and out of 100, which indicates if it's like really good or not really good. And none of this is an index out of 100. So like Ethereum, that's got an upcoming event. What is that event? Let's see. I'm going to guess probably EIP 1559, London hard fork. And of course it doesn't say anybody 2.0. Let me ask you this. I saw on the screen there an NFT marketplace release. Let me ask you where your thoughts are on NFTs right now. I think right now they're kind of unusable. I mean, people can still get them if they want to pay a lot of money, but that really negates a lot of people to get into it, right? That's the, hold on, let me stop this. Wasn't it the whole point of cryptocurrency was to first of all, eliminate the middle man, give unbank ourselves, and then be able to have reduced transaction costs, save money, and everybody could kind of be in a better financial situation. So for NFTs, when I see these things, I'm like, well, this sounds good, but then I'm like, especially for artists and things, but it's so much money unless you're like a Banksy or something like that. Or you put out something that's like tens of thousands of dollars, like crypto punks and things on the such. But as far as, as it is right now, if you have like a starving artist or something like that, they want to do NFTs, you're not doing NFTs. You're just not. That's what I think, it's the exact opposite. And I even talked about this in Twitter. I said, you know, think about it this way. And I am not a big fan of my banks, except for USA, I do like them, they're great. Had it since I was in the military. Right now it is cheaper to send money on a wire transfer, old fashioned ways, and sometimes even faster using Wells Fargo than it is to use Ethereum. But that's sinking. That's not what we're here for. This isn't, I mean, we're not supposed to be on par with the banks or losing to the banks. We should be actually beating the banks. And Ethereum is, that's not how I see it going. So that's just my two cents. Do you know that guy, Gary Vee? Yeah, Gary Venecek. He started a whole NFT thing, you know, and it's launched this whole, I don't know. I feel like there was a cycle of NFT hype and now it's kind of, you know, cooled down. Gary Vee was also the guy that said that audio and speech recognition was gonna take over the world as far as like social media. And he was big on to like Facebook talk or whatever it was. And I was like, yeah, we'll see. And then Gary's one of those guys that tries to get in front of everything. Yes. And sure, you know, if it works, it works. I mean, NFTs can be great in gaming, I think it's gonna be fantastic. But art, like I've always said, there's different levels of art. There's art over at Christie's that you can buy for millions. And there's art that you're gonna get at the back of Walmart. And I think that's where NFTs are going.  Oh, I don't know, whatever. And that's how it goes. I have that in my living room, no, I'm just joking. That's because you're classy now. Stay classy. So that is essentially it. Let me, whoops, wrong one. Let me break into the comments and then we'll wrap it up. But still price predictions. So if you're late, this is what I tell the whole thumbnail. So someone, no one accuses me of being click baby, even though sometimes what are you gonna do? We talked about the different cryptos that I would recommend to my wife. And as far as like risk to reward, I still say Bitcoin if you wanna be super safe and conservative, but a little bit only in there. And then the next one is, I've been talking about Cardano since it was in Pennies. And I've actually been recommending to my wife since it's been around 80 cents. Now we're at 220.  And she's like, what do we do with this? And I was like, well, first of all, thanks for asking.   If you're gonna put it into something, put it into Cardano because it's gonna go up. And the reason is because the infrastructure that is gonna come forward.  So I'll tell her, I'll tell the people I see in the streets, Cardano, a little bit of polka dot. And then Ethereum, I don't really have much faith into it. The best it can do is a 2X and that's about it. And right now, I mean, even like Cardano, my price prediction was about between $3 and $5, which is super conservative. Alex's price prediction for Cardano was 10 bucks. So that's what I always say. And there's other projects out there that are great. I'm not saying that, I mean, how many cryptos do you own, Alex? Just the top of your head. How many cryptos do I currently have in a portfolio? Yeah, like projects, like two projects, a million projects. No, no, no, no, no, no. Total crypto is eight cryptos in the portfolio right now. Very nice. I've got like, mine keeps growing. Now it's like 40 or something, or 30. I go in and out. I go in and out. Yeah, I've been heavy into avalanche lately. I think this is happening. I think Gavax is a great, is a great speculative project to be in right now. I mean, we discuss it. You discuss everything going on with Ethereum to no end. I know. And the next thing, the next thing I'm gonna get into, similar to these deep dives, is all of these Cardano type of projects that are coming up. I think they're gonna be pretty big, but who knows, only time will tell. And that's my recap. All right, that's it. What else you got, Alex? Any last words of inspiration and wisdom? No parting words. Going, you know, we're halfway through the month, definitely on the short term, looking for what's gonna happen tomorrow evening into Monday, as usual, and then keeping an eye on the open interests for Bitcoin options to kind of try to forecast what's gonna, the month's gonna end up. So that's all we're doing back at headquarters. Yeah. And as a reminder, check out Alex Mascioli's show. He just had two of the bright guys, CJ and Monty from Market Rebellion, and they said that their low was 47,500. That's correct. And when I heard that yesterday, I'm like, they're full of it. And of course, what is it now? 48,000 something hundred. So look out for that level. And that's it. Sony Bo, if you liked the video, found a little value, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing, and that's it for today. We might hit you up tomorrow, but that's all for this one. Have a great weekend, and we will see you on the next.


The path of the sweep leg. So one thing is that it has to be long. Now, if you looked at some of our recent videos, we've talked about some home training, talk about critical drills that are gonna add distance real fast, like doing 180s and 360s, because they teach the entry axis and they teach a really critical thing of how we're gonna sequence upper body, lower body, you're gonna see that. So I can do a drill pretty simply and I can move around and you can see how I'm gonna be able to keep it wide. Now watch when I'm doing that drill, is that right or is that wrong? It's not 100% right and here's why. The thing that we wanna do and the problem and the drill, we want you guys to focus on. We're giving you one of our drills from our system. It's a really simple drill and we're teaching the action of the sweep. So one of the things we've done for a lot of times is we tend to put a cone here. When you tend to see young throwers who tend to cut in, right? So you see a lot of throwers and they cut this way and they're spinning here. The one thing is we've always put a cone here so we teach our athletes to get out. The other thing that we tend to do is work the band. Here we go, band on the knees. So here's one of the things we do for years and now we incorporate it, putting the band and creating stretch on the band. Now, can I create stretch on the band? Slowly, you can. Now, the drill that we're gonna talk about is the sweep leg kick. If you're an online member, we go through this in a different level of detail because we, online members are utilizing the system and so there's a whole connection sequence, right? Our throwing chain reaction.  This will put two to three feet on your shot put right away. It's a really simple drill and what you wanna do is the following. So when we talked about this, we've trained athletes to come out, right? So now you can see how it's gonna help me take the wide path. So now when we use the band, we hinge and we're creating tension here. We want tension in the legs. So if you look at me this way, when I turn and I'm creating this, a really great example of that is looking at Daniel Stahl, looking at Frederick Dakers, right? He gets a really wide base and so when he goes, he gets that, you would see how the band would create that tension. This is one of the reasons why we incorporated. We wanna start teaching our athletes to feel that and our bands are a really easy tool to provide that feedback. Now, when we go over here and we're talking about how we're gonna create stretch, we're gonna be kicking out. So to create that stretch, you automatically have to do what?  It should make you move your sweep leg faster. So we use the band as part of that process and we use the upper body and we're feeling that motion. Okay, you guys, here's what. As we get always to the end of each day, we kind of lose focus a little bit.  So this is a perfect example. She likes to slide this hip. Okay, so I want this hip to stay right here. I want her knee to stay just right there. Now she's gonna flex, flex. So I want her to flex here. I want her to flex here. I want her to flex this and I want her to flex her glute. Okay, so we're gonna have all of that tight. Ready? Now, heel up and push. This is all flex. See how it moved? Don't move it. If it's all flexed, flex, flexed, flexed. Got it? That's it. Yeah. Okay? Does that make sense? Yes. So flex it hard. Okay. There we go. Yes. So we don't want this to move. We want this to come around this. Yep. And now it will flex a little bit more here. Now straighten it. Just a touch right there. Flex, flex, flex. See how that's tight? Hammy. Okay, good. Now push. And it will wind up straightening ever so slightly, but it's flexed there. Okay? So don't let it move. Go. Push the right side. So watch. It'll be here. Boom, boom, boom. Right? See how it's all flexed? Here. Shot. We're gonna be deeper. Boom. So we have to learn how to come up on it. Boom. Discus. We kind of land here and we, because we have the discus out here, we're gonna straighten a little sooner. This stays here. Okay. Block. Turn. Remember what I was saying over there. The hip turns the upper body. Okay. Now this has to open, turn. Let the hip turn the upper body. Stop. Stop. Okay. Okay? Okay. And then discus is Go. Come up. Heel up. Push. Bam. Bam. Implement block arm. Implement block arm. Oh. Counterbalance.


Welcome to this lecture on digital communication using GNU radio. My name is Kumar Appaya and I belong to the department of electrical engineering at IIT Bombay. This lecture will be on synchronization and non-coherent communication. In this lecture and the sequence of lectures ahead, we will be relaxing one more assumption about communication systems. Earlier we were dealing with noise and we saw how noise affected the detection of your symbols. We will now look at the practical aspect of receivers where let us suppose that you do not have the correct phase of the carrier or phase of the local oscillator available at the receiver or the frequency offset. Then what can we do? Similarly, we will also have to estimate the parameters of the communication system. So, in this lecture we will discuss some of these aspects and follow it up with some experiments in GNU radio. So, there are several practical receiver issues such as local oscillator offset that is you may not have the carrier available at the receiver with the same frequency. There is always some offset, there could be a phase offset and you also need to know how you can perform synchronization that is where is the beginning of the symbol so that I can actually start getting those symbols. What is the sampling location and what is the actual correct time at which I have to grab the samples after the match filtering? These are some aspects that have to be figured out at the receiver. The receiver parameters affect performance significantly in addition to noise that is if you do not sample at the correct location, if you do not have the correct carrier frequency and phase then you stand to incur a large amount of errors because of the fact that you are not getting things right at the receiver. So, one aspect that we will be looking at is the concept of parameter estimation. In other words, how do you estimate the amplitude of the signal at the receiver? How do you estimate the delay? How do you estimate let us say the phase offset or frequency offset? These are all problems that fall into the category of parameter estimation because there are several unknowns and these fall into the category of there are several unknowns and you have to figure these out in the presence of noise as well. So, we have to come up with a statistically correct way of getting the best estimates in the presence of noise. Finally, we will look at non-coherent communication wherein we say that we do not need to know the precise phase or frequency of the local oscillator, but can we still just go ahead with the communication if it is nominally close as well. When it comes to receiver design, we will just be making some simplifying assumptions just to get the concept across. Recall that the signal being transmitted is summation b k g t x of t minus k t that is suppose that your symbols are b 1, b 2, b 3 or you know you can b minus 1 and so on. These are symbols from your constellation let us say they are from QPSK or PPSK or any such constellation. Let us say that g t x t minus k t is your template pulse shaper. Let us say it is a sink or a root trace cosine can be a rectangular pulse whatever pulse that you have selected based on the constraints that have been imposed to you in terms of power bandwidth and so on. Now, the band pass version of this over here is real part of x of t e power j 2 pi f c t that is you basically do the up conversion and you will end up getting x of t times e power j 2 pi f c t if you remember that is the x c of t that is the i component times the cos minus x s of t that is the Q component multiplied by the sign. So, that is the waveform that you will get and this is at f c nominally at f c plus or minus you know w by 2 assuming that the base band bandwidth of x of t is w. Some key issues that we are concerned with are delay that is where do our symbol where do our symbols begin where do we start making our samples like for example, if you do not get the peak correctly then you will incur lot of symbol errors. Sampling offset if you do not in the case of sampling offset if you do not sample precisely at the right point then you will incur some symbol errors, but one more important thing is do we have carrier offset that is are you getting the f c at the receiver correctly are you getting the phase correctly. In fact, we will see that if you do not have the phase or the frequency correctly you will start having issues. Let us just do a very quick exercise to just check that out. So, let us say that you have let us say that you have your symbol let me actually just call it m of t I am just going to say let us actually title this as phase offset. Let us say that you have your x of t I will simplify it to have just a real signal is this is x b p band pass m of t cos 2 pi f c t. Let us now say that at the receiver you have only cos 2 pi f c t plus theta I am ignoring the q part let us just stick to real, but the concept is similar.   Now, this 2 f c term can be filtered out because it is twice carrier frequency if you just put a low pass filter you will filter it out. So, what you end up getting is m of t cos phi now this is actually not very good because if phi is unknown because let us say at the receiver you have a phase lag or phase difference between the transmit carrier receive carrier if phi is unknown then if phi is close to pi by 2 it will essentially null your signal or even if it is not close to pi by 2 if it is not 0 or you know if it is not exactly 0 your SNR is going to be degraded by a factor of cos square phi. So, this is actually dangerous. Similarly, you also have the concept of frequency offset. So, at least in the case of phase offset you only have one number to figure out that is the phase in the case of frequency offset you have m of t cos 2 pi f c t times and at the receiver we not only have a phi we also have f c prime.  So, your frequency of the local oscillator is actually not f c, but f c plus delta f.  So, 2 pi delta f times t plus phi minus cos of I am ignoring this 4 basically 2 f c term I am just not writing it I am ignoring it because that can be filtered out.  So, that you can extract the symbols, but this m of t is going to have an additional you know modulated term and some parts are going to be high some parts are going to be low and figuring out your symbols is going to be impossible unless you re 0 out the delta f and figure out the phi. So, in other words whenever you have phase and frequency offsets whenever you have phase and frequency offsets getting back your symbols is a challenge and this is something that you have to address by figuring these parameters out. One more thing is that suppose that your m of t undergoes a scaling of let us say a then this a also has to be figured out because let us say that your constellation is of the form of quam 16 let us say it has like you know then if these are the addition regions let us say these are addition regions if your constellation instead is scaled and you have something like this let us say all your decisions are going to be wrong let us say that you have this all your decisions are going to be wrong. So, you need amplitude also needed. In other words you have to figure these parameters out where to sample what is the frequency offset what is the amplitude. So, that is something which we are going to see how we can achieve in steps. Let us proceed. So, just an introduction to parameter estimation you can recall that maximum likelihood and map that is maximum a posteriori theory were used when we wanted to figure out which symbol was transmitted. What we did is we essentially found out the appropriate probability distribution function we found out given this y or rather given this you know rather which of the symbols were sent which is most likely given that this y was received. So, that is basically one way to look at it that is for map and in the case of equiprobable symbols we could do ML wherein which of these symbols would maximize the probability that this y was received. So, essentially we formulated these problems the difference between parameter estimation and our detection was that your symbols were one of a few one of finite numbers let's say that is your symbols came from a constellation like QPSK or quam 16. So, let's say if you have quam 16 you had to go through 16 symbol choices and find out that one that maximize the arg max of your metric or you know minimized if you put it in the you know in the distance format. So, you have to find out that point which is closest in the case of estimation rather there is a difference we have to for example in this case we are looking at estimation of a parameter theta theta is any of the parameters it can be the amplitude phase delay whatever it is we have to estimate theta we have a y that depends on this theta and this theta can be a continuous quantity for example in the case of phase this theta is a number between minus pi and pi or 0 to 2 pi. Therefore, in the parameter estimation problem we have a wide array of values and we want to estimate that is we are not choosing one particular we are choosing one particular value among an infinite set of values. So, that is where the difference lies that is why we call this an estimation problem much like the detection theta hat ml if you see is arg max p of y given theta we basically keep moving theta and finding out that theta it maximizes p of y given theta of course a probability distribution is non-negative by definition. So, we can take log and we want to find the you know arg max for you know log is a monotonic functions you can all just take arg max of the log as well this comes in handy when you have see functions like Gaussian because when you have an e power minus taking log will just make things much easier. The Bayesian in case you have a prior on p let us say that you know you are doing say phase detection and then you know that the phase is between minus pi by 2 and pi with a probability higher than with a very high probability you can plug in that prior distribution and you have p of theta given y is p of y given theta times p of theta. Now if p of theta is the same for all theta then this these two become equal this is consistent with our discussion of detection theory which we did where we had equiprobial symbols then map and ml were the same. So, these are some things to keep in mind always remember it is sometimes convenient to take log if your expressions become simpler. Let us look at the first parameter estimation problem the first parameter estimation problem that we are looking at is to get this amplitude that is we want to find out a that now let us say for a simplified example let us say that you are doing bpsk communication that is your b is either plus 1 or minus 1 and let us just say that you are have a system where you are receiving these this y you are just getting a number y and you have to figure out what a is you are affected by noise that is Gaussian noise with mean 0 variance sigma square. Now this problem is actually just a reformulation of your bpsk problem that is if b is plus 1 then y is Gaussian with mean a and we are using let a is in a small a to denote the actual value.  If b is minus 1 then y is a Gaussian random variable with mean minus a and variance sigma square. So, that is what we have mentioned here if b is known p of y given a comma b is plus 1 is e power minus y minus a the whole square by 2 sigma square by sigma root 2 pi if b is minus 1 then is e power minus y plus a the whole square by 2 sigma square by sigma root 2 pi. If you remember from the previous slide the parameter that we are estimating is a we just have to do an arg max over here and it is very easy to do the arg max when is this maximized when you put y is equal to plus a here. Similarly when is this maximized when you put y is equal to minus a over here. So, it is very evident if you have just one sample then let us just look at it intuitively in the absence of noise.  So, if b is known which corresponds to the case where it is a training based estimation that is if you tell the receiver hey I am going to send you plus 1 then the receiver knows what to expect as b and it can use that to figure out what a is more accurately or you tell the receiver I am sending minus 1 then the receiver can use that to just take the negative and figure it out and the ML estimate is just what you receive even in the presence of noise because you do not know what else to do you know noise takes you to the left or right equally probably your best guess is the mean.  Now, if b is not known apology this should be not known if b is not known then we have a situation where we need to average over b that is if b is not known that is let us say now you are a receiver you just know that the transmitter is sending plus 1 or minus 1 you do not know what was received then there is a trick that you know you can do suppose that the value you receive is very very high let us say it is a high positive value you can be reasonably sure that plus 1 was sent by the way I did not mention a is a positive number we are not concerned with negative a because if you know you can always just swap your b's to appropriate the handle it. Let us say that the transmitter sends the you know send something which you do not know and you get let us say plus 7 or something and let us say noise variance is known noise variance is let us say 1 you get plus 7 or something then you are into reasonable positive territory and you can be sure that what was sent was plus 1 and you can guess that your a should be close to 7 because you got 7.1 should be 7.1 similar if you get minus 6 which is a very high negative value you can just take your a as close to being plus 6 because you know that when it's a high negative value the probability that the receiver actually sent plus 1 is very very unlikely the problem occurs when you're close to 0 you're close to 0 you don't know what was sent that's where this cos h starts coming into the picture this cos h essentially if you just look back at this expression handle the situation where you're close to 0 so if you're only slightly positive and you do not have a reliable estimate then the value of a that you're going to get is going to be quite small and you're in a situation where you don't really know so the intuitively what happens is that this cos h which occurs because you have this e power minus a power y plus a essentially handles this case of uncertainty let me just you know if you simplify this expression e power minus y minus a the whole square by 2 sigma e power minus y plus a the whole square you can see that e power minus y square by 2 sigma square is common e power minus a square by 2 sigma square is common and you the remaining terms are e power you get e power minus 2 a y by 2 sigma square e power plus 2 a y by 2 sigma square and that essentially gets converted to this cos hyperbolic function this accounts for that uncertainty in the value of b if the where received received signal is essentially close to you know close to 0 in comparison to sigma so intuitively if you have if you have 3 sigma 4 sigma away from 0 you can just take it you know you just know that he sent the received he or she at the transmitter sent plus 1 or minus 1 appropriately. Now typically having just one sample based estimation or one short estimation is never enough let us say that you are using your cell phone your cell phone is essentially calibrating itself to the base station if you are really close to the base station you can get a signal very easily but suppose you are standing inside a building or inside a tunnel you will not get enough of SNR because your noise will be quite high in comparison to a in such a situation you want to use multiple symbols. So, the vector version of this problem is where you have y k is a b k plus n k k is 0 1 2 up to k minus 1 and a is the unknown that you want to estimate it is the same problem except that we now repeat you you now repeat this multiple times we actually get y 1 y 2 y 0 y 1 y 2 up to y k minus 1 we have k such measurements. Now since n k that is the noise realizations are independent and identically distributed Gaussian's intuitively you know if we just average appropriately we will get our proper estimate.   The best thing you can do is average because averaging will just average the noise also and that will reduce the variance of the noise. Therefore, if you now just formally want to do this write y as a column vector consisting of the stacked values of y 0 y 1 up to y k minus 1 similarly write an array for b similarly write an array for n. So, you are essentially your equation is of the form y is equal to a times b plus n that is what is being used here. Now in this case you can just understand that y under bar is actually going to be a Gaussian random vector with mean a b and variance not surprisingly sigma square times i. If you know b now all you need to do is you need to just perform the weighted average like we discussed it is very evident because if you multiply y by you know if you just multiply y by b transpose ok you will find that that is a sufficient statistic you can prove it and you can essentially get this particular estimate very very easily. The intuition like I mentioned is just flip the signs and average appropriately every sample has equal weightage because the noise is independent and identically distributed. So, averaging should just do the job for you. Now if you now want to do the same parameter estimation under the situation where unfortunately you do not know b k by the way this is also very practical because in some communication paradigms the transmission is being sent to multiple people. So, let us say that 10 people are receiving a signal you can't waste time calibrating the first user calibrating the second user calibrating the third user and so on. So, you keep sending the transmission and everyone wants to receive it then they should come up with a way by which for example if user 1 is already receiving it you don't want to waste time in training user 2 because user 1's transmission is going to be affected. So, is there a way to do the estimation of a without having to know b's in advance. This is called the blind estimation approach if the same formulation except that the b is not known at the receiver. In the case where b is not known at the receiver you just do the formulation much like the previous, but then you just have to average over the b's as well. So, in other words you have to marginalize over the b's to get rid of the b's and you can work that out. I am not going to do that as part of this lecture, but if you do that you end up getting a form that is somewhat reminiscent of what you saw just previously. Earlier you were saying it was 1 by k summation k runs from 0 to k minus 1 yk times bk which was flipping the signs and adding. In this case there is the stan hyperbolic a yk by sigma square. The stan hyperbolic is actually a kind of soft estimation of b. In other words if you look at tan hyperbolic it's a very nice function which looks like this. The tan hyperbolic looks like this. It's minus 1 at minus infinity 1 at infinity and if you receive a b let's say which if you receive a y which is highly negative or y that is highly positive you're essentially giving more weightage to that. In other words if you basically take a y that is several times sigma you're essentially giving it more weightage. If you take a y that is negative several times sigma you give it more weightage. If there is a y that is close to 0 the tan hyperbolic is 0 you don't give it much weightage. So this essentially acts as a it's almost like it is implicitly estimating the bk's as well while it is giving you an estimate of the a. So this is something which you can see and you can listen to this is also called sigmoid function and it has this property that you are able to get a soft estimate. In other words if it is very very reliable you are adding some weight if it is not reliable then you are not adding any weight to this particular sample. So the intuitively if you call b hat of k as tan hyperbolic that is if you are able to reliably say that it's a high amplitude and you know or negative high amplitude you will give that parameter more weightage. So that's basically the approach which we take here. So let us stop with this for this lecture. In the next lecture we're going to continue our discussion of parameter estimation and look at how we can estimate other parameters as well for example those corresponding to phase frequency delay and so on. Thank you.