Ben Armstrong - Is DeFi Now Unstoppable? How The Growth Of Crypto Is Powering A New Financial Revolution

Full transcript: Ben Armstrong (AKA BitBoy Crypto on London Real

1:38 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ben Armstrong, the wealth coach, investor and cryptocurrency enthusiast. You are the founder of BitBoy Crypto, a YouTube channel with over 1 million followers and are recognized as one of the leading voices in the crypto industry. You first bought Bitcoin back in 2012 and two years later lost your investments in the Mt. Gox scandal.

1:58 Since then, you’ve dedicated your time and energy to ensure people don’t make the same mistakes with the aim to, quote, financially change the lives of all of your subscribers. Today, we will discuss everything crypto, including the recent volatile markets, your ideas on investment opportunities, and all things DeFi or decentralized finance, which I’m calling the greatest dislocation of wealth in human history. Ben, welcome to London Real. Well, thank you so much for having me.

2:24 Quite an intro there. Very excited. Anytime I can talk about crypto and, you know, there are certain times and moments that, you know, it kind of all comes full circle and definitely a fan of your show and glad to be on here and be able to help your audience understand my journey and, you know, hopefully maybe starting the journey of their own. I love it. You know, and Ben, I love your videos.

2:43 You have a great way of conveying complex information in a simple form. And I appreciate everything you do. You’re actually a great educator. And I want to talk more about how you do that. And it’s been incredible to watch you.

2:55 I wanted to kind of bring you up to speed with kind of my journey and I can tell you how we’re going to kind of meet in the middle here with London Real and crypto because, you know, it’s it’s it’ll probably give you a little bit of background as far as what’s in my head. And again, I also appreciate your honesty and your story. We both have gone down some dark roads of addiction and recovery and we both told those stories and I appreciate that. And maybe we’ll get into that later, too.

3:19 So quick background on me and I don’t usually start the show by talking about me, but I’ll do it in this case. You know, for the last 10 years, I’ve been the host of London Real. Before that, I actually worked as a banker in the centralized finance world. I was 15 years between Wall Street. I worked in Chicago and I worked in London in the credit derivatives markets.

3:38 So I’ve kind of been there and done that since the early 90s. I put all that on hold to do London Real, which, you know, 10 years ago, I went all in on this kind of democratizing of information space. I was a big fan of the Joe Rogan podcast. I went back. I was on his show back in 2013 and I kind of did my own thing in London and through the course of having conversations with interesting people, Ben, I started hearing about the word crypto and I had people on.

4:04 So back in 2013, I had crazy Max Kaiser come on my show and we had an epic conversation about Bitcoin. I had just bought two Bitcoin. I just watched the old episode. I paid 85 pounds each. So about a hundred bucks each and Ben, I spent them on the Silk Road.

4:19 You know, I’ll be honest about that. And I know you say that that’s one of the reasons that saves, you know, and was a use case for Bitcoin and we’ll get into that, but we had a great discussion with with Max and of course, Max was all in on Bitcoin. He still is, but it was an episode and it was something we talked about. And then of course, you know, I played around the Silk Road and then, you know, life went on and I was lucky enough to have Andreas Antonopoulos, you know, Bitcoin Jesus on the show and he came on 2015, 2017, 2019 and Ben, you know, he was an incredible incredible guy at the time to really be able to articulate, you know, cryptocurrency, but also what it could become, you know, a really good evangelist.

4:56 And it’s interesting when you watch those episodes. Now, he was actually articulating what what DeFi is, but back then it was what it could become and he’s got a great little video. I keep playing to a lot of my followers and students where he says Brian, he said, you know, if Bitcoin is email, then what I’m talking about is the Internet of money and he said basically when you have a new system and there’s only one app like email, I got my first email account when I went to MIT in 1989 and I think I emailed my brother who was at Stanford and then I didn’t use it for five more years.

5:27 And I thought, oh, that’s the Internet. Of course, you know, when all we could see was Bitcoin, it was like, well, you got this thing, but we couldn’t see it was other things. And then Andreas said when we saw a web browser, we said, oh, it’s more than that. And I feel like that analogy is kind of what DeFi is and I want to get into that. So that was my experience with it.

5:46 But again, I couldn’t see it happening and I was doing other things last year in 2020. We spent pretty much the whole year fighting for freedom of speech. We went head-to-head with this incredible platform called YouTube, which we both have millions of subscribers on and I disagreed with some of their censorship. We got shut down by social media platforms. I got shut down by PayPal.

6:06 We got, you know, really taken all the way to the wall, but we kept fighting back and we put out 57 episodes on our own digital freedom platform and it was a serious fight, but we felt great about it. After that, I spent the last nine months running to be the next mayor of London. And so we spent millions of pounds. We drove 5700 miles to a digital battle bus. We did about a hundred pieces of media.

6:29 I went after the candidates like nobody’s business, but we didn’t win. And in the corner of my eye for the last few months, I started looking at DeFi, Ben, and I said, wow, something crazy is happening here and it’s something. It’s the innovation that I hadn’t seen since I traded derivatives in the 90s and we put these complicated financial exotic instruments together and package them up as options trades and all these things and I thought, wow, look what these guys are doing and the things that are happening in DeFi, you know, it took 10 years for Wall Street to create what DeFi can do in 10 months or even 10 weeks and the rate of innovation is it’s exponential and in some ways almost frightening.

7:13 So again, that’s my new perspective. And so I decided four weeks ago, I’m going all in on DeFi like I went all in 10 years ago on YouTube and broadcasting. So for the next 10 years, I’m all in on this space. We created a DeFi Academy and right now I’ve got hundreds of students right now that I’m getting up the education curve through practical action. That’s what we’re a big fan of here.

7:35 We’re actually putting on the trades and really experiencing what’s it like. So that’s my quick background. I know you say there’s two camps out there. There’s the Bitcoin maximalist. There’s the DeFi evangelist.

7:45 I guess it’s obvious which one I am, but that’s my story. First of all, I was wondering maybe you could tell us your story and then any thoughts on that whole monologue I just gave you. Well, my first thought was as you went to Wall Street and all you came back with was that suit.

8:03 That looks like a Wall Street suit. I love it. It’s sharp. I didn’t give me one of those. It’s funny.

8:08 I didn’t actually dress this good when I was working in London. I did this after I got the show, but yeah, it’s a good point. I used to joke that the banks actually finance London Real in the first few years because I was living off my savings. So much to their chagrin, it was, but go ahead. Yeah, so well, as far as my story goes, before I get into my story, I do want to say I love the fact you mentioned on Andreas Antonopoulos.

8:31 I love Andreas Antonopoulos. I think he’s been so dead on about so many things, and he’s one of the best speakers on Bitcoin and crypto and Ethereum out there. And, you know, kind of when we start getting into talking about DeFi, it’s going to be really interesting to look at some of the things that he said years and years ago about Bitcoin that have actually now started to translate into what DeFi is today, and so we’ll get into that later. But as far as my story goes, so I got into Bitcoin first in 2012.

9:01 I bought Bitcoin because I wasn’t on the Silk Road. It was nothing to do with that. It was a software that I needed for a business I was running. It posted ads on Craigslist of all things. I was selling event tickets, concert sports tickets.

9:12 Good thing I wasn’t still in that business a year ago, right? When there were no sports or concerts for a while, but I got into it because of that, and I didn’t really know what I had. And so I ended up making a lot of money over not a lot of money in regards to what we do now, but I made a few thousand dollars kind of overnight in 2013 when things popped up in November, and I sold it all because I was like, wow, I can’t believe I just made this much money because I was using Bitcoin as the original intent, which was a currency.

9:41 And so I was buying my monthly payments on that software and buying new versions of the software that I needed. I wasn’t keeping it, but I had some money left in there, and pretty much overnight, like I said, it shot way up, and I sold it. I was real excited like, man, I made a few thousand dollars for my family on vacation. Like, it was something kind of nice to do, but I didn’t understand what I was actually looking at, and that was my big flaw in the very beginning, and that’s actually what’s driven me educationally to, you know, help my audience be equipped with the education they need to be able to understand what they’re investing in to make money over the long term.

10:11 And so in 2017, I started, like you mentioned earlier in the intro, I did lose money in the Mt. Gox hack. I’ve got a claim with them. That’s kind of like the crypto OG thing, you know, you use BitInstant with Charlie Shrimm, and then you got hacked on Mt. Gox.

10:23 And so in 2017, I bought Bitcoin a few times and sold it in the middle, but wasn’t really in the market. I started adding up how much money I should have because I had sold it early. You know, at the time, my first Bitcoin I bought was $12. So over that first year, it ranged somewhere in between about $12 and $100. And then looking at how much it should have been worth in 2017, that’s not even counting how much it should be worth today.

10:45 I just said, man, I don’t want anybody to ever go through this again. And so I decided to go on a journey to go full-time in crypto and to start making content. And a lot of my education in crypto, it came through making videos because to do reviews on stuff, you have to understand what you’re looking at. And so that’s actually, you know, like, you know, Gary Vee, for instance, you know, he says like, just go out there and create, go out there and do stuff.

11:06 And that’s what I did. I started my channel in January 2018, started educating people on crypto and becoming more educated in the process. If you look at my education level of crypto when I started the channel versus where I’m at today, you know, there’s a reason we had explosive growth in the last year because I was making several videos a day when people weren’t even watching, but I was getting the education and that was a lot of, you know, the importance of, you know, hard work and stick hand out even when people aren’t watching.

11:29 And so today, we have the, you know, the basically the largest crypto community there is. We have almost 5 million total followers. We’ve got over a million on YouTube. We’ve got almost 500,000 on Twitter. We’ve got 2.7 million on TikTok, several other platforms.

11:45 And the main, I could retire today if I wanted to. I don’t want to retire because the mission of our channel and the passion of my channel is changing people’s lives. They’re giving them, you know, the literacy to understand what they’re looking at in crypto because I wasn’t afforded that opportunity in 2012 because the education resources just weren’t out there. Wow. That’s pretty incredible story.

12:05 And again, like you said, you’re learning by doing, you’re learning by putting the videos out. And even if they’re not watching, if nobody’s watching them, you’re getting something from them, right? Absolutely. That’s the hard work when nobody’s watching that led to the success. It’s so true.

12:18 You know, talk to me about this kind of fork in the road that happened. I don’t know when it was a year ago or two years ago where you said pretty much everyone out there is either a Bitcoin maximalist or a DeFi evangelist. I watched some of the Bitcoin conference down there in Florida from over here. And again, like I said, I’ve been out of this space for a while. And I thought, oh, it’s going to be a conference that talks all things cryptocurrency.

12:41 And then I realized, oh my gosh, wow, like they’re hardcore Bitcoiners, aren’t they in there? Yeah, I mean, yeah, there’s a thing called Bitcoin Twitter, you know what I mean? When we talk about these different areas of Twitter, as I’m sure, you know, crypto Twitter, political Twitter, Bitcoin Twitter, it’s not a real place. It’s just because you follow so many people in that niche, that’s kind of all you see on your Twitter feed. But there’s a Bitcoin Twitter where you don’t even see stuff from other altcoins.

13:07 But, you know, what’s funny is we became the large crypto channel, you know, late last year. No, that’s actually not true. Kind of in the fall of this year, or excuse me, the spring, early spring of this year, we became the large channel. And in quarter one, we actually reached out to the Bitcoin conference people, and we said, hey, you know, we’ve got a definitely on a roll. We got growing into the largest following, got all this stuff going on.

13:30 You know, I would speak at the conference if you know you guys allow me to speak there, and they’re like, no, they’re like, no, you cannot speak at our conference. I was like, okay, I guess the battle lines have been drawn here because the Bitcoin people, they don’t want people that talk about DeFi and Ethereum there. However, the funny thing is, I’m sure you know, Brian, is don’t watch the words, watch the actions. So many of the booths that were the sponsors at the Bitcoin 2021 conference were things that did deal with altcoins and did deal with things outside of Bitcoin.

13:59 And so when it came to them taking money in, they certainly didn’t mind taking money from altcoins. So, you know, I mean, they know what’s coming. And what’s really interesting is there was definitely a split this year in the conference between like, I would say the Bitcoin maximalists were actually the minority at the conference. They’re a very loud vocal minority. But they’re the visitors, the people there.

14:20 I mean, we had hundreds of people coming up and taking pictures with me. And so anyways, there were two different camps, and, you know, there were definitely the majority of the people there. I mean, there were a lot of people that were there to talk to me and see me and took pictures with me and things, and we’re definitely an altcoin camp for sure. We believe in Ethereum. We believe in DeFi.

14:39 We believe in the decentralization of the internet. And to me, that’s something that is going to be absolutely huge for the future. So. Well, let’s talk about that split because you mentioned Andreas. And again, he was back on our show in 2015, 17 and 19.

14:55 And he’s talking about this concept of DeFi. He’s not using that term because it hadn’t been adopted yet, but he’s talking about this future infrastructure where we could, you know, program things and build things, and it’s going to change the world. And it was interesting how you said early on that all that has now become true, but it didn’t actually happen on the Bitcoin platform. It happened on Ethereum. And maybe you could explain that to people who maybe are either new to this space or don’t understand why that happened and why you think that is also what’s going to continue to happen.

15:26 But anyways, listen to Andreas Antonopoulos. In reading through, you know, the internet of money, all of his books that he’s written on Bitcoin, he talked about that the first layer of technology from this point forward is always going to be money because obviously we all know money makes the world go round and everything ultimately gets back to money. And because of that, any technology that comes from this point forward is going to help kind of the rails of money to move faster because, I mean, we’re still using basically the same technology to transfer money that, you know, for decades now when we have better technology, as you know, the central banks kind of run the world, that probably has a lot to do with it.

16:09 Bitcoin was kind of supposed to solve that. Bitcoin was supposed to be the internet of money. It was supposed to be the way that people transact from this point forward. But unfortunately, that did not happen. Why?

16:24 Because I’ve got a friend, Jacob Canfield, who bought a mattress on overstock.com when they started accepting Bitcoin back in 2016. He bought a mattress that in 2017 was worth $400,000. Today, that mattress is worth over a million dollars. The number one use case of Bitcoin, as defined by Bank of America in a recent report, is that it goes up in value. It appreciates in value.

16:48 You’re not going to want to use Bitcoin to send money because having the Bitcoin itself is more valuable, and that’s easily reflected in my story to where if you look back at how much money I would have had if instead of buying the software, if I just would have bought the Bitcoin, I would have had millions of dollars. But instead, I just had the software. And so people have gotten to the point where they don’t want to spend their Bitcoin. Now, there is, we work with a company called Crypto.com where we have a metal Visa card, and we take some profit sometimes and use that card.

17:18 We support them. We think it’s good. But we know in the back of our mind that all the money that we do spend is money that eventually would be worth more. But during, since Bitcoin’s got these bull and bear cycles, it makes sense to lock in some profit sometimes by doing that. But overall, Bitcoin is not the future of decentralized finance.

17:36 Decentralized finance is what Andreas Antonopoulos was actually defining five years ago without even knowing or in beyond, without even knowing that he was really doing that, setting the tone for what would be the future, which is DeFi. So decentralized finance in a nutshell is what Bitcoin was kind of supposed to be in the beginning. It’s removing the third party, it’s removing the intermediaries, removing the need for a credit card processing company to step in the middle and do business for you on your behalf and then charge you a fee for it.

18:11 We’re getting rid of that so you can do it directly. And basically, anything you can do at a bank, you know, is going to be done in the future in DeFi. And these bakers, they know this. Bank of America in that same report said, they’re not worried about Bitcoin. They’re worried about decentralized finance.

18:28 And that’s why I think right now, you see a lot of negativity during the recent price drop about Ethereum because a lot of these institutions are accumulating Ethereum because to understand DeFi is to understand Ethereum. It’s Ethereum’s number one use case at this point. And like you said, DeFi is going to be the number one way that people are going to change their lives financially in the future. Yeah. And it was that Ethereum that allowed those smart contracts to about that open source method where people could actually now start, you know, creating those dApps and really starting experimenting.

19:02 And I was trying to tell my students like an analogy. You know, when I worked on Wall Street, Ben, it was me and maybe, you know, 20 other shops like ours that had balance sheets, that had the regulation, that had the know-how, that could offer these derivative instruments, right? Maybe the JP Morgan’s and the Bankers Trusts and the Goldman Sachs and a few others. And so we were in there innovating. But, you know, you had to have 10,000 employees.

19:26 You had to have a couple billion on your balance sheet in order to even offer these instruments. And so we innovated. We competed with each other. You know, we made a lot of money, but again, it wasn’t decentralized. Now I see almost the same thing happening in this open source way where you got four kids up in Helsinki or ten kids out in Singapore or eight guys or men or women.

19:47 I don’t know where they are. I don’t even know their names, right? They’re cooking up these fascinating new apps. They’re putting them out there. Yes, there are bumps and bruises and hacks and mistakes, but the innovation’s incredible.

19:59 And again, it allows the user to decide and then you can see where the money is. And you can see the market caps. You can see the flows. And since it’s a public blockchain, it’s all visible. This rate of innovation could never happen in a centralized finance world.

20:13 Not to mention the fact in centralized finance, not only would they wouldn’t innovate, they keep all the money for themselves. I’m sure you read the book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s actually just not in their interest, whether they’re evil or not. It’s just, you know, it’s not in their interest to eat their own lunch and take their own profits. And so I totally agree with what you’re saying.

20:30 What we’re seeing, it’s all based on that Ethereum innovation and the fact that, you know, it’s open source and other people can now go out there and play with it. There are now some issues now because everyone’s on Ethereum. I’m not sure she can talk about, but I think that’s a pretty good explanation. And just to be clear, you think you still have core positions in Bitcoin, core positions in Ethereum, because you think they’re going up, but you think also the big asymmetrical gains are in some of these new DeFi platforms.

20:57 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve seen that over the last year, really two years now. DeFi really started kind of coming to the forefront, you know, near the end of 2019, 2020, throughout the first six months of the year, it really started ramping up. And then we call it the DeFi summer that happened last year. It’s when things really exploded.

21:18 And yeah, there’s certainly a lot of problems with Ethereum. But those problems actually open up opportunities for other coins. But we’ve seen some of the biggest gains over the last two years for anything, projects like Aave, projects like Synthetic, projects like Compound. These are, you know, a lot of them are yield farming or yield aggregators where people can do flash loans and do a lot of lending and receive interest at high APY returns and things like that through these platforms.

21:46 And because these platforms are working so much and there’s so much what we call TVL, total value locked onto these platforms, billions of dollars, I think right now, it’s at $50 billion total in DeFi. There was, I think at the peak of the market, I think it was like $84 billion or something like that that was locked into these platforms. The coins themselves were actually going up massively. Like, if you look at Aave, you can’t even quantify the returns of Aave for the last year.

22:14 That’s how high they were. It’s like trying to quantify the returns from Bitcoin since 2009. It doesn’t even make sense to put a percent on it. That’s how much it rose. And so, these platforms are the future because like you said, they’re unlocking the ability for the average person to be able to take part in the same kinds of financial instruments that the big money has been doing for years.

22:37 It brings the derivatives market to the individual. There’s a quadrillion dollars in derivatives out there. We’re never going to stop derivatives, which are basically just IOUs. But now, the individual has the power to take advantage of those instead of just the hedge funds in the institutions. And Ethereum is bringing a lot of this to the forefront.

22:57 And Ethereum is the backbone of decentralized finance. But there are other chains and other projects that are starting to, you know, build ecosystems into this, of course, Cardano and Polkadot. Those are two massive projects. They’re not fully launched in their full capabilities yet. They’re Ethereum, Cardano and Polkadot right now, which I favor Cardano by a long shot over Polkadot.

23:21 I do like Polkadot too. I own a lot of Polkadot. But these two projects are kind of where Ethereum was in early 2018 in terms of their ecosystem. So it was just ramping up, building the ecosystem, building the dApps, or as you call them, dApps, decentralized applications. That’s what that stands for.

23:39 So Cardano and Polkadot over the next year are going to start having those come out on their platforms. They’re going to have coins launched on top of them of Asynthetics Compound. These are all coins that were launched on the Ethereum blockchain. We’ll have similar coins launched on these other chains. So if you look at those coins and how much they rose and how much those platforms, you know, killed it, these other chains will have also similar projects, similar platforms, similar coins as well.

24:05 And I do just, you know, before we move on, I do want to reiterate what you said a second ago, which was my number one core position is still in Bitcoin. Bitcoin, to me, it is digital gold. It does lead the market. I do believe Ethereum, assuming we do return to a bull trend this year, I do believe Ethereum has a great chance to pass Bitcoin in market cap this year or early next year, but our core position is still in Bitcoin because the better you do financially, the better you want to hedge, right?

24:34 So that’s why we actually have Bitcoin as our core portfolio because it goes down the least compared to the other coins. They drop massively in bear markets, but Bitcoin we found is a safe haven for a lot of our crypto gains. One way to look at it is the end goal for people should always be trying to collect more Bitcoin and more Ethereum. The institutions, the hedge funds, the manipulation, the whales, they want you to sell your Bitcoin. They want you to sell your Ethereum.

25:02 Do not sell those two coins. No matter what. Do not sell those. You want to hold on to those. You want to accumulate those.

25:08 That’s what gives you a voice in the governance of these projects in the future. That’s the only thing that gives you a voice is being able to own those coins. Derivatives markets, Bitcoin futures contracts, Ethereum futures contracts, they’re paper Bitcoin. It’s paper Ethereum. You don’t actually own it.

25:22 You want to get on Coinbase. You don’t want to go to grayscale. You don’t want to buy stock in Bitcoin through different trusts. You want to own Bitcoin, own Ethereum. If you can afford to own one Bitcoin and you don’t own one Bitcoin, you’re making probably the biggest mistake of your life.

25:36 Most people that are invested can afford an Ethereum right now at $2,000. But even if you have smaller amounts, even if you can afford that, using a lot of these other altcoins when they drop down considerably like they have recently, that’s how we were able to accumulate so much Bitcoin, is using a lot of these explosive gains from these smaller projects, and then when they kind of top out, you move that over to Bitcoin and Ethereum. There will be other projects in the future that are added to that list, I’m sure, like Cardano.

26:02 That’s definitely my third, you know, favorite project behind those two. That game will change too. I’m sure institutional money will try to penetrate Cardano and Polkadot, some of these other top coins, Binance Coin, for instance, in the future, but for right now, Bitcoin, Ethereum, that’s where it’s at. That’s what you want to own, but you can use the other coins to get more of that. Yeah, and I really appreciate that about you where, you know, you’re open-minded enough to be able to see the value in each coin and not get into this cult-like behavior, because as you said, you know, as a core asset, I think you even said you can see Bitcoin going to a million, million and a half sometime in the future.

26:40 It’s something you want to own, but it’s not going to cause the building of the infrastructure of DeFi. It’s not going to be a part of that, or we don’t think it is as much as they might want it to. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to own it. And again, Ethereum, it’s going to be that backbone. Now, there could be some other projects that come along with it, but you still believe that owning that Ethereum is still the great long-term play and its market cap could even approach the Bitcoin, which means those prices get definitely a lot closer.

27:09 Those are interesting points. You made something really interesting about derivatives there, and let me talk about that. And by the way, I love the companies you mentioned. We’ve actually got the CEO of Aave on here in a couple of weeks, and we got Charles from Cardano coming on here, I think in the next month. Love Charles.

27:20 And we’re going to talk to both of those gentlemen. Fantastic, yeah, visionaries. Going on there. You know, I worked in derivatives in the 90s, and they got a bad name in the 90s, and then in the 2000s with credit derivatives, because they supposedly took down the housing market. What took down the housing market was bad risk management, basically bad risk management.

27:41 And you could say it was greed and all this stuff, but you know, it was really bad risk management. Derivatives have been around since humans have been around. You know, derivatives are everywhere in our lives. A dinner reservation is a derivative. An insurance contract is a derivative.

27:55 Promising someone you’re going to pay this amount for their corn when it comes out of the grounds, that’s a forward contract, which has probably been happening for the last, you know, 50,000 years. And again, the derivatives themselves aren’t the problem. It’s just understanding the risk. And like you said before now, it’s pretty much been the financial institutions that controlled that. Now we have access to them.

28:16 And if you can understand the risk, it can be very empowering as an individual. And again, I’m blown away by the derivative innovation going out there with some of these companies. I’m just like, wow. And honestly, it’s almost getting so complicated because, you know, back on the Wall Street days, I had to make markets. A customer would come and they’d want a two-way market on an off-balance sheet, a fixed floating swap, or a derivative on a 10-year treasury five years from now.

28:42 It wasn’t exchange traded, and I’d have to sit there and make markets for the customer. Now, I didn’t get tokens to do that. I didn’t get paid. You know, we got paid because of our bid offer spread. But with DeFi, you can see people now being rewarded for liquidity pools.

28:57 You know, you can see all this innovation that Wall Street could never have even thought about. You know, how do we reward a market maker? How do we give them some extra money or some tokens? So I’m blown away. And I actually haven’t been this excited about something in a long time.

29:11 And when you talk about this innovation, it gets me excited, Ben. So many things, you know, to talk about here and understand. And like you said, these Polkadots and these Cardano’s, these could become these things in the future that we’ve seen Ethereum become. But it’s interesting that you’re saying, still hold those core assets. And again, don’t hold the future on it.

29:32 Don’t hold the institutional stock and the institution that has it. You want to actually own that in your cold wallet, ideally, a place where that’s yours. Why is it so important to actually have the asset? Yeah, so this is what we call custodianship when it comes to crypto. It’s at what level do you actually own your crypto, okay?

29:51 And I think that two of these levels are great. I think one of the levels is very bad. So we have the lowest level of custodianship, which is you literally don’t own it, you can never own it. We’re talking about apps like Robinhood, okay? It’s all derivatives.

30:07 You don’t actually own Dogecoin, for instance, on Robinhood. If stuff hits the fan and you want to pull your Dogecoin out, you got nowhere to withdraw it to. You can’t withdraw it. And you see what happens when it’s at the most pivotal times is they close the trading on it. Now, look, certainly Coinbase has some issues too with overloaded traffic and Binance.

30:28 They both do when there’s overloaded traffic, but it’s a little more strategic and underhanded from companies like Robinhood that they want to make sure that, of course, you know, they’re giving the data to the hedge funds from their retail traders. And the retail traders are always at the loss, which is the exact thing Robinhood claims to be against. And so, I don’t like Robinhood. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, this is another company where you invest in the stock market.

30:52 You’re investing in the stock that has a one-to-one match. It’s actually not one-to-one, but you have a share of a Bitcoin on paper. You don’t own that. You can’t withdraw. So, someone I know who got heavily into Grayscale because they’ve come from a traditional market, well, eventually, getting in through Grayscale made them understand they actually don’t own the Bitcoin and they want to own it.

31:17 So, the second level of custodianship is exchange custodianship. This is where you have an exchange like Coinbase where you go there and you buy the asset, and you don’t own what we call the private key. This is the secret password to your crypto. You don’t own that. So, if Coinbase were to whatever reason, like, it’s in California, like, let’s say that it fell into the ocean.

31:42 Let’s say California fell into the ocean tomorrow, and all of the servers for Coinbase were in California, you lose your crypto. You don’t have access to it. Now, that’s an extremely unlikely scenario, and I’m actually way more in favor of people holding coins on exchanges than most people. And the reason is because the people that hold crypto on exchanges, most of the time, they’re at the beginning of their journey, and trying to move to what we’ll talk about is that third level of custodianship in a minute.

32:11 I would say far more people have lost money and sending Bitcoin to wallets without knowing what they’re doing than actually exchange hacks from major exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, Binance US, KuCoin, you know, exchanges like that. So, you don’t own it per se. However, when you’re ready to move to the third level of custodianship, you can withdraw it. You can withdraw your crypto from Coinbase. So you buy it on Coinbase, you buy Bitcoin on Coinbase, and then you set up a personal wallet, and you can send it there.

32:46 So you do actually own it. You just don’t technically own it until you pull it off, but you have the option to do so. Robinhood, level 1, you can’t do that. Exchange is level 2. You don’t own it until you withdraw it, then you actually own it.

32:59 The third level of custodianship is simply having your own wallet. There are what we call hot wallets and cold wallets. A hot wallet is like an internet-based wallet. So you’ve got to be connected to the internet to use it. A cold storage wallet would be something like a ledger, which is a device, it’s a USB device, or there’s even things called paper wallets, and there’s even more extreme ways to store your crypto.

33:23 It’s basically where you’re taking your crypto off of the internet so it cannot possibly be hacked. Nobody can get access to it in things like that. When you own your own Bitcoin or you own your own Ethereum, in that third-level custodianship kind of way in a hot wallet or a cold wallet, you own it. No one can take it from you. If the internet went down tomorrow, if there was an EMP somewhere in America, and we lost power for a year, as soon as you got back to the internet, your crypto is still there.

33:55 It’s untouched. Nobody can hack it. And a lot of people bring that up. You don’t hear it as much anymore. People used to say like, well, you know, what happens if the internet goes down?

34:05 Like, how is crypto affected? Well, if the internet goes down, your credit card doesn’t work. Your debit card doesn’t work. Nothing works. You’re not going to be able to go to the ATM.

34:13 You’re not going to be able to go to the bank. They’re not going to have any power. So, you know, the whole thing is, in that third level of custodianship, you literally own your Bitcoin, and that’s what makes Bitcoin and crypto, I don’t use the word cryptocurrencies. A lot of people use the word cryptocurrencies. I’ve stopped using that word because that implies everything’s trying to be money.

34:32 It doesn’t really describe what crypto is. We say crypto assets because it’s an asset that you own. It’s property. That’s what makes it different. And that’s why trying to weave your way through up to the third level of custodianship is very important.

34:47 And I would note that exchanges like Coinbase, they also have different levels of custodianship within them. There’s a big tip I give to a lot of people if they use Coinbase is there’s something called Coinbase Vault. This is where you can actually do a much higher level security for your crypto on Coinbase to make sure it doesn’t get touched, and it makes you actually invulnerable to SIM card swaps and being able to where people basically switch your phone number, they get access to your Gmail because you connected your phone number to your Gmail.

35:19 That’s a big no-no if you can disconnect it, disconnect it. They get into your email. They have access to everything in your email including your Coinbase. It all happens in about five minutes. So the Coinbase Vault has workarounds to that where you don’t have to worry about that happening.

35:31 So I do want to point that out for anybody who’s interested. Yeah, that’s a really good description and funny enough all my students are going through this whole process this week. They’re going from centralized exchanges to the hot wallets to the cold wallets and we’re just forcing them to do it. So they actually get it and again by taking action. It’s a great education tool because they’re like, oh, it’s the private keys and now I have them and like you said if the internet does go down in that worst case scenario, you’re going to have a lot bigger problems, you know, like where’s the food?

35:56 You know, where’s the riot happening? Where are the zombies? Yeah, where the zombies and again, the internet will come back up at some point. And again, you got your private keys. So that’s that’s a really good explanation.

36:05 And again, I had Robert Kiyosaki author, Rich Dad, poured out on a couple weeks ago and and he said Brian when I own gold, I don’t own a gold future. He’s like, I don’t own a gold promissory note. I either have the gold in my house or it’s locked in a safe where I have the key. You know, he’s like when I own real estate, I know where the property is. It’s on the corner there.

36:24 So he’s big into real assets, which is why he’s actually a fan of a certain crypto assets as well because he sees them as much more real than the fiat currencies and that’s a whole another rabbit hole to go down. Let’s talk about this bear market right now. You know, we’ve crossed a few of our you know, 50-day averages and 200-day averages. You’ve been through the bear markets before we actually saw the DeFi summer last year come out of a correction. What’s your read on this?

36:54 You know, one of the things I’m trying to bring to my academy is 30 years of trading experience to a market where I see zero and I see a lot of newbie behavior, a lot of panicking, a lot of people telling me how they got diamond hands while their hands are melting off and just again, not very intelligent trading strategies at all. What do you tell people to do in a quote unquote bear market? How should people behave or think or have discipline when something like this happens?

37:21 You know, the bear markets, we get rich for sure. The bear market is where all the money is made in crypto. By the time the average new retail investor has heard about Bitcoin in a way that gets them excited to get into it, it’s already made the, you know, most of its moves that it’s going to make. And we saw that, you know, people got excited about Bitcoin when it broke a new all-time high, and then within two weeks, it was already at 42K. And then it went up to 64K.

37:47 But, I mean, Bitcoin was at 3900 in March of last year, of 2020. So, when you really see those massive gains that can be made at the beginning of, you know, the bull markets, when a lot of people aren’t really excited about Bitcoin, that’s where a lot of the big money is. But if you look at a lot of the altcoins and you look at, like, I love to talk about Cardano. I love Ethereum. I love Cardano.

38:09 There’s by far and away my two favorite projects. But Cardano was, right now, it’s at $1.28 as of the time of this recording or right before we came on air here at least. It got all the way up to $2.50 at the peak. About six weeks to two months ago, somewhere in that range, it was at a penny, a penny to two pennies, for almost the whole bear market between 2018 and, you know, early 2020. That’s where you make all the money.

38:36 But markets are so psychological, as you know, Brian. It’s that you, I remember there’s a guy, he’s a good friend of mine, and he told me the entire bull market of 2017. Man, I tell you what, if Bitcoin goes back down to $3,000, I am going to mortgage my house. You know what happened? It went down to $3,000.

38:57 You know what happened? He didn’t mortgage his house. Because the fear that comes in when it drops, it just pulls that momentum away, and that’s what causes people to leave crypto. The stats say if you’re in crypto for four years or more, you’ll become wildly rich, period. As long as, you know, you’re not investing $1.

39:17 As long as you’re putting money into crypto and you stick through an entire four-year cycle, you are going to make so much money because the gains are astronomical from the bear market. So I want to be clear about that. The bear market is where the money is made. Are we in a bear market right now? Now, that’s a great question, and it’s a very complicated question because all we really have to base where Bitcoin is today on is where Bitcoin has been throughout history.

39:44 And that is something that we’ve really done on my channel for years, and that’s really why my channel blew up. One of the reasons over the last year and a half is because we were so dead on because we used the history to judge where it’s going, and up until the last two months, we had been dead on with where it was going to. But more recently, things have gotten a little fuzzy. So we have three bull markets in history to look at, you know? You have the 2013-2014, you have 2016-2017, and you have today, okay?

40:17 Now, what really drives the Bitcoin price, in my opinion, it’s not adoption, it’s not institutions, it’s nothing more than the halving event. This is where the production of Bitcoin is cut in half every four years. To put that in perspective, right now, about 900 Bitcoin per day are being created. In 2024, that number is going to be cut down to 450 Bitcoin per day. That’s through Bitcoin mining, which is a whole different subject.

40:48 My favorite number in Bitcoin, my very favorite number, my very favorite statistic to talk about, is that when you look at the 12-year history of Bitcoin, this shows the compound effect of that cut in production. In 2009, there were 50 Bitcoin mined per block. Today, we’re down to 12.5 due to all of the halving events, okay? Or actually, 6.25. When you look at the first 12 years of Bitcoin, 18.7 million Bitcoin have been mined in 12 years.

41:25 18.7 million in 12 years. The last Bitcoin does not get mined until 2140, so 119 years from now. 12 years, 18.7 million Bitcoin. 119 years, there’s only 2.3 million left total to mine. The last Bitcoin cycle, there will only be one half of one Bitcoin mined in four years.

41:50 It’s mind-blowing when you think about that compound effect of the cut in production. Right now, 900 Bitcoin being mined per day, grayscale, Paypal, Square and MicroStrategy, not even counting Tesla. Between those four companies alone, they’re buying over 2,000 Bitcoin per day. There’s only 900 being made per day. That puts into perspective how much demand there is now, and every four years, we go through a supply shock, okay?

42:18 That is what really drives the price of Bitcoin. It’s not, did Goldman Sachs tweet about Bitcoin today? It’s not, does Tesla think Bitcoin mining is great or bad today based on, you know, the whim of, I call them the muskrat, okay? That’s not what drives the Bitcoin price. It’s a halving event.

42:37 None of the fundamentals of Bitcoin have changed between today and two months ago when it was at all-time high of $64,000. And when you zoom out, overall, the price always goes up. But understanding that four-year cycle is so important. I say all that to sum it up is this. In 2013, we had an 83% dip in the middle of a bull market.

43:00 Everyone thought it was the bear market. It was over. By the end of 2013, it had one more massive leg up. In 2017, we never had that. We did have a retest of a Fibonacci level that matched 2013.

43:14 It’s dip, but it was not as dramatic. People look at the 2017 market, it’s basically just went straight up left to right, okay? There were certainly corrections, but there was never over a 40% correction in the latter half of that bull market. It looks like now we’re either, for this market cycle, we’re looking at either one of two things. We’re either looking at something different than we’ve ever seen in history before with Bitcoin, or we’re looking at a similar pattern to 2013, and I think that’s what we’re looking at.

43:41 We’re having a mini bear market inside of a larger bull trend that will continue until the end of the year. And the indicators recently are we’re crossing the 50-day and 200-day average, right, which are typically signs of bear markets, but you’re saying this doesn’t behave the same way stocks do and currencies do and all the way that typically Wall Street evaluates something. This is a very unique instrument with unique supply issues, and the way you see it is people are calling it too early just to be a bear market.

44:11 Now, you made five predictions in January 2nd, and I’m bringing them up because, you know, they’re pretty good, I think, but you said, let me just rattle them off, Coinbase dollar known as the USDC will win the stablecoin wars, XRP falls from grace, Ethereum institutional FOMO will kick in, Bitcoin will exceed $225,000 per coin, and the Bitcoin bull run will end in 2021. Now, you said precisely September 28th. First of all, why were you thinking these things?

44:38 And do you still think these things were true or has the timeline changed on some of them? Wow, I’m actually impressed with my own predictions. They are pretty impressive. They are pretty impressive. Those first three obviously have been 100% dead on.

44:51 The latter two, we’ve yet to see. We’ll have to wait until the end of the year to see where it ends up. But, you know, I actually had increased my Bitcoin prediction based on all the numbers that we were looking at. We looked to be ahead of the pace, and the stock-to-flow chart, which is by a guy named Plan B on Twitter, he’s anonymous, he created, he basically brought the stock-to-flow commodities chart into Bitcoin to measure the stock and the flow of Bitcoin, its production.

45:19 It’s been the most accurate chart in Bitcoin history. It still shows a $288,000 Bitcoin by the end of this cycle. It looks like it may be lengthening out the cycle maybe. I’m still not ready to say that. Plan B says that he believes there’s no chance.

45:36 Like, the worst possible case scenario for Bitcoin is by the end of the year, it’s $135K. And that would mean an extension of the cycle, and then at the beginning of 2022, we could possibly see, you know, Bitcoin climb to that $288,000 number. I do think we still are definitely looking at $100,000 Bitcoin or more. $228K, for me, I still believe that we’re going to get to those numbers. The only problem is we do have the institutional manipulation like we’ve never had before in Bitcoin, and that could change things slightly.

46:12 So we’ll have to see if that one comes true. As far as the September 28th day goes, that’s based on something called the Golden Bick, the Bitcoin Gold, I can’t speak, the Bitcoin Golden Bull Ratio. And what this measures is for every Bitcoin cycle in history, which has just been a few, it measures the percentage of time, the percentage of weekly candles, or maybe it was daily candles, I think, actually, in the specific chart, from the point, from the low point in the market, so the bottom of the market, to the halving event, and then from the halving event to the peak of the market.

46:47 It’s been so far an exact 49 to 51% ratio. 49% of the bull run happens before the halving, and 51% happens after the halving, which occurred May of 2020. That puts the exact end of this Bitcoin bull run at September 28th. And because we know all those other mile markers, so you do the math and that’s what it works out to. For altcoins, you know, we only have one altcoin cycle.

47:15 It went four weeks after the top of Bitcoin before it topped out, and so we would assume a four to six week extension for altcoins where people are pulling profits out of Bitcoin and investing in altcoins. So, first three, turned out to be right. We’ll have to see what happens with the other two. Talk to me about institutional manipulation. What are you talking about here?

47:34 Obviously, we saw, you know, a big institution like the Chinese government trying to lock down on the use of crypto. We know they’re going to try to introduce their own on their, you know, state sponsor, WeChat, etc. We also see in America a lot of financial institutions getting into this, which makes me think the US government is not going to do the same thing, but when you see this institutional manipulation, it’s also an information war as well. What are you specifically talking about?

48:02 Yeah, so, basically, what’s going on right now, in my opinion, a lot of evidence, I mean, on-chain metrics to support this. We looked at a chart this morning where you compare what we call the long-term holders versus short-term holders of Bitcoin. The long-term holders are the institutions. The short-term holders are the retail investors because they’re the ones that get scared off by the psychology of the market. If you actually look at the way that they track, the retail investors, the flow of money going in and out of Bitcoin matches the price exactly.

48:31 When the price is going up, people are buying, buying, buying. When it’s going down, they’re selling, selling, selling. But what happens is it reaches an equilibrium, and then they keep selling well under the average, you know, value or what the value of Bitcoin should be. The long-term holders, these are the whales. These are the institutions.

48:50 Actually, they’re already back on an uptick of accumulating. They will accumulate while the retail investors are selling. That puts it all into perspective. These people, these institutions, and look, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, they’re certainly all involved in it, and you know that because it’s dissemination of information. You see the narratives that these people put out, and they’re always putting out narratives based on what they’re trying to do.

49:15 So when they want the price to go up, you know, Goldman Sachs, Bitcoin is a new asset class. When they’re wanting Bitcoin to go down, we actually don’t know if Bitcoin is going to make it. They actually had a private call recently with some of their investors. They said they thought Bitcoin could go to $22. That should be against the law.

49:34 That should be a crime for them to be able to say that. And so what’s going on is you’re trying to get, the institutions are trying to get the retail sellers to get rid of their Bitcoin. That’s why I keep telling my audience and tell your audience as well, if you own Bitcoin, if you own Ethereum, do not sell Bitcoin, do not sell Ethereum. Like, right? What are the rules of Fight Club?

49:53 Number one rule, don’t talk about Fight Club. When it comes to crypto, number one rule, do not sell Bitcoin or Ethereum. That’s what you don’t need to do because these narratives push the price down. And the Muskrat, as I call him, as I mentioned earlier from Tesla, he certainly is all wrapped up and involved in it too. There’s never been a bigger price manipulator than Elon Musk in the history of markets.

50:15 If you watch it, what he did, and I think he’s acting as cover for a lot of these institutions, I don’t think he’s actually manipulating the prices. I think he’s actually kind of the linchpin. He tweets. It’s already on the way up or down. It’s camouflaging and disguising a lot of the whale and the institutional moves is what’s actually going on there.

50:35 And so they’re trying to give these narratives. They’re trying to send these tweets. They want you to think Bitcoin is bad for the environment, which is total myth. It’s asinine. Your air conditioning uses 10% of all the electricity in the world.

50:49 Are we going to shut that down? No, because it’s beneficial. Bitcoin pales in comparison to that and is maybe not equally as beneficial as air conditioning. I certainly like being cool. But it’s very important for the financial stability of the future of the world, okay?

51:03 So you’re seeing all these narratives saying stuff is negative, it’s negative, it’s negative. What’s happening? Whales accumulating. They’re forcing the retail investors to sell because you might be looking at your holdings. You might pull up your Coinbase account.

51:18 You might be a newer investor. You might be in college. And you might say, Why do they care about my 0.05 Bitcoin? This sounds silly. Like, why would they want me to sell 0.05 Bitcoin, which right now would be equivalent to, you know, $1,500 or $2,000, whatever it would be.

51:35 But it’s not insignificant because there’s 20 other thousand people, 20,000 other people that also have 0.05 Bitcoin. They want that to come out of all of your hands because the banks know, the central banks know, the people behind these institutions know that the only way they can truly get control of the crypto market is to own the most Bitcoin and own the most Ethereum. Something very interesting is happening in the world of Ethereum right now. They’re fighting. We call it fighting.

52:04 It’s fear, uncertainty and doubt when these narratives are coming out that are painting negative pictures of Ethereum and of Bitcoin as well. They’re fighting with these narratives. They’re telling you Ethereum is going to get crushed. They’re giving you all this negativity. But the Ethereum holders are not selling, and it is driving them crazy.

52:22 Ethereum is the greatest opportunity of your lifetime. For most people, I believe decentralized finance is all based on Ethereum right now, and they want you to sell, do not sell. So it is. It’s an information war. Everyone’s putting out narratives.

52:36 It’s on Twitter. Everyone’s on the internet. There’s a lot of emotions involved. And like you said, one tweet by Musk can, like, kill markets. One appearance on Saturday Night Live can move markets in a way where if that was a stock, he’d have his second SEC investigation, right?

52:53 Well, you know what’s interesting, Brian, if I could cut in here, is, you know, you look at the mafia, right? How do they go after the mafia? Do they go after the mafia for unsolved murders? No, they go after him for tax evasion. I really believe that the SEC, who Elon has already obviously super pissed off, they now have a way to go after him for all of this manipulation, even though it’s with Dogecoin, even though it’s with Bitcoin, even though it’s in an unregulated market, because Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin back in January, Tesla’s value, they made more money in profit off Bitcoin than they made in like two years in Tesla over the last, you know, quarter.

53:35 Whatever the numbers are, they made a massively amount of money more from Bitcoin. Tesla’s financial stability is at least partly related to the price of Bitcoin. You got Elon Musk tweeting about Bitcoin, manipulating the market, up and down. He knows what he’s doing. And he’s basically saying, you know, Nanana booboo, you’ll never catch me to the SEC.

53:58 But now that Tesla is linked to Bitcoin, I think that may change. And I think there’s a good chance at some point that they’re going to, if he continues the way that he’s been doing, which, I mean, he’s just an awful person. I mean, I did a whole video on him exposing him. I mean, he really is one of the great masqueraders in the history of mankind where people champion him as some kind of maverick when really he’s just as firmly implanted in, you know, the people controlling things than anybody else.

54:23 Well, he makes great electric cars, doesn’t he? No, not actually. I would never own one. But well, he also didn’t create that. He didn’t create anything.

54:33 He actually stole Tesla from the two guys who created it. Wow. Well, you’re going to get a lot of love out there from Mr. Musk. So, but I appreciate your point of view.

54:42 I honestly think he’s too busy trying to put rockets on Mars and build electric cars to actually be conspiring with others for his tweets in the crypto markets. But like who knows? Again, what I do know is it moves things. What I do know is that there’s something wrong with that, in my opinion. And what I do know finally is we have to all think as retail investors or even larger than the retail status.

55:07 We should really be careful with the information we consume and how seriously we take it and try not to get emotional about trading. You know, one of the first things Gordon Gekko says to Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street is first lesson, don’t get emotional about stock. And yet we see most of the crypto market, all the retail people have never probably traded anything in their lives. Very emotional. And then we see these tweets moving things up and down, which I guess means great opportunities for bigger people, but it usually means the little guy gets burned.

55:38 Absolutely. I mean, yeah. I mean, that’s the whole name of the game is burning the retail investor. And it’s something that’s been really sad to watch. And, you know, what’s interesting is, you know, sometimes that emotion of the trading of bad trading days, having large unrealized losses, I mean, forget realized losses.

55:54 Those can be even worse or definitely are worse. You don’t actually lose until you sell. But we even notice here because I’ve got 25 employees here. I have a corporate office. You know, this is not just me and my basement making videos.

56:05 I’ve got a phenomenal team here that helps me with things. And, you know, everybody here is obviously into crypto and invested in different things. And what’s interesting is on these days of the market crashes, we’ll find ourselves like having more arguments, disagreeing more about stuff. And it’s not even like we’re sitting there thinking like, oh, we’re very angry because the market is down. But it’s like that overwhelming psychology that goes into understanding your net worth, changing at the drop of a dime depending on which way the wind blows.

56:36 And a lot of times, a lot of these false narratives, especially, is very frustrating and it affects you in a lot different ways than you would think. It has a much bigger effect even when you don’t realize it’s having a big effect, you know? Like, if you’ve got something going on in your personal life, you know, it affects what you do at your job. Markets are the same way. You may not realize how much is affecting you, but in a lot of ways, you know, it is.

56:59 And that’s one way that a lot of these hedge funds, they beat that, is because they’re using bots and they’re using algorithms, and they’re not, you know, they’re not having to make decisions based upon the way somebody’s feeling on that day. And so that’s another way they just continue to beat the retail investor. But, you know, the Wall Street Vets thing has showed us anything, which there’s a big, I think, NCC 1002, I think, is a law or regulation that’s going into effect that’s actually going to stop a lot of these hedge funds from being able to over-leverage themselves.

57:32 A lot of people haven’t been talking about this, just kind of came out in the last few days, people are starting to learn about it. They’re starting to realize these hedge funds are there’s more retail investors than there are of them. There’s more collective money between real retail investors. There’s more of us than there are of them. And I think people are waking up to this fact.

57:53 And, you know, one thing we really try to do on my channel is enable the retail investor to understand that you matter, you have worth, you have value, and you have a say. When everybody collectively sits together and says, I guess we’ll never change anything, nothing will change. But when we start to realize the power of the individual and the power that we have as a group to work together against, you know, a lot of this big money that tries to manipulate us in different ways, we can win.

58:19 And I believe that through crypto over the next 20 to 25 years, we will win. Yeah, a lot of great points there. I mean, I guess, you know, I guess GameStop is a mid-level example of maybe that working. Okay, there was a lot of problems with that as well, but you did see for the first time, you know, retail’s kind of grouping together and beating one of the big guys. And, you know, I worked on Wall Street for decades, and the whole business model is jacking the retail investor.

58:44 I mean, that’s ultimately pays for everything. And so, but back then, there was no way for them to communicate with each other, right, because there was no internet, there was no social media. There weren’t even the platforms on top of that that we saw. So, I think you make a great point, and I think it’s all about educating people on how to trade. And you bring another point up, just having a position on into crypto takes mental bandwidth.

59:04 And so, I said something the other day on one of my broadcasts, this is, you know, this is trading. This is not Netflix. This shouldn’t be where you go for your entertainment, or for your dopamine spikes. And if you’re doing that, you’re probably going to end up with losses. You know, this is real.

59:18 This takes a discipline, a long-term view, and it will eat up your life if you’re not careful. When I used to trade on Wall Street, I would take positions home at night on my book. I would be long or short, you know, big amounts of government treasuries, or futures on the Chicago border trade, or your dollar future contracts. And I caught myself, the same way you guys caught yourself, thinking, oh, I’m happy when I’m up, and I’m sad when I’m down. And after a couple years, I realized, but I’m not a different person.

59:46 So, I shouldn’t feel better about myself because I happened to call the market yesterday, better than the day before. You have to really separate your emotions. And again, like you said, it happens on a subconscious level. So, these are all things, I don’t think these retail investors understand. It’s almost like throwing a new drug into a population, and they don’t understand the effects of it.

1:00:05 We could probably go for a whole episode about that, which means people just need to understand this a little bit and also just put some basic checks in place and stop losses and stuff, and we can get to that. Tell me about Cardano because you’re a big fan of it. I’m going to have Charles on in another month or so. For people that don’t know, what is it? Why is it different?

1:00:25 And why are you such a fan? So, Cardano is a smart contract platform, the same thing that Ethereum is. But the issue is Ethereum has a lot of problems. Now, there are, I won’t bore, you know, people that aren’t well-versed in crypto with the details of, you know, some of the solutions for this that’s coming for Ethereum. Here’s what you need to know though.

1:00:50 Ethereum has what we call congestion problems. It has scalability problems. The more people, it’s basically a victim of its own success. Ethereum has so many people using it that it right now cannot handle the level of transactions going through at one time, which means you’re going to have to pay a lot in what we call gas fees. These are the transaction costs.

1:01:14 Crypto is supposed to be low transaction costs, but with Ethereum, it’s so congested when things are going well that those fees get out of control. And that also means the speed is very slow, which means if it’s not working right now, imagine if the entire traditional finance or even 1% of the traditional finance world came over to Ethereum DeFi. It could not handle it right now. So it has a solution called Ethereum 2.0. It’s going to be launched fully in several years.

1:01:41 It’s got kind of a mini solution that’s coming over the summer called the London hard fork, EIP-1559, which will solve some of those issues, right? But Ethereum has problems. Cardano was done the opposite way. So Charles Hoskinson is the founder of Cardano. He also is a co-founder of Ethereum along with Gavin Wood, who’s the founder of Polkadot, and Vitalik Buterin, who is what we consider to be the father of Ethereum, the main Ethereum developer.

1:02:12 But together, they all were a massively great team. But early on, Charles, even Vitalik, they started recognizing some of the problems with Ethereum. Charles decided he wanted to build something that already had those solutions to those problems built in, like the problems wouldn’t even exist when it launched. Basically, it would be extremely low fee, extremely fast, it would be environmentally friendly, and it’d be extremely scalable and extremely decentralized.

1:02:38 And that’s why he decided to start Cardano. And Cardano, you know, it’s got a lot of the same things that, you know, Ethereum has, a lot of the great benefits to it without having a lot of the problems. But I’ll tell you why I love Cardano so much is I just believe in Charles. Like, I really do. I’m so glad you’re having him on.

1:02:56 I didn’t know that you were going to have him on as a guest. He’s one of the most interesting people in crypto. He gets kind of a bad rap. People say he’s hard to work with. People say that, you know, he loves, you know, Charles loves him Charles, you know?

1:03:08 But the thing is, is when you really get to know him, you really actually talk to him on a personal level, you really start finding out like he really knows what he’s talking about. The stuff that he says, it comes from a lot of confidence. And the reason why he’s so confident in Cardano is because it’s peer-reviewed. So where Ethereum, they just put it out in full process. Cardano, everything they roll out, they rigorously have, you know, academic researchers scrutinize it and criticize it and figure out like, okay, will this really work the way that you say it will?

1:03:43 And through that process, they’re able to make all their individual launches on their roadmap, which a lot of people would argue is extremely slow, too slow. It gets a lot of delays. But the thing is, is once it comes out, it’s good. It will work. What we see with a lot of crypto projects is they’re more about getting it out, making sure they meet the deadlines, and not as much about making sure the solutions actually work.

1:04:08 And so because of that, Cardano has consistently, at every tick of its roadmap, regardless of how long it’s taken to get there, it has not had any problems with any single phase of the roadmap that’s rolled out. And I think we’ll continue to see that. And the way I kind of see things is I see that Ethereum, I describe it like this a lot, you know. I know that maybe everybody doesn’t watch football, but I’m a huge sports guy. I’ve got season tickets to all our Atlanta teams here.

1:04:34 I love sports. And I think NFL is a great example of this, okay? It’s kind of like this. Ethereum is like a star quarterback, right? It’s a star quarterback for one of the top teams.

1:04:47 Like, let’s just say Tom Brady on the Buccaneers. But Tom Brady gets hurt in the second game of the season. And what happens is over the season, the other teams in that division or in that conference, they have to make up ground against that top team because they know when that quarterback comes back, they know that team is going to be really, really good, right? Right now, Ethereum has problems. Its quarterback is out right now, right?

1:05:14 They’re working to get him back into the game, but Cardano is that other team that has the great opportunity to catch up on Ethereum while it’s having problems to make progress, build its ecosystem, gain a lot of developers. That’s another thing about Cardano that’s great is their Plutus Smart Contract language. They’re trying to get developers from regular web development where Ethereum has a specific program language called Solidity that you got to be a specific Ethereum developer.

1:05:42 So they got a lot larger pool to pull developers in from. But they’ve got in the next year and a half until Ethereum 2.0 launches, they got a lot of time to catch up to Ethereum. Kind of the way I see things happening over the next four years is I see Ethereum being able to solve most of its problems. I think it’s going to work great. I think DeFi is going to live on Ethereum still.

1:06:05 Cardano is going to be that second-in-market share with the opportunity to replace it at some point, but we haven’t yet to see what that head-to-head matchup is going to look like for real. But I definitely think in the future, they both will have a large market share, and they’re both going to do very well. So what makes sense when you think they’re both going to do well? You bet on both horses. So 100 years from now, we look back, Ben, we’ll we see Bitcoin, then we’ll see Ethereum, and then we’ll see Cardano as the three early evolutions in the crypto space, or is it too early to call that?

1:06:40 I mean, I definitely believe that. I do believe that. I think those are the top three. I think you also kind of the dark course is Binance Coin. Binance is having a lot of kind of regulatory exploratory issues right now where the SEC and CFTC are like starting to ask questions about this, the largest exchange in the world in crypto that like doesn’t have a home base.

1:07:03 It’s decentralized to some extent. It’s a centralized exchange, but Binance will tell you that they’re workers to decentralize. They don’t have a home base. It makes it very difficult to go after them. If Binance is able to either work with regulators or skirt around these regulatory issues, which probably won’t be able to happen, Binance is the world’s biggest exchange.

1:07:23 They have their own smart chain. There’s a smart contract platform as well. Because of that, it’s like they’re kind of have the possibility to be the Amazon of crypto, right? It kind of does everything. It’s a retail hub.

1:07:36 They’ve got a good opportunity to or maybe another comparison would be saying like the Google of crypto, could be Binance. That’s another one to really, really watch. If they’re able to continue operating as a business and not have a lot of regulatory problems or fines that will, you know, cease their operations in different places around the world, they definitely have the head start to be right up there with the other three as well. Okay. It’s a great way you articulated that because, again, if you look at back when Bitcoin was created, at the time, it’s solved a bunch of problems that the market had.

1:08:07 And so, again, we did the market tested it. It had a use case, which was Silk Road. And again, it brought a lot of value to people. But then we needed the next stage. And then Ethereum came in with all of these wish lists, all the Antonopoulos wish list with the smart contract, etc.

1:08:23 But of course, it couldn’t foresee that it itself might, you know, have its own growth issues and things from seven years from now. And it looks like Charles is trying to look, you know, that 10, 20, 30 years ahead. Maybe now, since we at least have a base of what we maybe know what this is, we can maybe see a little bit further ahead in time. Now, probably you can’t see 100 years out, but I’m sure Charles is thinking 20, 30, 40 years out, whereas that would probably be impossible with Bitcoin creation because you didn’t even know if it was going to go anywhere.

1:08:53 So that’s a really good explanation. And I think, look, even Vitalik has said in interviews that he’s the guy that builds it. And he’s not the white paper guy. He’s not a big fan of white papers because he thinks the use test is the real test as opposed to the, you know, all the theory. And again, I’m an MIT grad, but I’m also an engineer.

1:09:13 So I went to work at Ford Motor Company. We built cars that went on the road. I didn’t sit in the lab and create theories. So I see where both have their places and it looks like Charles is doing the longer game and that could create an amazing piece of infrastructure. I guess we’ll just have to see how that plays out.

1:09:30 But again, Ethereum could come back. You know, we’ve got this new 2.0 moving from proof of work to proof of stake. How do you see that battle playing out in the future? And how do you explain that to your grandma when she’s trying to find out what’s up with proof of work, proof of stake? And, of course, you got the information war coming in that it’s going to ruin the environment and Elon doing this.

1:09:51 What’s your two-minute answer on that? And what will the future of that be? Yeah. So here’s one of the beautiful things about crypto that I think is one of the most misunderstood, misinterpreted things. It doesn’t really matter whether like to the average person, you shouldn’t have to explain what proof of work is, proof of stake.

1:10:09 The only reason why we’re talking about it is because of the environmental argument for proof of work. So I do believe which proof of work is Bitcoin mining or crypto mining, proof of stake is where the consensus of the network is done by nodes on the network that hold a certain amount of the crypto so they got all the motivation to send the transactions. A lot of people don’t care about that. Proof of work is crypto mining. Proof of stake is where people hold crypto to verify the transactions, okay?

1:10:36 The only reason we’re talking about it is because of the environmental concerns. But here’s the thing. How many people use the internet? Everyone, basically, right? 95% of the world, I think, is the last number that I saw.

1:10:50 How many people understand what an HTTP protocol is? I think the P stands for protocol, right? We all go in and we all type it into the browser, especially when we had to start adding the S to it, right, for the secure, you know, website browsing. How many people can, number one, say what that is, and number two, explain how it works? It doesn’t matter, right?

1:11:11 Some people, I’m sure there’s some people in the chat right now that are saying it’s, you know, high throughput transfer or what. I don’t even know what it is. I like the fact that I don’t actually know. I want to keep not knowing what it stands for, okay? But some people in the chat are saying, well, I know what that is.

1:11:24 Like, I can explain what that is. You’re the vast minority. You’re the vast minority. 99% of people, maybe 95% or 90% of people that are browsing the internet right now, couldn’t tell you what that is, and they use it every day. It doesn’t matter how the network comes to consensus.

1:11:42 What matters is that it comes to consensus. Now, when it comes to the Bitcoin mining, like it’s all in the news about the environmental stuff, we could do an entire episode where I basically debunk all of these arguments about Bitcoin mining. Gold mining uses way more energy than Bitcoin mining does. Banking infrastructure uses way more energy than Bitcoin does. Oh, yeah. And the Bitcoin mining, it’s mostly done now on renewable energy sources.

1:12:14 So continuing Elon Musk and Tesla, they’re given the ability to develop greener ways of doing things. For Bitcoin, they say, you’re not allowed to develop greener ways. You’re not green enough right now, so you’re done. It’s so silly. So I think number just to get back to the crux of the question is, how do I explain it to my grandma?

1:12:33 I don’t have to. When it is working, the best way that it should be working, and it has adoption, which, by the way, the blockchain adoption curve is steeper than the internet adoption curve. This is the future. It’s coming faster and quicker than anything we’ve ever seen in history. Outside of what’s funny is, you know, the most adopted technology in history was a VCR.

1:12:53 But anyways, that’s neither here nor there. Also, it went out pretty quick. It’s coming. It’s in the future. It’s going to work when everybody’s using it, and they’re not sitting there thinking about like, oh, wow, I’m using blockchain.

1:13:05 All they know is, wow, I’m using a censorship-resistant social media platform. That’s where the real win is, and that’s where we’re heading in crypto. Yeah, it’s a great point, and I think you make an excellent point there. Again, can it be used? Can it be used quickly and efficiently?

1:13:19 And again, you might not even know you’re using it in the future, and that would be even better the way many people use a lot of those features you just talked about. And again, at some point, you know, we’ll have to talk about the censorship issue because that’s also deeply embedded in there, and it’s also a very important issue. You mentioned a few of your picks. Are we missing any? Because you talked about Aave, you talked about Cardano.

1:13:41 I know you’re a fan of Uniswap, and again, if you look at the Uniswap volumes, it went from like $169 million to like, you know, something like 80 times that of locked-in value last year. And again, when I looked at that, I thought to myself, things don’t grow this fast. I was actually a dot-com CFO in New York City in 1999, and things weren’t growing that fast back then even. So, and again, this is verifiable on a blockchain, so you know the money is in there.

1:14:05 So again, I agree with you. This rate of growth is something to definitely pay attention to. What other companies are you looking at or types of companies? Also, do you find sometimes, Ben, that it just gets really weird out there when there’s tokens upon tokens upon other tokens, where people are throwing these weird curveballs, where sometimes it’s almost hard to get your head conceptually around some of these new DeFi protocols? Yeah, you know what’s really interesting is, you know, you mentioned the dot-com boom, and I really look at a lot of these projects.

1:14:34 Like, here’s the thing. We’ve got over 10,000 coins, I think, at this point, on coinmarketcap.com, which is our, you know, it’s kind of the standard, like, if you’re legit or not, are you on CoinMarketCap? Not all the projects on there are legit. Some are scams, but in general, like, that’s kind of the benchmark. So we got about 10,000 there right now.

1:14:52 Let me just think about it. If 95% of all the coins we have today went away, and that’s not the total amount of coins, that’s just 95% of the 10,000, we would still have 500 coins, you know? So when you really start doing that math, you start saying, like, there are crazy ones out there that will not make it. We will have a considerable reduction in coins before I believe we have another jump up, you know, in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, probably about 20 years.

1:15:18 I think one day, every retail store will have its own coin the same way they have their own website. That’s kind of what I foresee things where you learn the way to create kind of like a macro economy inside of a larger retail economy, the way they do a gift card. It’s very similar. I think we’ll see that in the future. But that’s a long, long ways away.

1:15:39 We’ll certainly have what I think would be a bust. And it might be during either the next bear market or the one following where we see that huge reduction in coins. But if there’s 500 right now out there that are going to still be around, all of those other 95% that go away, that money and those have to go somewhere. So that gives you the confidence to know that a lot of these top coins are certainly going to be there. And some of the best coins that will be around probably haven’t even been created yet.

1:16:04 There are weird coins out there. There’s a whole world of what we call meme coins, which are basically coins that serve no purpose other than a community agreeing that they’re going to go up in value. And so we certainly see that’s where things get really weird right now are the meme coins because of the, you know, once again, thanks to the muskrat, Dogecoin pumping out of control over the last year, number one gainer probably in the top 100, you know, definitely of 2021 so far.

1:16:29 But that’s where things get real weird, but then you’ve got other projects. Like, I remember there was one like the one attract the supply chain of bananas and stuff. It’s like too nuanced. One day, these will come to fruition. Like, if you look at pets.com, it was actually a great idea.

1:16:44 Webvan, great idea. We use it today. It’s called DoorDash. Or, you know, Instacart is the one that delivers our groceries. So when you look at that, they were just way ahead of their time.

1:16:55 So I think a lot of these really quirky ideas, they’re great ideas. They’re just too ahead of the time. They’re solving problems. A lot of them start out with the idea of like, hey, I’ve got the solution. Now, let me find a problem somewhere out there that’ll match it instead of doing it the reverse way.

1:17:10 That’s where I get a lot of these really good ideas for coins that I think will probably go away in the short term but might come back around later as blockchain fully takes over. But in terms of the coins that I think are the big winners, I have a list of five coins that I believe are the long-term holds. Bitcoin and Ethereum by far and away are at the top. So you can almost kind of look at like those two, and then I’ve got three others that I think are prime candidates to be long-term holds.

1:17:36 Cardano, Binance Coin, I’ve already mentioned both of those. I’ve already spoken about those, and also Chainlink. So Chainlink is really interesting because if we were in a full-blown bear market right now, which I don’t think we are, but if we were to keep going down further, if we go back to $20,000, you have to start to realize like it probably is, you know, a full-blown bear market, maybe multi-year bear market. In the bear market, Chainlink was the number one performer.

1:18:00 So Chainlink is a project, and we’ll talk about the use case, but it’s kind of moved counter to Bitcoin. When Bitcoin, you know, during the bull run, Chainlink has not really performed nearly as well as most of us thought that it would because we got a false expectation of how well it would do based on how it did in the bear market, but it just kind of seems to do better when Bitcoin isn’t doing great. Chainlink is what we call a blockchain oracle solution.

1:18:22 So when we’re thinking about full blockchain adoption, you have to get blockchain and regular businesses to work together. So Chainlink runs oracles that communicate off-chain data with on-chain data. It basically brings your business up to speed to blockchain. It’s able to take a Walmart supply chain and be able to communicate what’s already there into blockchain. So phenomenal solution.

1:18:52 So those are the five what I consider to be long-term holds. Then I’ve got another list that is what I consider to be kind of that next, the next tier down. And three coins specifically really come to mind there. I could go ahead and say five. Solana and Elrond, I would also put on those lists because they’re kind of the, and also Polkadot, those are kind of the next smart contract platform competitors behind Ethereum and Cardano.

1:19:19 So if any of those stumble, those are the three that will probably move up. We’ve seen Solana crush it over the last couple of months. But the other three I put on that list, number one, it’s Polygon. It’s what we call an ETH layer 2 solution. So a lot of those problems Ethereum has, in the short term, Polygon solves that and makes it faster.

1:19:37 So that’s one that we’ve seen make a massive run up this year. I also see VeChain. One of the greatest adoption cases of blockchain is supply chain tracking, not just bananas. Okay? But basically, all products that are involved in supply chain VeChain is far and away the number one coin in that space.

1:19:57 It is a Chinese project, so we’re starting to see a little, some weird stuff happen between, you know, the west and the east when it comes to, you know, is VeChain not on Coinbase because it’s a Chinese project? I don’t know. Are we seeing some of that space race between China and the United States kind of come to fruition through not allowing certain coins on different exchanges? I’m not really sure. But I do know VeChain is far and away the number one coin when it comes to supply chain tracking, one of the easiest real world use case adoption projects out there.

1:20:30 The third one I would put on that list is XRP. And XRP, as it did have a big fall from grace, is it had the SEC lawsuit. It fell all the way down. You know, I think it went back down to $0.15 or something like that. Maybe even lower. I can’t remember exactly.

1:20:44 But, you know, it’s one of these that I put on that second tier because it’s got to prove itself. A lot of banks are using the Ripple Labs software, which is behind the XRP coin, but they’re not using the XRP coin yet. So once that XRP coin actually moves into adoption between money transfers for central banks and other banking infrastructures like Santander and others, then I think it could move up to that top list, but just, you know, look, I don’t want to get conspiratorial here, which I know your audience probably loves conspiratorial stuff, but I get a lot of information given to me.

1:21:21 And I’m hearing from multiple sources that are nothing to do with people that are, you know, heavily invested in XRP. We call them the XRP Army. And a lot of these banks are working on that. They will be, after the SEC lawsuit announcing a lot of big banks, and the future adoption of XRP by the banking infrastructure as a whole could happen. If that happens, I mean, you could be looking at a massive run-up for a coin that’s had, you know, a lot of controversy to say the least.

1:21:46 So those are 10 projects, 5 on the long-term hold list, 5 on the next tier that your audience can research and look into. And I would say, by the way, for full transparency’s sake, I think I’m probably invested in all 10 of those. So I’m invested in hundreds of coins, so. Got it. And Aave and Uniswap, you still, would you still buy at these levels?

1:22:07 Yeah. Well, Aave and Uniswap, yeah, I would definitely buy at these levels. It’s just for me, like, when you come, when you’re looking at DeFi specifically, I look at a lot of these DeFi projects to kind of ride them in the short term and see what they’re going to do. Aave is, Aave is in our top 10 holdings. Uniswap is in our top 20 holdings.

1:22:27 So I would say that between those two coins, they’re definitely ones I believe in. And it’s just, you know, it kind of gets into like dicing, like, you know, minutia here, like, I could have easily put either one of those on the list. If you think about Uniswap, what really gives Uniswap a lot of leverage there, no pun intended, is that it’s the No. 1 decentralized exchange on the No. 1 decentralized finance platform.

1:22:50 But I think there is a chance we could see more competitors pop up over time. And Aave is firmly implanted as, you know, the No. 1 DeFi platform outside of DEXs, outside of an exchange. It’s the No. 1 DeFi platform.

1:23:05 So, yeah, those are definitely two projects. But the thing about Aave, I would say to your audience, is that Aave has already had, like, the most massive monumental Goliath run over the last year and a half that it’s going to be hard, even if it stays at the top, to get kind of the continued explosive gains. But it’s one that you definitely want to have, you know, a position in, I would say. Yeah. And compounds, you still are…

1:23:36 I’m meh on compound. Okay. You know, compound is another one that, at the beginning, absolutely explosive gains. It came out of nowhere. I felt like nobody even knew it was launching.

1:23:45 And then it launched. It was top 10, top 15, like almost overnight. Compound is a good platform. I definitely don’t want to say anything negative about it. It’s just for me, it’s not a platform that I use.

1:23:57 And since this is not a platform that I use, it just doesn’t make, you know, it’s high on my list. It’s one that will be solid. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’ll be solid. It’ll be a big gainer.

1:24:06 But I don’t look for it to be probably one of the most explosive ones over the next few years. Okay. That’s super helpful. You know, I got a couple final questions about you and your company in the future there, but was there anything we didn’t cover in the crypto and DeFi space? I mean, we went through a lot of things there, but if there’s anything that you would normally try to get in people’s heads, you know, if maybe this is their first touch point with that, is there anything we didn’t cover?

1:24:28 Well, we could probably have a 24-hour conversation because I like to talk crypto, but I would just say, you know, I just want to reiterate, you know, what we said earlier about DeFi. Let me give you my number one talking point at the top. Don’t sell Bitcoin. Don’t sell Ethereum. You’ll hear me say that all the time.

1:24:44 When it comes to decentralized finance specifically, like, it is the horse and buggy versus the automobile. Traditional finance is the horse and buggy. They fought it for years and years and years and years. If you saw the stories about what people said about the horse and buggy and about how, no, it was definitely going to last forever and, you know, it wasn’t going out. To hear people talk about the fear of automobiles, the reason why the United States actually became the number one automobile producer is because in the UK, they had like all these archaic laws.

1:25:15 Like, you actually had to have four people in a vehicle to be able to travel because you had to have one person driving it. You had to have one person walking beside the vehicle. You had to have somebody with a flag up ahead and behind. And because of that, the UK got left behind when it came to automobile manufacturing. It’s just a better product.

1:25:34 There’s no question about it. Anything? And I would just ask your audience to all look at yourselves deep in the soul and ask, answer this one question. Do you enjoy going to the bank? I already know the answer.

1:25:50 Unless it’s just a bank teller that you think might be your wife one day or your husband one day, you probably detest any time you have to go in a bank. Imagine if you never had to and that’s D5. Yeah, and imagine if you never had to pay for that really beautiful expensive lobby. Where did that come from with the marble floors and the you know, the big arches like where did that come from? Well, you pay for the free pens.

1:26:15 Yeah, the free pets. You know, those are those are great observations. I appreciate you wrapping that up as far as those thoughts. And I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean this City of London, I think used to be filled with a million horses.

1:26:28 I mean something crazy like that. I mean it was part of every piece of infrastructure here. And and now you can barely see it because there’s old houses that they call the Muse that used to be horse tables and you see these places and now there’s no horses in London. I mean the police have a few but you know a hundred years ago, it would have been a completely different environment. Everything changed and I’m sure a lot of that legislation stopped that from happening and I agree this product is easily 10 times better and that’s usually what it takes to adopt an innovation.

1:26:59 A product has to be 10X better. This product is potentially 1000X better. And so it’s a really good call. You know, you know what Brian, I’d like to say this too. You know, the thing is now is like horse and buggies are very nostalgic.

1:27:12 You like to take your date on a nice horse and carriage ride through the city. Maybe one day you’ll take your your date on a tour of a bank and you guys can remember the nostalgia of what it was like to have to go into one. Yeah, it’s funny you say that Ben. I have a two sons. They’re four years old and five years old and I don’t know if you can see behind me on some of the wide shots, but we have typewriters mounted on the walls here and my son came in and he started touching it and he said, what is that daddy?

1:27:36 What is that? And I said, well, that’s where we used to type and put letters on a piece of paper and and he looked at me again, like what is that? Why would you do that? It doesn’t make any sense. And again, I see him one day.

1:27:48 Maybe he’s going to live in an apartment that used to be a bank, you know, and it’s got those big arches and it’s like well, what is that? That used to be a bank. What’s that daddy? What’s a bank? It’s like funny, right?

1:27:57 So that’s that’s probably what’s coming. Then a couple questions about you. I mean, you know, look, I’m guessing like you said, you could probably retire anytime you want. You probably have enough money, but yet you show up every day and you go hard, you know, with this this whole BitBoy Crypto channel, the education, you’re clearly passionate about it. You’ve clearly thought a lot about these things.

1:28:21 What drives you to keep showing up every day? And what do you want this to become in the next 10 years? Yeah, so that’s a great question because I was faced with that. So when I started this channel, like look, you have to separate your goals for your audience from your personal goals. My goal for my audience, let me tell you when we go to events and people come up to me and they have tears in their eyes and they’re thinking me for what my channel has done for their life and they’ve been able to go from look, I love it when people put in $100,000 and they become multi-millionaires.

1:28:52 That’s great, but I got somebody that comes up to me and says that they had started with $1,000 and now they’ve been able to pay off their student loans or they’ve been able to I talked to a girl who said for the first time ever, she was actually able to go get her own place. She’s a full adult, you know, she was able to go get her own place. I love hearing the stories of the people that had nothing that have actually been able to move to a place in life where they’re comfortable and they’re at a level where they never thought that they would get to and I hear those stories time after time after time.

1:29:24 I get people sending messages to me when I go to meetups and people tell me this in person, like I know we are impacting lives and we’re changing people. I never thought I would be in finance. It’s funny. Like I actually used to make fun of people in finance. Like how boring does that sound?

1:29:39 Like I know nothing about the economy. I would never have watched CNBC or you know Bulls and Bears on Fox News or whatever it is. Like I remember seeing those on Saturday mornings, like who watches this? But it’s you understand blockchain has the ability to change the world and I love the idea of playing an impact and playing or having an impact and playing a role in that. And look, I’m a guy, you know, controversial price.

1:30:03 I’m a fighter, not a lover. You know, I like to fight for things. And I love the fact that we’re trying to take it to these larger institutions and we’re fighting for the little guy and we’re fighting for the retail investor and that’s who watching my channel. Regular people and I love that. I want that education.

1:30:18 I don’t want them to ever have to go, you know, go through what I went through where you’re looking like, oh, I should be a millionaire. I had the best opportunity ever and I missed it. So that’s the audience side, why I do what I do. From the personal side, I really had kind of, I had like two different kind of, you know, moments where I was like, what am I even doing in my life? You know, it was, I started this channel to get more educated about crypto.

1:30:40 But when I went full-time, the goal is, I want to buy a house for my family with cash. I want to buy a house. I want to live in it. I didn’t have to want to worry about somebody coming and taking it or, you know, do we have the money to pay the bill, the mortgage this month? And so that’s what, that’s financially why I started this channel.

1:30:54 I was tired of like looking at my kids and trying to figure out how am I going to provide for you. And I did that last fall. In the fall, in September, I had to cash out some crypto and it was hard because there were coins I didn’t want to sell and coins that I knew would be worth more down the road. But I was like, I did it. I met my goal.

1:31:12 Here we are. I have the money to pull the money out and still have a decent amount in crypto. And so I decided not to be greedy. And I did it. It was like a big moment of accomplishment.

1:31:22 And I sat there and I was like, oh, I did it. Now, what do I, now what? Like, what do I do now? Like I set this goal. And so, you know, I was talking to, I have a business partner now who, you know, is 33% of my company and he’s somebody who I brought in named TJ that comes on my channel every day.

1:31:36 He helps me with the live streams. And he’s been a good friend of mine for years and years and years. And, you know, we just talked one day. We’re like, what are we going to do now? Like, we did it. You accomplished your goal.

1:31:46 Then, eventually, we came to the largest channel. We have a million subscribers, 100,000 subscribers and all these milestones. And I really want to look at what I want to do in my life. And we’ve got a lot of, you know, philanthropical things we’re doing, things we’re going to do more in the future. Personally, I want to own the Atlanta Falcons.

1:32:00 Like, that’s my goal. That’s what I want to do. I want to own a sports team in Atlanta. I bleed Atlanta colors. I’m wearing Atlanta colors right now.

1:32:08 You know, that’s about all of our teams are either navy blue and red or black and red or, you know, red and white. And, you know, I want to represent my city. And I want to, you know, one day have a role in sports. I love sports probably more than I love crypto. And the cool thing about that goal is eventually, if I’m able to accomplish it or at least get part ownership, whatever it looks like in the future, like, then I get to actually have a role in playing and, you know, managing the team.

1:32:33 And it opens up, you know, the next 20 or 25 years of my life. So that’s kind of my bigger goal. That’s why I wake up every day. I come to work. I could, you know, and just so everybody knows, like, I am a huge family guy.

1:32:43 Like, I’ve had to leave my own live stream, my 5 p.m. live stream, like, early two nights in a row because my kid had all-star games and baseball. Never miss games for my kids. I’m always there for my kids. My daughter’s super awesome at tennis.

1:32:54 So she went to the state championships this year. And I do actually, like, people think I work all the time and I do, but I also balance that out. We have a lot of family time. That’s why I go on a lot of vacations with a family. And that’s, you know, my family, you know, God, my country, family.

1:33:07 Like, those are always my top priorities. Excellent stuff. How much does it cost, do you think, to buy the Falcons? Well, by the time, if you look maybe 10 years down the road, I assume probably about $4 billion. Right now, probably about $2.5 million, maybe $3 billion somewhere around there.

1:33:21 But, you know, Mark Cuban’s worth $4 billion and he owns the Mavericks. So I don’t know how that works out with his net according to Google. I don’t know how much he’s really worth, but according to Google, it’s worth $4 billion. So, you know, that’s, I think he’s definitely achievable with crypto. I mean, if you look at, if I’m able to make the same return during the next bull market, that we’ve made during this one, and hopefully we’ll continue to make through this one, then, you know, I don’t think it’ll take us, you know, 5 to 10 years to get there.

1:33:49 Right. And there gets us a supply issue with teams as well. They’re smart that way as well. So. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll let me in the club.

1:33:56 I hope the future commissioner will like Bitcoin. Yeah. It’ll be you, Brian. You never know. Well, you mentioned Mark Cuban.

1:34:02 We didn’t talk about him as far as the influencer. Mark’s been interesting because he was really an early adopter of DeFi, was talking about DeFi, but then, you know, the iron finance thing happened a week or two ago, and I actually watched, read his blog that he published a few days before that where he’s like, look, I’m getting these amazing returns on this stablecoin. I’m rocking it. And then afterwards, he was calling for regulation of stablecoins, and I was a little disappointed.

1:34:27 Now, maybe I’m reading that wrong, Mark, and I think net positive he’s helped the community. But what’s your read on, Mark? Well, look, people don’t like to admit that they make mistakes. And I think, obviously, I mean, he knows he made a mistake, obviously, and I don’t know to what level he wants to own up to that, but you can’t have a platform as big as Mark Cuban’s and be what, you know, in the crypto world. We call it shilling, you know, promoting whatever.

1:34:53 A coin that’s not a top coin when you have that much influence, and that’s why actually like over the growth of my channel, as we’ve gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, the level of coin that we cover has gotten higher and higher and higher because when I’ve got 2,000 people watching my channel, I don’t mind talking about something that’s way down in the thousands that may have massive potential because it didn’t have a lot of influence, you know? So it’s like, guys, this is, you know, go take a risk. You want to go gamble on this? Go gamble on it.

1:35:20 We got a million subscribers. That’s why now we mainly talk about the top 10, top 20 coins. And we learned this over the summer. I mean, we covered projects over the summer that scammed us that basically there was a project. I don’t want to name the name of it because, you know, it’d be given those people promotion, but we did a sponsored review.

1:35:39 Now, in the history of my channel, 100% of the sponsored reviews, you know, or projects we’ve been investing in, we’ve set up front, we’ve disclosed because I’ve known for very early on when regulation comes in down the road, I want to be able to have that strong backbone to be able to point it every time we ever did a sponsored video and say it was sponsored, but we started working on projects over the summer where we did a sponsored review, and we had their smart contract audited, and it was foolproof. It was great. They could not have pulled the money out, pulled the liquidity out.

1:36:10 As soon as my video came out, they changed the smart contract. And so there was a vulnerability built in to change the smart contract that wasn’t within the smart contract. And so people that invested in that project got hurt, and like we were devastated by that. We came out, we talked about it. Anytime we’ve ever made a mistake, like people don’t understand, like, when you go through the kind of explosive growth that we went over the last year and a half, like, you learn stuff.

1:36:34 You make mistakes. But the thing is, can you own up to those mistakes? And can you promise your audience that you’re going to do things to fix those to prevent that from happening in the future? When Mark Cuban is talking about Ethereum, Aave, and Titan in the same breath, like, that’s not a positive thing. You can’t say that’s why you’re not going to hear me give you the top 500 coin on this show.

1:37:00 Like, we’re going to tell you what the top coins you should hold are because we’re very confident in those. And I don’t know if he was kind of a victim of, you know, kind of just over-excitement or if he was a victim of someone in his ear telling him it was going to be great, looking at the returns. Yield farming and decentralized finance can be risky. You’ve got to understand there’s risk going on. And the people that we call degenerates in the space or the people who they use really tiny platforms, they know what they’re getting into.

1:37:25 You kind of build in getting scammed in what we call rug pulled into your overall bottom line where, you know, you put money into a bunch of these platforms, so they’re going to scam you. But the ones that don’t, some of those returns are going to be so massive, they’re going to cover it because your losses are capped at what you put in. Your gains aren’t capped. You know, it can go up exponentially forever. I mean, we understand not forever, but you know what I’m saying.

1:37:49 You can get, you know, 69,000% returns on things sometimes, whereas you can only lose 100%. So, I think for Mark, I think he’s been a pretty good ambassador for crypto at different times, and I think really what we’ve done, I can only talk about what we’ve done, we pointed the fingers back at ourselves and looked at when we made mistakes and when we got scammed, and we fixed that going forward, and I hope Mark does that. You know, there certainly should be a level of regulation somewhere, but you got to start looking at yourself and where you made the mistake and promoting something that’s scammed and make sure that doesn’t happen for your audience again.

1:38:22 Yeah, I think that’s a really good call, and again, it’s hard not to get excited about certain protocols and certain things, and when you have a big market share, and it’s working out really well, I totally get it, and I definitely think he’s been a net positive, showing a lot of light on this space, but you know, that was something that, it’s actually a great little case study right there. I actually used it for my students and said, this is a great example of what can go wrong when you think nothing can go wrong. And again, if the returns are too good to be true, it’s worth taking a look at it is all, especially when it comes to some of those, you know, APYs and things that were happening.

1:38:55 It doesn’t mean it can’t happen. There’s always places where the innovation can actually show that, but it’s worth having a third look. And of course, hindsight’s 20-20. Well, I would say, Brian, just on that point, I think that’s really the most difficult thing about crypto is that the returns are already too good to be true, and that’s where I’d really warn your audience a lot against scams. Like, I’ve got thousands of impersonators, thousands, literally thousands of impersonators out there that try to take advantage of people by trying to convince them that they’re me, and, you know, we’ve never in the history of, you know, I don’t have time to manage other people’s money.

1:39:30 We don’t ask for money from people for investments. And there’s a lot of scams, including Google Ads on YouTube, actually has a scam called BitBoy Arbitrage, where they allow those ads onto my videos, and I can’t take them off through YouTube, to where they trick people into trying to invest in scammers. And so you’ve got to be careful out there, because the thing about it is, while crypto, the returns are already too good to be true, you have to keep a healthy skepticism of things.

1:39:59 And what I would say is if anyone’s offering to give you something or to give you a return for free or for a small investment, that’s something you definitely want to watch out for. A lot of the projects are great. A lot of people are bad. And that’s what you got to be careful of is the scammers. Really good advice.

1:40:16 And again, like, people don’t understand some of the crazy issues with security and fake ledgers being shipped out and people getting control of your mobile phone. And again, these ads being sent out there and impersonators and DMs and stuff. I mean, in this space, there’s so much money to be stolen that they’re getting super creative. So you’ve got to really have your radar up and it’s a thing that’s really hard to teach people. So we’ll repeat it over and over again, but you got to look out for sure.

1:40:44 Just wanted to cover, you know, one of the last things on a personal note. I mean, one of the things that wanted me to have you on the show, Ben, is your honesty about some of the things you faced in your life. And, you know, I came out a few years ago and told my audience about some dark times I had when I was actually in New York City and I struggled with addiction. And in 2001, the Trade Center came down and I had a heroin overdose. And I told people about it about 20 years later.

1:41:08 I told my wife and family about it. We made a whole movie about it. And a lot of people, I was very scared to talk about that, but a lot of people, it really helped them because, you know, these things happen to a lot of people and a lot of friends and family. And I think it’s really powerful when people talk about this stuff. And, look, I know you had a time in your life where you struggled with addiction.

1:41:27 And I just think sometimes it’s important for men and women out there to know that you and I, we weren’t always this way. You know, we weren’t always in a place where we feel really good and empowered and on top of our game. And I was just wondering if there’s something you can tell us about that or something you learned about that or if someone’s out there in a tough space, just thoughts for them. Yeah, well, I mean, addiction is a powerful beast. And for me, I mean, one of the craziest things to me is, you know, like, a lot of people view me as just like, I’m a regular guy, I’m a dad.

1:41:57 A lot of people know me as a dad, you know? Like, I love my kids. I make dad jokes. I’m your typical, like, you know, wear a fanny pack at Disney World Dad, you know? Like, I just actually wore a fanny pack for the first time at the Bitcoin conference, and I found out it was really useful.

1:42:10 And so now I’m going to have one for all the time. So now I know I’m officially in the club. But what’s always funny to me is when people say, oh, my gosh, you got this addiction history, like, I would have never thought that about you. I’m like, go tell that to all the people that I was doing meth with in the early 2000s. And they would be like, oh, no, he was a terrible person.

1:42:27 Like, what do you mean you can’t see him doing drugs? I was basically, you know, on hard drugs, mainly meth. That was my thing from 2007. I’m sorry, from the age of 17 until 24 for seven years. And it was very dark, and it was very bad, and, you know, that’s just who I was, you know?

1:42:47 I, you know, homeless at different times, and I did the whole thing. The whole thing. It was my life. It was my obsession. I tried to get clean a couple times.

1:42:54 I couldn’t do it. I ended up, I was on meth, coke, weed, seven hits of acid. I got into a fight with a bunch of police officers, and I overdosed. I was under arrest. It was like a really, really, really bad situation facing a lot of prison time, actually, in 2007.

1:43:09 And so I woke up out of the coma. I was in the coma for three days, and I woke up in the hospital bed. I just woke up, and I just remember like sitting there in the bed and the light shining through. I had a breathing tube down my throat. I couldn’t breathe.

1:43:22 I mean, I couldn’t breathe on my own. And I just remember like I opened my eyes. I saw the sun. I was like, God, thank you. Like, I just knew that I should be dead.

1:43:29 And I didn’t even know what it, I didn’t even know at that time when it happened. Later on, you know, I found out I went on a massive overdose, and I was, you know, very, you know, off, you know, teetering on life and death for several, several, several hours. And, you know, I just woke up and said, I don’t do this anymore. Like, I’m ready to be done with this. And so I went to a rehab facility.

1:43:48 It’s actually called No Longer Bound. It’s in coming Georgia, and I was there for a year. And then I did another year as an intern there. And then, so from 2009, all the way until I went into full-time crypto basically, in 2018, I worked with people in addiction recovery. I was the executive director of an addiction recovery center for teenage boys for a long time.

1:44:12 That was my heart because I was in my addiction when I was a teenager and beyond. And so I wanted to help kids. I did that for a long time. And the message is very clear. The lie of addiction is it doesn’t get better.

1:44:24 Like, that’s what keeps you locked in is that it will never be better than this. Like, when you’re getting high and when you’re living that lifestyle, that’s the peak. But in reality, like, that’s the lie your mind is tricked on, you know, the trick that gets, you know, made on you. Actually, when you’re a regular person not addicted to drugs, not addicted to alcohol, that’s when you’re really living your best life. And you don’t understand that until you get out of it and you look back on it.

1:44:54 And so I would just say to anybody who’s struggling with that or has family struggling through that, you know, don’t give up on them. You know, keep encouraging them. Or if it’s you, like, just understand like, look, if you find yourself having to justify what you’re doing to keep doing it, it’s probably a good sign you might need some help. And I’m as big of a proponent as anyone who’s getting structured help. I had a whole year, a whole year where I did nothing but work on myself.

1:45:17 And that’s really what has led me to the point I’m at today. That’s where I learned how to work hard and learn how to work through stuff. And I would also just the last thing to add on is for, I would just say in my experience working with people in addiction because I work with people in adult and then teenagers in addiction, there’s always things driving it. It’s not just you like doing drugs. That’s also the lie that gets you hooked in.

1:45:41 Guilt, shame, things from your past, whether it’s sexual abuse, you know, physical abuse, mental abuse for your past, traumatic events, death in your family, death of a parent, whatever it is, there’s a pain and something that is a hole inside of you that’s not getting filled and you’re filling it with that negativity with the drugs because you’re trying to numb the way you really feel. When you truly actually start feeling whatever that traumatic event was and go back through that and really get healed from it, that’s when you will truly find freedom. And, you know, people ask me all the time, not all the time, just like, you know, it’s a question people ask like, what’s the best day of your life?

1:46:21 Like, people always expect you to say like, oh, like the day that my first child was born or the day that I got married or the day that, you know, I started my own business. The day I went to rehab, that’s the best day of my life because everything else is, you know, a reflection of that decision and what I went through at that time. Powerful, powerful stuff, Ben. We’ve had Dr. Gabor Mate on the show and, you know, he believes that all addiction comes from trauma.

1:46:49 He doesn’t believe that all trauma causes existent addiction, but he believes all addiction comes from trauma. And, you know, he’s worked on the streets with people in Vancouver and has had an incredible career. And, yeah, when I look back at my addiction, I just, I didn’t want to be me. And so I wanted to escape me. Sometimes, honestly, my own criticism, I think, for not being what I thought I should have been.

1:47:10 And so, again, it was there to take me out of reality. Little did I know there was nothing fun about that. And so, now I try to be present for the good and bad times. And I am thankful every day that I’m sober. It’s something that’s a big deal for me.

1:47:26 And I appreciate your input there. And I would say to anybody else out there, things can change and things can improve, even though when you’re repeating a cycle and to you, it looks like it will never change because it hasn’t changed for a year or two years or three years. There are ways out and, like you said, structure and other people and other inspiration can really make a massive difference. And the other last thing I’d say is that I found that some of the people that went down that route have now built some of the most incredible things out there.

1:47:55 A lot of my guests on the show, including guys like Grant Cardone, you know, used to be in the same place. And they’re like, what, him? And I find that those people sometimes, when they can focus their energy and put it in a positive direction, can sometimes do incredible things. So I would say if you’re struggling out there, you’re probably more powerful than you think you are. And if you can channel this in the right direction, you could have an incredibly productive life too.

1:48:21 So it’s just incredible. Absolutely. I think that there’s a reason for that. Well, I mean, the obvious reason is like you go through something really tough and you come out on the other side and you learn how to do that and that’s something that can continue in life. I think a lot of people that end up in addiction, it’s because they have very curious minds.

1:48:40 And you start going like, oh, I was told that drugs are bad, that weed is bad, but oh my gosh, first time I did it made me feel real good. Like, you know, everything must be aligned. So you start going down that rabbit hole and then you start questioning everything and then you don’t even know who you are anymore once you go down that road a lot. But it’s a lot of that curiosity and that questioning and that judgment of what’s going on, you know, not judgment, but like being able to judge where you are at in life compared to other people.

1:49:05 I think a lot of that is what, you know, really drives people down the road to get super sucked into positive things. And, you know, one thing that I always thought was funny was a guy who I knew in rehab, you know, he told me that he thought I was a closet perfectionist. And that was always my problem is I could never do anything perfect or well. And so I just kept going further down the negative, you know, hole there. And, you know, he was dead right.

1:49:29 Like, that’s the thing is I want to do everything so well that I want to achieve and I want to perform and I want to do everything positive now, but in the past, like, I just always channeled that, you know, in the wrong direction. And so a lot of people who are locked in addiction, especially from teenage years, the majority of kids or the majority of people that are in addiction, you started in your teenage years and you stunted your growth in a lot of ways. And when you’re able to break free of that, you’ll actually discover there’s a lot of qualities that were getting developed in you that you weren’t able to quite reach yet.

1:50:00 And when you break free from that addiction, those things start to come back and you find out the best version of yourself is somebody better than you thought it was. Yeah, really well said because they’re usually kind of mavericks, rule breakers, a little bit of a punk mentality. They can actually get you really far in life. If you can do that sober, then you can be one of these incredible innovators. So yeah, there’s a lot there.

1:50:22 That’s probably another episode we should have for sure. I appreciate your honesty about that. It’s really important that we talk about that. Ben, I’m a huge fan of what you do. I hope everybody goes subscribe to your YouTube channel.

1:50:32 You’ve also got News Network. You got a lot of things coming on the back of that. Is there a main website to go to? What’s the best way for people to follow you? I know you’re big on TikTok as well, which is a great sign that people are looking into this space.

1:50:44 What’s the best way for people to get in touch? Well, people can just search BitBoy Crypto and I’ll come up pretty much anywhere, but I would, you know, other than the YouTube channel, I would push people to my Twitter. It’s at bitboy underscore crypto. We’re actually doing a big giveaway when we reach 5 million total followers. And so if you go to my Twitter, bitboy underscore crypto, it’s the pin post.

1:51:05 You can see all the different ways to enter the contest, which will lead you to all the different ways to become part of our community, including our TikTok, our, you know, new subreddit we just launched and some other cool things as well, Instagram. All that stuff is available through there. And hey, you might win 5 Ethereum. Nice. Is that what you’re giving away? Yeah?

1:51:22 Yeah, we’re doing 5 Ethereum to the first place winner and then $1,000 to the next four winners of Cardano, Polygon, XRP, and VeChain. Nice. I like that a lot. Great stuff, Ben. Next time, let’s do this here in London.

1:51:37 Hopefully, we’ll get you over here or I’ll come over to the States. We can do this in person. But again, really enjoy your videos. I recommend everyone to go and watch them. You got a great way of breaking things down.

1:51:46 Education is so important in the space. And that’s what we’re trying to do here. Just keep people up the curve, get people to learn about the stuff because it’s coming. Like you said, horse and buggy is going to go. And for me, it’s a breath of fresh air to see this innovation.

1:51:58 I love it. And I’m just so excited to be in this space. So thank you so much. Until next time, all the best and we appreciate what you do, Ben. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

1:52:07 Really enjoyed it. Excellent stuff. Thanks so much. We’ll see you all next time on London Real. Take care.