Full transcript: Ben Armstrong (AKA BitBoy Crypto) on London Real
2:29 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ben Armstrong, the broadcaster, investor and cryptocurrency influencer. You are the founder of the BitBoy Crypto YouTube channel where you post daily market updates addressing all the latest news to a massive community of crypto enthusiasts. Your aim is to provide education and entertainment in equal measure, and you’ve amassed the largest following of any crypto platform, with over 5 million total subscribers.
2:54 Last time you were on the show we talked about the future of Bitcoin, Ethereum 2.0, crypto education and investment strategies. Today I want to talk about how to survive the bear market in crypto, geopolitics and Bitcoin, the Cardano upgrade, SEC regulation and the next big altcoins. Ben, welcome back to London Real.
3:10 Ben Armstrong: Well, thanks for having me. Last time we had a really great time and glad we get to continue the conversation, and a lot of people still care about crypto a few months later.
3:19 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s good to see. And I just want to say to everybody here, they need to go subscribe to your channel, BitBoy Crypto, because I love your videos. My students in the Academy, they love them too. Again, it’s, you know, it’s a little bit of P.T. Barnum and a lot of great knowledge, and it’s fun to watch you.
3:34 I like your drives to the church on Sunday, and I don’t know, you’ve got a great way about you, so thanks for all the content. All of my people really enjoy it as well, so keep up the good work. I know it’s hard producing that much content, but you’re good at it, is what I’ll say. Ben, so thank you. I appreciate it.
3:51 And you’ve also got my students freaked out, Ben. So I got to ask you about this, because inside my Academy I’m getting tons of questions this last week. They say BitBoy Crypto is telling us, “The bear market’s coming.” You talked about, I think, Bitcoin going to 18 to 24,000. Now I know you were talking next year, but all my students started freaking out.
4:10 I said, “What do we do? Do we buy? Do we sell?” And I’m glad we’re having this conversation, because it happened kind of at a similar time where the market has now tested some lows this week. I know we’re back off the lows, but Bitcoin went through 40,000 briefly, Ethereum below 3,000, and everyone’s asking me about how we deal with the bear market, whether it’s now or in six months or 12 months.
4:32 And Ben, you’re really honest about talking about this stuff. You’re always about, “Look, this is going to happen. You’ve been through these bear markets before and you made it out alive.” So let’s talk about the bear market first. You have a great quote: “If in doubt, zoom out.”
4:45 It’s a fantastic way of looking at things. Tell us, is the bear market happening? How do we deal with it?
4:51 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, the bear market is definitely going to happen. Now, there’s a little bit of confusion.
4:57 This weekend there was a tweet, I ended up deleting it, because it wasn’t conveying the proper message that I wanted to convey, which is, you know, we do feel like this market is going to top out soon, but we do believe there is one more parabolic move, and we do think Bitcoin will hit 100,000 in the next couple of months, and then it will go down. You know, all coins will move up after that, but Bitcoin will be tumbling, and then next year Bitcoin is going to tumble greatly. We know this.
5:22 It’s a four-year cycle for Bitcoin. We’ve seen it over and over and over again, and there’s nothing about this market to indicate anything different. We’ve already seen in the bull market how quickly things can change in May, we had a 55% drop in one day, so we do know that this can happen. You know, other bull markets we’ve seen even bigger drops in a day. So to think that we’re immune this time because there’s more money in or institutions are here?
5:47 I don’t think that’s really a good way of looking at it, or a good perspective. The best way for me always is looking at history, and it doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes. That’s what you know, a lot of people say, and I generally agree with that. According to my calculations, I guess, you know, that I’ve made for two years. I said the bull run would end at the end of September in 2021.
6:06 Now we’re getting to the end of September and we’ve not had that parabolic rise yet, so my timeline may end up being off by four or six weeks, but I do believe sometime during the fall we will see the top of the bull market. The top of the bull market is literally the beginning of the bear market, so, you know, that they go, you know, one right into the next. So how do you survive a bear market? Well, just like you said when in doubt, zoom out. When you look at the overall trajectory of crypto and of Bitcoin, it’s always up and to the right, meaning we expect big growth coming from it.
6:41 So really and truly, the way to navigate the rest of this bull market, like, I have a lot of people that’ll come up to me and they’ll say, you know, just people in my regular life, like, you know, maybe people at the ballpark or people I see, you know, from church or whatever it might be. They say, “Okay, I want to go all in on crypto.” Like, somebody told me, they said, “I’m selling a house. It’ll be sold in about two months. I’m gonna take all that money, I’m gonna put into crypto.”
7:04 I said, “Do not do that. I said that’s a terrible idea.” Because that time frame is not conducive to the gains of this bull market. It’s gonna be at the top or near the top or slightly after the top for people that want to put big chunks in. Like I’m talking about not necessarily money that you can’t afford to lose, but money that’s very significant to you that you want to see a return on.
7:29 It’s gonna be better to wait until next year, because the percentage gains that we could get from Bitcoin right now, in my opinion, we could see Bitcoin slightly above a 2x, maybe a 2.5x at the most from here, goes somewhere between 100 to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Which, I guess, 120 thousand dollars from 40 would put it at about a 3x, but that’s the best that we’re going to get, in my opinion. When you look at the bear market, after it drops down considerably, your risk versus reward is so much higher than trying to time the market at this point.
8:02 People that are newer to crypto, it’s not a good idea, in my opinion, right now to put a lot of money in, because the gains are very short from here. We’re only going to have two to three months at the most of the remainder of this bull run before we go to the bear market. And I believe personally that we are moving from inflation to deflation in the United States, and this is key, because one of the things that made this bull run go so parabolic so quickly was the quantity of easing and the money printing in the United States.
8:28 So as the value of Bitcoin was going up, the value of the dollar was going down. Well, I now believe that starting in the fall, with tapering and bond yield returns lowering, that we’re going to start seeing deflation while Bitcoin is in a bear market. So you’re actually going to see Bitcoin going down, and at the same time you’re going to see the dollar going up in value, and I think it’s going to actually make this one of the worst bear markets that we’ve ever seen, because it is having to factor in against that deflation.
8:57 But people have to hear this, and I know everybody in crypto, you’ve got the short-term mindset. You want to make as much money that, you know, you’re planning on buying a new house next year. You know, you’re planning on being able to retire off the money you’re making in the next year in crypto, or the next three months in crypto. Well, that may not be the case for everybody, but the statistics show over a four year period in crypto, if you invest, you will make money, and I think that the short-term, immature mindset of a lot of newer crypto investors.
9:26 This has to lead to a higher plane of consciousness in crypto, where you look at the bigger picture, and the bear market is the opportunity for you to do that. So when you hear me say, the new person, they hear me say could be the worst bear market ever. They hear, “Oh no, in the short term we’re not going to do great.” But the smart investors, the ones that listen, the ones that will change their lives forever, they say “Oh, worst bear market ever, best buying opportunity in history.”
9:51 And I think that’s what we’re going to see over the next year.
9:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, last time you were here, the quote I remember the most is, you get rich in the bear markets, and that was the quote. I went right in to my Academy the next day, and I said, “This is what he said.” And it was a great realization that’s what we’re here to do, and it is a long-term play. And the problem, the problem is there’s a lot of wonderful things about crypto.
10:12 The problem is even that word HODL, which is something you only see in the crypto space. You don’t hear the equity markets, or when I should trade government bonds. There weren’t any HODLers in that market, but by definition in this market everybody wants to own it, and they want it to go up sooner than later, and so nobody wants to hear about bear markets or short selling, whereas on Wall Street it’s a reality. They’ve been doing it for 100 years, and the big players, this great line of wall street, he says, “Quick buck artists come and go with every bull market.
10:41 It’s the real players that make it through the bear markets.” That’s what one of the old guys says to Bud Fox when he’s on the trading floor. And, but I guess in this market a lot of people are new to it, and they want to make the fortune, and then they want to find their way to HODL their way through it. So let me ask you this, Ben. The HODLers, which is by definition someone that holds on for dear life, they’re going to get punished badly in the bear market, because they don’t ever get out of positions.
11:05 So what do you tell them, or what do they do? Just take the pain?
11:09 Ben Armstrong: Well, look, I think HODLing is a, this may sound counterintuitive to what a lot of people are going to tell you, but HODLing is not the optimal strategy. It’s a lazy strategy, and if you feel like, and this is where the word came from, a guy said every time I make a trade I lose, literally every time I sell at the wrong time. Now keep in mind, when this was said, I think back in 2012, this was a typo from the word hold, and it was, you know, spelled HODL, and that’s where all this comes from.
11:40 But at that time there were not educational resources available to everyone, and on top of that we didn’t have content creators out there everywhere giving this message, and you didn’t understand, you didn’t have the history of three to four cycles to go off of, you just had one. We’ve got so much more at our disposal now. In my opinion, there’s no excuse for anyone not to be able to sell near the top of the market. It doesn’t have to be the exact day. Dollar cost average out, but there’s no excuse for it.
12:07 Think about the potential gains you can make. An accumulation, I just use this example. I’ve used this a million times, very simple to understand. Okay, this is how you can turn ten thousand dollars into over a million dollars very easily with crypto. Okay, you bought a Bitcoin for ten thousand dollars, let’s say last year.
12:26 Now, the price, we don’t think it’ll go back to ten thousand, but you use as an example ten thousand dollars. You bought one Bitcoin back in, let’s say, September of last year or October, whenever it hit ten thousand. One Bitcoin, ten thousand dollars. You ride that all the way to the top, where we believe it’s gonna hit a hundred thousand dollars. When Bitcoin hits a hundred thousand dollars, you sell your Bitcoin, you now have a hundred thousand dollars sitting in your bank or sitting in a stablecoin.
12:51 The price of Bitcoin retraces. Let’s just say it retraces 80 on average. It retraces 85, but let’s just say 80 this time, so it goes from 100,000 back down to 20,000. You’ve got money sitting in stablecoins. You’re now able to afford five Bitcoin, okay, instead of one.
13:10 You now have five. Okay, we believe during the next cycle there is a huge chance that Bitcoin goes up to 250,000. That would be extreme diminished returns from the last several cycles, but I think we can safely say 250,000 for the next cycle is very achievable. You turn 10,000 into 1.25 million dollars just by that strategy. Meanwhile, if you held, and you just held that one Bitcoin, you’re looking at, if it drops back down to twenty thousand dollars, having twenty thousand dollars.
13:40 If it goes up to, you know, 250k, you have two hundred fifty thousand dollars. That’s a great return, but you could have five times more than that. And we look, we see these opportunities in several coins. It’s not just Bitcoin. That’s a real easy tangent one for people to understand, but these opportunities exist everywhere.
13:56 You have to be willing, in my opinion, to sell tops and buy bottoms. And we’re only, as somebody told me, they said, you know, I’m just a HODLer, like, you know, I just don’t really know how to time the market. You only have to time it twice every four years. That’s it. Just time approximately within a couple months of the top and within a couple months of the bottom, and we have a lot of history to suggest when those times will be, and you’re going to accumulate way more.
14:24 We’re never selling out of crypto to get out of crypto. We’re only selling out of positions to accumulate much more over the long term. It’s not like you just say, I’m going to sell the top and be done with crypto. Why would you do that when this is an emerging market? And so that’s something I think some people get confused about.
14:42 We’re going to cash out 80% of our crypto, and we’re going to make massive returns when we accumulate more crypto with those numbers. We diversify some of that money here and there, um, property, buildings, ballpark stuff like that. But when it comes to our overall crypto strategy, we’re only selling to buy more crypto.
15:00 Brian Rose: Yeah, great point. I agree, HODLing is lazy.
15:02 Again, it doesn’t exist in any other market, for a reason. Um, and you just said get out of maybe 80 of your crypto, so you won’t necessarily get out of everything you own when you think you’re near the top, but you’ll get out of a huge chunk of it. Is that what you’re saying?
15:17 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, and the reason for that is, uh, you know, at some point in the future crypto will change and it will get off of a four-year cycle. All coins will emerge.
15:26 You know, if you look at Chainlink from the last bear market, it crushed it the entire bear market and went way up. Like, I don’t, it went up like 100x in the bear market. I don’t have that exact number, but something similar to that. So what we’re going to be doing, we’re going to be selling 80%, most of the small projects. We’re going to sell for sure, but, you know, some of the larger ones, your Cardanos, your Ethereums, your Bitcoins, we’re going to hold on to 20 in case we’re wrong.
15:48 The upside for us to still have 20, if let’s say it were to go to three or four hundred thousand dollars, or let’s say there is no bear market, we still have a significant amount of exposure. And, you know, if you were to ask me like, what the chances are that I feel like there will be a bear market, I would tell you like 95, um, so by holding on to 20, I think our risk versus reward there is still, uh, you know, still very high, and that way if we’re wrong or if some coins were wrong, we still get the remainder of the pump, and things are almost, you know, continue to go up when we have other things sitting in stablecoins.
16:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, look, I think that’s a great strategy.
16:22 From all the smart people out there I’ve spoken to, uh, investors at least, they take a small percentage of their total portfolio. We’re talking 10 or 20, and put it into crypto, and the rest they keep. Their house, they keep their other stuff, and then from that, like you said, they go in on the crypto, but they’re smart enough to get out of it, um, almost completely in the right markets. But try telling that to somebody new to this, and you tell them, oh, you’re excited about crypto, oh, you’re new to crypto, sell it all, and again they can’t compute.
16:50 So you get the HODLing mentality. You keep people that ride these waves down, and like you said, after this big spike and it comes back down, they’re sitting on a 2x move on their Bitcoin, from 10 grand to 20 grand, when they could be sitting on five Bitcoins. So, um, you’re right, and again people shouldn’t think that they’re ever going to sell the tops or buy the lows. You’ll literally go insane trying to do that. If you’re 30% off the highs or 30 off the lows, you can still be doing okay.
17:14 So it’s a great philosophy, and I think people should be comfortable holding stablecoin in their accounts, being ready to take advantage of the bear market. I know it’s like sitting on your hands, and to a person that’s new to the trading environment, it’s such an emotional head game that most people won’t do it. It takes a lot of discipline, then, to follow your advice, right?
17:34 Ben Armstrong: Well, it does, and I’m gonna say this. I mean, the reason why I can give this advice very easily is because I’ve done it the wrong way so much during the last.
17:43 Let me tell you, when I heard people, when Bitcoin was still around 14,000, 15,000 in 2018, when I heard people talking about, oh, Bitcoin has the potential to go down to three thousand dollars, I was like, whatever. That’s not, I’m so tired of these haters, these bearish people. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Bitcoin’s here forever. It’s going to bounce back any day now, you know.
18:04 And then we went into a three-year bear market. So for me, I made decisions based on what we call hopium, you know, based on like the oh, it’s going to come right back up now over time, because I continue to buy more crypto and stay dedicated on the channel. Like, things worked out very well for me, obviously, but it would have been very easy for me to just give up and quit when things were pushed down so far, because I didn’t expect it and I didn’t see it coming.
18:25 And so a lot of my advice to you comes from the things that I wish I had done differently, and I had been more open-minded, because when you first come into crypto, it is such like sensory overload, uh, whether it’s information or charts or videos, or just understanding decentralization and blockchain for the first time. The technology, it’s so sensory overload that like you just feel like it can’t ever go down because you watched it go up so fast and so hard. But history shows us it does have these dramatic drops that last over multi, you know, multi-years, and I think we’re going to see it again, so the advice I’m giving people right now is what I wish I would have listened to four years ago.
19:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, look, great advice, and you’ve said once, smart money is just dumb money that’s been through a crash. And so again, your advice comes from going up and down the pops, and you’re right, this market is insane. I mean, I tell my students it’s like you’re going into a fun house as a seven-year-old kid, and then, and smoking crack at the same time. I mean, there’s just so much going on that it’s hard not to buy into it, to go down the rabbit holes, to let it affect your DNA.
19:29 I don’t remember any market I’ve ever traded being this crazy, and again I can barely keep up with all the things going on, and all of a sudden, you know, AVAX is in the top 10 market caps, and like that happened in a few weeks, and, uh, and like all these things are happening. I want to talk about those all coins, but, um, it’s good advice, and, um, I really hope that people really think about this and take it, because I agree. I do think we see another move on this.
19:52 I do think we break those six figures, but then there’s going to be a time where we see that retracement, and again, you’ve seen it happen. You know, Max Keiser talks about how he’s seen three different 90% retracements in the market, and even always happy and peppy, Max said that will kill the spirit. And so you just got to be ready for it. Um, let me read it.
20:10 Ben Armstrong: It does, if you’re not expecting it, for sure.
20:12 If you’re not expecting it, and you’re, you know, fingers, you know, like, I’m not going to listen to anybody bearish. It takes you by such surprise that it, it crushes you, and that’s why a lot of people believe crypto. So you got to understand that it is a possibility of happening.
20:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, and again HODLing is lazy, so get off of it. Again, if you, if you’re, if you’re, uh, if it’s too complicated, not to HODL, drop yourself down to three coins, pick them, and then pick a time to sell them, and be comfortable being in cash at 80%.
20:36 Try, try being in cash for 80% over the weekend and realize that everything’s okay. Right? You just try it, getting in and out and you’ll start to get a feel for that. So I think that’s really good advice. Let me read something that was said by uh Gary Gensler, our friend over at the SEC, recently.
20:51 I think even like today or yesterday, he, uh, compared the crypto industry to the Wild West, and he said, we’ve got a lot of casinos here in the Wild West, and the poker chips are these stablecoins. Um, we see the SEC, and a smart guy, I think he’s a fellow MIT grad who used to teach about this stuff, who’s now saying things like this. I mean, this, this is a pretty toxic thing to say about a market that has a lot of depth to it when it comes to development.
21:19 What do you see when someone like that says that? Is that part posturing, or is that how he really feels, and what does it mean for the market?
21:27 Ben Armstrong: No, he doesn’t really feel that way. We know in 2018, uh, he did an interview where he said 75% of ICOs, which were, you know, looked at as the bane of the industry at that point, 75% of ICOs were not securities, and now everything’s a security, a few years later, even though almost all new projects have totally fair launches that go through DEXes, and for him to say stablecoins or securities, I mean, we call him, you know, uh, lizardperson, or either, uh, skeletor on my channel.
21:54 Uh, this guy’s been through the ringer, you know? It looks like a guy that’s had a real hard life, uh, for sure, if, if you look at this guy. But, um, I, I think that he’s, you know, everything he says is asinine when it comes to crypto. No, he doesn’t believe anything he’s saying. He’s a, he’s a chameleon.
22:09 This is what he is. This is a guy that used to work for uh Goldman Sachs or Fidelity. I can’t remember exactly which one it was. I think it was Goldman Sachs. Uh, he is an inside man for the banking infrastructure, and what we’re seeing right now with a lot of this talk is two things.
22:23 Number one, we are seeing intentional FUD trying to keep crypto down, uh, especially coins like XRP that the SEC is really big on. You know, obviously they got the lawsuit, which I think will be settled soon, uh, in favor of, you know, XRP will get a slap on the wrist, or Ripple Labs will get a slap on the wrist, but you know, he’s saying this stuff to try to keep things down while all the banks accumulate. We call it the financial cartel. Your big hedge funds, your Andreessen Horowitzes, your, you know, BlackRocks, uh, your Fidelities, your Goldman Sachs, all these people are in what we call the financial cartel.
22:56 These are people that move the markets intentionally at their own whims. Very few people understand how this works and know how this works. Uh, Gary Gensler is a shill for them. Nothing that he says is honest and nothing can be trusted. The SEC is the most corrupt organization in the United States government, and that’s saying a lot.
23:17 Um, and they work hand in hand. The financial cartel works hand in hand with Coinbase. Suddenly, you know, uh, the SEC is saying we’re going to go after Coinbase, and then now Coinbase is getting to go to Washington and tell them how to do crypto regulations, because they all work hand in hand. But the other thing about this, it’s not just that they’re trying to, to press things down, but when it comes to stablecoins specifically, there’s a reason why stablecoins are being targeted.
23:42 Okay, what is the safest investment that you can make out there? That would be government bonds. Government bonds are the safest investment. They’re based on two things. They’re based on the, your country’s still existing, and your government’s still taxing people.
23:58 As long as those two things happen, those bonds are good. They’re basically, short, sure-fire bets for people. The returns are very small, and if you look at what’s going on with crypto, with stablecoin staking, USDC, Tether, whatever it might be, on Celsius, BlockFi, the Coinbase Lend platform, that’s not going to be coming out. What you’re looking at, you’re looking at extremely safe returns that blow the returns of bonds away, and the bond market really churns the entire world economy.
24:28 It has ever since the late 1700s. Okay, so this is why stablecoins are being attacked, because they’re going to crush stablecoin staking. BlockFi earlier this year, they announced that they were dropping their rates of return on stablecoin staking. People are like, why would they do it? Because they had to.
24:49 They were made to. And Celsius will have to go through the same thing. Celsius will be, we work with Celsius, we love Celsius, I love Alex Mashinsky, uh, you will still be able to stake Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Tron, whatever you want to stake over there. But stablecoin staking returns are going to be reduced significantly, if not eliminated, over the next year.
25:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, look, great call.
25:09 And um, I do believe these regulators are in this kind of a weird scripted dance that we see, and it plays out. Yeah, and we see it in a lot of things. I mean, a lot of times when the US is threatening North Korea and Iran, there’s also another deal going on in the background. And so it’s like, I shout a lot, and then I get what I want. And you can just imagine Gary’s phone blowing up by the top 10 banks saying, can you stop these damn stablecoins?
25:31 They’re going to crush our business here. I mean, they’re literally sucking all of our returns out. And this is the worst thing that can happen to us. Let them have their Bitcoin, because that thing is just, you know, up and down, but this is a real threat to us. So you can see that happening.
25:45 I mean, I worked in fixed income markets for many years. When people used to say, oh, you used to work on Wall Street, they said we’re a stockbroker. I said no, I traded, you know, fixed income derivatives and Treasury bonds, and this is the heartbeat of the entire economy. It’s what everyone watches. It’s the numbers.
25:58 That’s how they control monetary policy and inflation, and if you start to take away deposits and the basic lifeblood of the banking industry, it’s a real threat. And stablecoins are, they’re the, um, gateway drug into crypto now, and it’s a massive space. I had Stani Kulechov here in studio last week, uh, founder of Aave, incredible guy. I want to talk about him later. And, um, it’s, it’s the gateway drug.
26:20 I mean, you can get people into this, and they see the four percent yield if they can get it on Coinbase, no longer. Um, we got Alex here of, um, Celsius on next week, and again, they were promising those big returns. And yeah, those regulators are posturing now and trying to see what they can do. So, uh, yeah, it’s a dance. I guess we’re all gonna have to watch, um, and see what happens with regulation.
26:41 Do you think they’re gonna try to clamp down and, and stop these yields from happening on stablecoins?
26:46 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, yeah, well, they are now. They’re not gonna come out and say it like that, but yeah, they, they are, and they will. That, that’s coming. Uh, there, there’s no way in the next one year, maybe, uh, optimistic timeline.
26:57 Um, you know, by the next bull market in four years, there will be no way that the returns on stablecoin staking will be close to what they are now. They may exist. It would be closer to one percent, still a giant improvement over the point zero one percent interest you’re getting on your bank accounts. Um, but not significant enough, like 4 to 6%, where people can, you know, be making massive amount of money, doing that, so that’s the goal. They want to eliminate those returns.
27:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, and again, even if they have to intimidate to stop it from happening or take action, it’s all kind of the same resistance of the central banking institutions. Um, so to be continued. Again, I had Stani in there. I had Robert Leschner out of Compound the week before they’re both trying to build the next bridge between CeFi and DeFi, and trying to get banks to take advantage of these stablecoin yields, and they’re doing their best. We’ll see if they are successful before they get shut down on the other side, and I guess the dance continues when it comes to that.
27:51 I call it all five. Yeah, right? All five. Yeah. I’ll fight.
27:55 Let me ask you about NFTs. I had Stani here last week, and he said, “Brian, I own 000 NFTs I’ve never sold one.” He sold his own, actually. He created an NFT for like 1.1 million dollars. It’s a GIF of like his face and some balloons, and I said, “Stani, it’s nice, but it’s not that nice.”
28:13 And he went on to tell me about why he believes NFTs of the future. He said how he had an artist friend of his and this is an interesting story, Ben, who had a painting on the wall that was this beautiful piece of modern art, and Stani said, “I want to buy the NFT of that,” and the guy said, “Okay, I don’t know why you want the NFT when you can have the art.” And then a few weeks later, Stani said, “I actually think this is more valuable than that painting, because I’ve got proof of ownership.
28:36 I can show people how many people come over to your house anyways. I can show them all online.” And the artist started to think that maybe he was right. What’s your call on these things? I think you’ve said it’s got the wrong name, because, you know, non-fungible tokens, it just means that it’s non-fungible.
28:51 It doesn’t mean it’s a JPEG or a piece of art, and yet that’s what’s in our brain. 90 percent of people have no idea what non-fungible means, if not more.
28:59 Ben Armstrong: Right, right. Yeah, I think the name’s terrible. Uh, nifty’s is kind of a word I’ve heard people say, but I want to see, like, maybe a phrase that leans more towards digital collectibles but somehow has blockchain, you know, attachment to it, because your average person when they’re trying to figure out what NFTs are, they’re like, what’s a non-fungible token?
29:17 What does that mean? It’s, it’s too techy. It’s, it’s too crypto nerd in my opinion. So I’d like to see kind of a different name develop over the next, uh, you know, one to two years. I’ve had, you know, celebrities have talked to me about the same thing.
29:27 They’ve said, you know, I’m trying to get into this, but I was so confused when I first got into it, because I didn’t understand what any of this means. So, and to really understand fungible versus non-fungible, I mean, you really have to already understand Bitcoin and why it is fungible, and why these other ones are not, why they’re individualized tokens. So I would like to see some simplification on that. I think we will see more simplification of NFT platforms, but, you know, NFTs are definitely the future.
29:49 We’re just scratching the surface with NFTs right now. Art, collectibles, songs, uh, eventually events, tickets, all this stuff will be NFTs, but there’s even way bigger use cases for NFTs outside of that. Uh, you know, if you start getting into, you know, insurance or medical records or house deeds, there’s all kinds of things that can become NFTs that make them instantly transferable on the blockchain, which makes things really easy. It eliminates the need for, you know, sometimes mortgage brokers, middle, other middlemen, and things like that.
30:19 So you know, we think NFTs are going to be absolutely huge, uh, for, for sure. So we do want to see a simplification, but I, I think that when it comes to the conversation you were having, um, you know, with Stani and, and the, the idea of what’s more valuable. Well, you know, I used to sell football helmets, uh, signed football helmets, and, you know, the thing is, is with a digital NFT or a digital autograph, you can never scratch the autograph off. Right?
30:45 We had some football helmet signed by Tom Brady that we smudged, because you’re taking it out of the box and you don’t know where it is on the helmet necessarily, or you’re putting it in a box and, just, just a little finger, you know, move on top of one of those signatures. Sometimes we’ll rub it off, and once you have a smudged signature, you have nothing. It’s, it’s ruined. Right? Uh, so when you look at digital autographs and, dig digital signatures and collectibles, you can’t lose those.
31:14 They’re forever, for literally forever. So when you look at, there’s another story that’s similar to the one you were explaining about the art piece, where recently a YouTuber traded his actual Tesla Roadster in for an NFT of a Tesla Roadster, right? I think it was around a hundred thousand dollars, whatever it was, and he said, “I got by far the better end of the deal.” Well, you know what? The engine don’t go out on a Tesla Roadster NFT, you know?
31:41 But eventually the actual engine on a vehicle goes out. Eventually, you know, that thing will be sitting in a junkyard while the collectible will still be on a blockchain. I know that’s a really, you know, long-term way to look at it, but it is true, you know, that there is powerful to digital collectibles, and we are going through a transition right now where people are finally starting to understand that the digital is the future, and ownership does not have to be tangible.
32:07 I can put my hands around to ownership.
32:09 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a great point, and I think we all saw ourselves go digital in the last 18 months, you know, because of lockdown and everything, so our digital identities became a lot of the ways we interact with people. If you talk to my daughter, she’s 17, her digital identity is, is maybe more important than her physical identity. Whereas when you and I grew up, you know, we all needed a car to go hang out with the friends, and, you know, the digital came later.
32:33 These days, you could buy a piece of modern art, you could stick it in your house. How many people are going to come to your house this year? 20? Or you can stick it on Twitter and show that you own a CryptoPunk, and you’ve got the clickable check thing on Ether, on Ethereum, and you can show off, you can flex, you can be in the high end of the, of the monkey social order, which is all what we’re trying to do here anyways. So you could start to see how this is, this is important, and it’s real.
32:58 It’s 14% of the market, I think, now, at 28 billion dollars. I mean, it’s big, and it’s getting a bit bigger, and we can’t even conceive of some of the uses, right, in the metaverse. And I mean, we’re just getting started. It’s almost like the email, uh, that was the internet. The NFT is now, it’s a JPEG now, but it’s gonna be some five-dimensional thing in the future.
33:16 Ben Armstrong: Right, well, we’re going through a total fundamental change in the world right now. Pandemic certainly sped that up. You’re looking at digital ownership and digital identities being more important than real and tangible ones. I believe that 100 percent. Uh, merchandising is also going through a shift.
33:31 We’re going to see where, you know, a digital poster is more sought out than an actual poster you find in the little poster bin at Walmart. Uh, and so, you know, I agree with 100. This is the new way. It’s so much easier to sell digital products than real tangible products. There’s no shipping.
33:47 Um, there are some gatsbys, you know, so we’re still trying to work around, but, um, you know, I definitely agree with that 100. NFTs are the future, and people that don’t see that, they’re just not looking hard enough.
33:57 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s exciting. So they should get up the coin. I promise to buy an NFT in the next seven days, so I’ll keep you posted.
34:03 Ben Armstrong: Uh, Pluto Alliance. That’s, that’s, that’s our project, one of our NFT projects, Pluto Alliance. All right, Simulink, we’ll give you one. You send me an ETH address and we will send you a Pluto Alliance. All right, there we go.
34:15 Brian Rose: I think you just hooked me in. All right, I love it. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Talk to me about Cardano.
34:20 You have been talking about Cardano for a long time now. Um, they launched obviously their smart contract, I think, in the last couple weeks. Um, I asked point blank my last five or six guests on this show, everybody from Sandeep, co-founder of uh Polygon, to Stani when he was in studio, Dan Morehead running three billion at Pantera Capital, Anthony Scaramucci, the Mooch, with a billion dollars of Bitcoin, and a few other big influencers. And I said, well, Cardano replaced Ethereum, and they all said no chance.
34:52 But I’m a big fan of what Charles Hoskinson is going to do. He’s going to be on the show in a few weeks. I love his vision. I love everything he stands for. But a lot of people that have been in the market for a while are kind of in this You’ve been talking about it a long time.
35:06 Show me, don’t tell me. We don’t see the developers. We don’t see everything tell me. What do you think about the future of Cardano?
35:13 Ben Armstrong: Well, let’s go over those people that you just, you just said.
35:16 Uh, Sandeep from Polygon built on Ethereum. Yeah, Aave, project built on Ethereum. Pantera was one of their biggest investments Ethereum. So when you start going over the list, of course, oh no, there’s no chance. There’s no chance for us to sit here and say there is no chance that Cardano will pass Ethereum.
35:36 That’s extremely unrealistic. Uh, now I will say this though. Uh, when you look at Bitcoin versus Ethereum, most people believe in cr that are hardcore crypto enthusiasts, not your Bitcoin maxis believe that Ethereum one day we’ll pass Bitcoin. It’s the number one coin, and I believe that. I think by the end or by 2025, Ethereum will permanently pass Bitcoin in market cap.
35:57 It just does more stuff, and the potential is higher. Okay. But at this point Ethereum is much closer, percentage-wise, to Bitcoin than anything else is to Ethereum. So Ethereum has a massive lead, but if we can all say, I guarantee you, if you asked Indeed, and if you asked Danny, and if you asked, uh, you know, uh, Dan Morehead, if you said, could Ethereum ever pass Bitcoin, they’re all gonna say yes. Right?
36:24 They’re all going to say yes. If the first mover advantage of Bitcoin is not strong enough to be able to, to hold back other projects from passing it, then how are we going to say Ethereum is any different? Especially when Ethereum now, I love Ethereum. It’s our number two holding, between our number one holding, love Ethereum. I like Ethereum way more than Bitcoin, but, uh, you know, if you were to say, you know, the potential of Ethereum is just so much higher, I think everybody can agree that that’s the case.
36:55 Um, but, uh, eventually we could see the same thing with these other projects. In Ethereum, Ethereum has massive problems. There’s, no, we’re just talking about the gases. I mentioned it a minute ago because the gas, gases or NFTs are insane now. I believe.
37:10 Do I believe that Cardano is going to pass Ethereum? I will say no. Will it be competitive, and is there a chance? Absolutely. We don’t even, we haven’t seen this ecosystem.
37:20 I believe within three months this will be the second biggest ecosystem behind Ethereum. It’s going to start catching up to it very quickly. And I’ve made this comparison before. Um, you know, when it comes to, uh, the NFL, right? I love football.
37:34 I love the NFL. The way I look at Cardano and Ethereum is kind of like this. You know, what Ethereum’s having, all these massive problems, is trying to roll out ETH 2.0, which will be coming out, you know, some say the end of this year. I think it’ll be a couple years where it fully rolls out, but, you know, it’s kind of like the Chiefs, right? They got Patrick Mahomes.
37:52 He’s a great quarterback. Everybody loves Patrick Mahomes. They lost last week, whatever, but there’s a lot of people think they’re gonna go back to the Super Bowl. Well, if you’re in their division, if you’re like the Raiders or the Broncos or the Chiefs, Ethereum is like Patrick Mahomes. It’s hurt right now.
38:04 Patrick Mahomes gets hurt for five or six games. What is that going to do? The cheese season, it’s going to cause it to be a little bit harder for them to get that number one seed. But what needs to happen is all the other teams in that division have to pounce on the Chiefs while they’re down and they’re not playing optimally until ETH 2.0 rolls out. Cardano, Solana, Tezos, all these other platforms, like they have to pounce on Ethereum, and they have to start making serious headway against it while it’s having these problems, because if ETH 2.0 rolls out and it’s seamless and it’s flawless and it solves all the major problems, then nothing will ever catch it.
38:41 But if ETH 2.0 rolls out and we still are having even somewhat congestion problems and somewhat scalability problems, Cardano or Solana or any of these other projects, they have to position themselves to be right there to pounce on that. And, uh, you know, I think that is definitely something we can see. I, I don’t think Solana will compete. I think Cardano is the smart contract platform of the future. I, I’ve said that for a long time.
39:05 Uh, they rolled out the smart contracts. We’re still just seeing what they can do and seeing what kind of projects can roll out on there. So can it happen? Yes. If I were to put a percentage on it, what would I say?
39:15 Maybe 10 to 15 percent, but I do believe it’s the strongest chance of anything to pass. In theory.
39:20 Brian Rose: And again, some of those big Ethereum fans that I asked about ETH 2.0, they kind of smiled and said, we’re years away. And these are people that are all in on this ecosystem. Their future is the ecosystem.
39:30 So even if they’re being objective, it’s hard to be objective because they’re built on these ecosystems, and they said it’s going to be a while. And like you said, right now, I mean, that’s actually the biggest thing my students complain about is the gas.
39:42 Ben Armstrong: The gas, the gas. Well, it makes it hard for smaller traders. You’re, you’re newer person to crypto.
39:46 It really handcuffs them on what they can do.
39:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s actually one of the worst things when you come to the market, because you see that and you’re like, but I see all the promising things of DeFi, and then the gas hits me, and as a smaller investor, it hits hard. So, um, all right, I, I see what you’re saying, and I, and I, uh, respect what you’re saying about Cardano. Solana slipped in here and looked like it started eating some of Cardano’s lunch for him by providing these super fast solutions, some great potential for NFT.
40:12 I actually just realized about a month ago that it stands for Solana Beach, which is basically where I’m from, in San Diego. But they haven’t airdropped me any coins, but that’s okay. Um, what do you think about Solana? Um, is it eaten some of Cardano’s lunch that we didn’t think it would, by taking some market share as a layer one solution, and is there anything else on the, on the, you know, horizon like Tezos or some of these other things that might do the same?
40:36 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. So, um, let’s see. Where do I want to start with that? I’ll start. I’ll start with Solana.
40:42 Uh, I, I don’t think Solana will, will catch Cardano. I don’t think Solana, from the tech perspective, has been eating Cardano’s lunch. I think that’s laughable. Uh, here’s what happened: taking market share. It’s taken market share, potentially.
40:55 It has taken it has taken market share, but it’s not based on anything Solana is doing. Okay, that they launched an NFT platform, which is really big, and, you know, the Mutant Apes over there, they did phenomenal. Uh, here’s why: Solana pumped. Institutions started buying it. That’s it.
41:11 There’s nothing more to it than that. We reported on a story that suddenly Solana had become the number one target for institutional investment. It passed Cardano, right? What was previous to that? Number one, Cardano hasn’t been, Ethereum since much earlier this year.
41:27 So what did we see? We saw Cardano go on a massive pump when the institution started buying. We also want to go on a massive run as soon as that started happening. It, like, 3x in a short period of time after the institution started putting money in. And by institutions, financial cartel, this is who these people are.
41:42 The big funds, your BlackRocks, your Fidelities, your HSBCs, these companies, your Andreessen Horowitzes, which we’ll get to in a second, these companies are driving the market now. Why all of a sudden are they putting money into Cardano and into Solana instead of into Ethereum? Well, they’ve realized at this point they can’t control Ethereum. They can buy enough. Over half of the top 100 Bitcoin wallets were created since 2019.
42:06 You know what that means? That means all institutions. Institutions are the only people with enough money with Bitcoin above ten thousand dollars to buy one of the biggest Bitcoin wallets. They’re the only ones. When you look at Cardano and Solana, you’re looking at prices that are so low with such big circulating supplies out there now.
42:25 Cardano does have a lot of stake, but where they’re able to buy right now for control, they missed out on Ethereum. The institutions missed out on Ethereum. They have found it’s been so hard to get early Ethereum holders to sell their Ethereum. They have not been able to accumulate it at the same rate. So what you’re seeing with Cardano and what you’re seeing with Solana is the institutions injecting that control and trying to make sure that those two projects do not run away from them before they have enough time to accumulate as much as they want.
42:57 Of course, you know, Solana very, you know, tied at the hip with Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s in charge of Alameda Research, who’s behind FTX. Uh, which is kind of the chosen exchange of the financial cartel, right there after Coinbase. Basically what they want to do, they want to have, you know, Coinbase, is Digital Currency Group, which is certainly, you know, owned by, you know, uh, not completely owned by, uh, but Digital Currency Group, of course, was basically funded originally by Li Ka-shing and Hong Kong, China.
43:22 So it’s a lot of control in there. Um, but when you look at Solana and when you look at FTX, like FTX is right there in the same vein. Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, they’re all behind a lot of the money that was raised, uh, in a big FTX race, which, like I said, is tight at the salon. So we’re seeing a lot of institutional control, companies through projects now what project could be next for a Solana-type run? Well, I guess the projects I really like, L Ron, Cosmos.
43:47 Cosmos is one that we’ve already seen have a big run. We just put thousand dollars each into HBAR, Algorand, e-gold, uh, and XRP as well. So we believe these projects still have a lot more upside. The one we put the rest of the money in that we were moving back over to crypto was Avalanche. Now Avalanche is one to watch.
44:08 Okay, because one of the biggest crypto funds out there is the a16z fund. Now this is ran by Andreessen Horowitz, and so what happens is, whenever that money flows into a project, you can count on it to have big returns. So we’re now looking at institutions starting to put money in Avalanche, similar to what we saw in Solana the last few months when the rest of the market was down. It was pumping. The market has been crushed this week.
44:38 Avalanche still up 25. I talked about this about a week and a half ago, and ever since then Avalanche has been climbing while the rest of the market has been going down. Cosmos has been doing the same. Uh, L Run has you know, HBAR and Algorand have all had pretty good runs lately. But to me, right now, for the market to have gotten crushed, and Avalanche to climb up to number 11 in market cap, I think it shows it’s got a lot higher to go.
45:02 I think it could end up at seven or eight and make some more big moves.
45:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s been a massive move. Obviously they had an announcement this week. They had a bunch of uh, injection of funds from a bunch of other funds as well, which similarly is something that we saw with Solana right before it went on its massive run, when it had 300, I think, 90 million dollars put into it.
45:23 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, I think um, AVAX had 230 million.
45:25 Brian Rose: Uh, Stani from Aave had just announced a partnership with them a couple weeks ago, where they were going heavy into AVAX and supporting their token and a bunch of their efforts. And then this thing, I mean, blinked, and it’s a number 11. Um, it’s a massive run, like you said. It was one thing that’s been up when everything’s been down. That being said, do, do you buy AVAX here?
45:44 I guess you do. Do you buy Solana here? Do you buy FTT here? Something you’ve been talking about, or not?
45:50 Ben Armstrong: We’ll argue about our strategy in all three of those.
45:53 Now, when we bought our Solana, um, I think we put 50,000 into it. It’s now worth, I think, about 1.3 million, somewhere around there, and is our now our fourth biggest holding. So, um, we certainly didn’t buy it as our fourth biggest holding, but the, the rally has been so high that it’s held our portfolio tremendously. So anything I say about Solana, I mean, look at it through that lens. Like, I’m hugely invested in it.
46:14 I’m still trying to give you, like, our, my unbiased opinion on it, and the control from the institutions in it. Okay. But the thing about it is, is at this point, like, how much further can the Solana run go? Now we’ve said it over and over and over again, and it’s just continued to go up. We’ve had a huge retracement here, which could be a good buying opportunity, but for us we’re standing pat with Solana.
46:35 We feel like we’re good with that. Avalanche, we’re looking, we’re seeing a lot of the same things that we saw from Solana, not very early in this run, but early in this latest run. Like, sorry, maybe about five weeks ago, we’re just started going parabolic, and so we actually have been putting a little bit more and more and more money into Avalanche. Now, we don’t have nearly as many, as much in Avalanche as we’ve got in other projects. Several projects we’ve got over half a million dollars in, uh, someone, or Avalanche.
47:02 We don’t have close to that. We do have six figures, but we’re putting more into that because we think it’s got a good chance. I think the risk versus reward is very high for Avalanche right now. Now, for FTT, the FTX token, I’ve already told you guys we believe that Coinbase and FTX are the chosen American exchanges by the financial cartel, right? So because of that, you know, they’re both going to be adding derivatives trading.
47:25 You’re seeing them do a lot of similar things, uh, and so that means they’re going to get, you know, what they’re going to be able to walk through regulation very easily. It may not look like it to the, you know, person from the outside, but they’re getting passes on a lot of stuff. So the FTT token is something that we feel like is a very strong add to your portfolio in the bear market. We don’t own any FTT right now. We’re not looking to buy any for the rest of this run, but this is going to be one of the number one coins that we accumulate in the bear market.
47:55 We’re going to look for great entry points through that, you know, through that entire season.
48:00 Brian Rose: I love how Ben, you can look at something and say that’s the cartel, but if it’s a good trade, you’re like, I’m going in with them even though I know you’re right.
48:07 Ben Armstrong: What’s that? Swim with the whales. That’s what we say.
48:10 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a really great way for you to just, to be objective, and like you said, you have a big Solana position but you’re still questioning it. And they do have some very interesting tech. I don’t know if it’s been bulletproof yet, but, um, you make some great points, and great points about that institutional bind you’ve talked about. The Graph, VeChain, Quant, Luna, any updates on those?
48:29 Ben Armstrong: Uh, yeah, I mean, I think those are all still great buys.
48:32 I’ve heard The Graph could be, if you’re looking for another dark horse to get institutional investing, The Graph is another one, uh, to look out for. It hasn’t had that major pump recently like some of these other ones have. AMP is another one we really like. I think it’s going to be the future of payments outside of XRP with their remittance payments and stuff like that. Uh, so AMP is more like payment rails.
48:53 Uh, the works, third party with a lot of different, you know, websites and retailers and other, in any website that takes payments. So AMP is another one. I, I say look out for, for sure. Um, it’s, it’s a major one. We believe at some point, you know, has the potential to be a top ten coin.
49:10 Brian Rose: Okay. Uh, so much more to ask you, but we’re gonna have to have you back in another month or two. But let’s finish with geopolitics. You know, we’re seeing what’s happening in Central America with the adoption. We’re seeing China make all sorts of interesting moves.
49:22 Um, I saw an email from Pantera the other day that showed every time China banned something, how the market like tripled on the back of the ban, uh, whether it was Facebook or Bitcoin. Many ways. Other, I mean, you’re, you look at the geopolitics a lot. What are the big moves you see, and what do we need to pay attention to, and what do we need to ignore?
49:42 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, so I think that the one thing to ignore is El Salvador right now.
49:46 And I know that sounds crazy, right? Because you know, there’s this narrative like they’re going to accept Bitcoin, and people are going to love it, and it’s going to show like Bitcoin’s a currency. Well, I was on a documentary, and I said the exact opposite months ago. Here’s the thing. El Salvador is going to be a failed experiment with Bitcoin because people don’t want to spend Bitcoin.
50:04 I mean, Brian, do you want to go pay for a house on Bitcoin right now?
50:07 Brian Rose: It’s, it’s interesting you bring it up, then, because in my Academy I give people the option of paying crypto, and lately everybody’s paying me in cash. It’s interesting, right?
50:16 Ben Armstrong: Exactly. Yeah, nobody wants to spend it.
50:18 Bitcoin is not a currency. Bitcoin is digital gold. It’s a hedge, it’s a store of value. It’s going to be higher and higher as time goes on. We believe there’s a place for that.
50:28 It will always be one of the top cryptos by market cap, not number one, but, you know, in the top five, probably, for all of eternity. Well, as long as we’re alive anyways. Uh, so you know, this is something in El Salvador that I think people are seeing is not going to work, and there’s going to be a death blow to a lot of the Bitcoin maxi narratives. So the financial cartel does not find what’s going on in El Salvador right now particularly interesting.
50:49 Why? It’s, it’s, it’s like, I don’t know if it’s technically a third world country. I think it is, though. It’s definitely not a first world country. So what’s going on, the economics of El Salvador, is not particularly interested or interesting to the people who are trying to control the world economy now.
51:04 If it went really great there and other countries started wanting to adopt it or do it, then that would be one thing, but we don’t believe that it is going to do great there. What it’s going to do is it’s going to teach the people in El Salvador the value of holding onto Bitcoin, and they’re not going to want to sell it. People will want to take it, but they won’t want to use it to buy things. So you know, that’s something that I think right now is kind of a red herring in, in the advancement of crypto.
51:28 Look, it was a watershed moment. There’s no doubt about it. Like, it was a big moment for crypto, but I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on the future, uh, the way that a lot of people think that it will. There’s a lot of other, you know, things going on right now in the state of Texas. They’re saying, you know, 30% of people there, 37% of people there would like to accept Bitcoin as payments, similar to what’s going on in El Salvador.
51:50 Once again, there’s a lack of education for people to know the number one value of Bitcoin, as it goes up it appreciates in value, according to Bank of America. You see Ukraine. Ukraine’s a very interesting case to me right now, and here’s why, because Ukraine announced several months ago that they would actually be building a CBDC, a central bank digital currency, on the Stellar Lumens network, or XLM. Well, now they’re saying they’re trying to change their laws according to their, their president, uh, Dimitri Kulichev.
52:20 I can’t remember the last name exactly, but he is basically saying, now we want to make our laws extremely Bitcoin friendly so we can, kind of like El Salvador, have the option to accept Bitcoin as a currency. And I think this is really interesting, because we’re seeing this dynamic of a country saying we’ll accept Bitcoin, but we’ll also build a CBDC on a different network other than Bitcoin. So I think that’s something to watch to kind of see how that develops, because I think that is actually like much more applicable to what’s going to be going on the rest of the world is all these other countries move towards, you know, central bank digital currencies over time.
52:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, we’ll have to watch that and see if what happens. You know, if that actually becomes a reality for me, it’s hard to see that a government would ever want to give up control to another currency. And maybe, yeah, El Salvador would just be a media event. I think you might be right on that. Uh, Ben, two more things.
53:10 First of all, is it true that your beloved NFL has banned NFTs? Is that true? And second of all, uh, final thoughts for people just to get some perspective on this market, probably more for the people that have been in it for six or 12 months. So first tell me about the NFL, and then final thoughts.
53:27 Ben Armstrong: So the NFL has announced that they’re not going to be allowing teams or, teams to do their own NFTs at this point.
53:33 Um, but I, this is obviously, in my opinion, a big move by the NFL to position itself to have, you know, kind of a league-wide NFT, maybe even, you know, like, you know, trading cards, their own trading cards, something like that, uh, for the next season. So I think over the next year we’re going to see this develop tremendously. Uh, we have different projects that are kind of fighting over this. They’re saying no, we’re going to be the company. We’re going to be the company.
53:56 The two, watch, e comey, uh, and uh, Chiliz, C-H-I-L-I-Z. Is it one L or two? I can’t remember, but anyways, that’s the I-Z at the end. Uh, and then also you do have Dapper Labs, which created, um, you know, Flow for NBA Top Shot, that worked with the NBA. So they could also be a dark horse as well.
54:12 So those are three projects to work out, look out for that. But I, I do think that, uh, you know, NFL NFTs will be coming soon. Let’s call them NFLTs, you know, maybe that’s what they should call, um, but as far as just some encouragement or something to give some people for some perspective on this market, uh, you know, I’m just, I harp on this all the time. Education. This is what it’s about.
54:34 Find resources where you can figure, where you can find different perspectives. If we have a show, you know, five o’clock every day, uh, Eastern Standard Time on my channel called Around the Blockchain, where we bring in other YouTubers and other perspectives, so people just aren’t hearing me all the time. You got to make up your own mind about something. You’ve got to do your own research, but you have to actually go do the research and listen to different perspectives.
54:54 Make sure you’re not caught in an echo chamber. There’s going to be a lot of people out here in this market, they’re going to tell you what they want you to hear. It may not be the truth. We’re only going to give you the truth on my channel, on what I really believe. That might be wrong sometimes, but we’re always going to give you, from an authentic perspective, exactly what we think is going on.
55:13 We’re not ever telling you stuff based on referrals or based on, you know, what we may make money on in the future. There’s plenty of time for us to make money. We’ve made plenty of money. We care about our audience. We want people to find financial freedom.
55:24 That’s why I tell people, if you’re brand new to crypto and you’ve got a large amount right now, I just sit on the sidelines right here. I don’t even think it’s great for you to come into this market right now. The risk reward is not, uh, super high. But when it does come to, you know, if you’ve just got extra money sitting around, then you know you still can be up for a two or three acts. But the real money, I’m gonna say it again, next year in the bear market.
55:45 Brian Rose: Wow. All right, that’s great predictions. I couldn’t agree more about education. I’ve been using the phrase, like, it takes a village to educate someone on crypto, and, um, we’ve been super lucky to have all these voices coming in and different perspectives. And Ben, sometimes it’s just somebody says something with the right sentence, or the right day, with the right tone of voice, and then people get it for the first time.
56:07 And again, I, I think we also know that everyone brings their own perspective. So, you know, Max Keiser by definition is a Bitcoin maximalist because he’s lived and breathed and eaten Bitcoin for 10 years. We get it. Sandeep is inherently linked to Ethereum, because that’s what Polygon’s based on. And so like everybody definitely brings some baggage, but also a perspective.
56:26 So I agree, education is the best thing, because this market, it’s it’s, it’s, it’s happening. This will be part of our reality in the next five to ten years. It will become a big chunk of the financial system. So better to learn it now than later. Um, and again, I appreciate that advice on crypto.
56:43 You’re probably the only guy in the crypto space that says don’t buy crypto or don’t pile your money into crypto. So anyways, I appreciate that. Ben, what’s the best way for people to start following you, get in touch with you, etc.?
56:54 Ben Armstrong: Yeah, you guys can search BitBoy Crypto. I’ll come up everywhere.
56:57 You find me on YouTube. You can find me on Twitter, uh, Instagram, everything like that. So we also launched a brand new academy called BitLab Academy. Uh, you know, some of what you guys are doing with the D5 academy is for just, you know, very, it’s not device oriented. It’s just crypto in general.
57:10 If you want to check out that, it’s bitlabacademy.com.
57:12 Brian Rose: Good stuff, man. All right, thank you for doing what you’re doing. I can see how this is, like, you know, 24/7 for you or a big chunk. I know you got family, and some of the things you do very, very well, but thanks.
57:22 Uh, Ben, I watch your videos all the time. So to all my students, and, and we appreciate it. So thanks for coming on. I hope we see you back here soon. Absolutely.
57:30 Ben Armstrong: Brian, thanks for having me on.
57:32 Brian Rose: All right, good stuff. There he is. BitBoy Crypto, go follow him. We’ll see you next time on London Real.
57:38 Take care, bye everybody. You.
