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yeah yeah we back we back we back we live let's get it what's going on folks happy Thursday uh it is a chilly day here in the Northeast shout out to everybody everywhere in the world you could have been anywhere in the world but you're here with us tonight man and you're in for an absolute treat uh Bitcoin is the Talk of the Town that's a fact that's a fact um so much stuff going on and you know we've done this a few times but um we'll do it again I think this is actually the

third time where we kind of had this conversation I know we did it during the pandemic with Justin and I believe we did it one other time where we've talked about crypto a lot but we have like actual boot camp as far as like explaining it breaking it down yeah so this is a time to do it again you know um every two years it seems like we have this conversation because that's when the Bull Run happens but so many people are interested in cryptocurrency specifically Bitcoin and um it's intimidating I put it on Instagram

83% of Americans still are not invested in any form of cryptocurrency ever um so you know today we're going to go over the ins and outs um everything you need to know so you can make an informed decision if you want to start to actually put some money into crypto yeah that's a fact um the more that we see it run up the more people are interested that starts coming up on every news feed your parents are talking about it your grandparents are talking about it your kids want to know about it but most people

don't have the education and so it's funny I I fin I read some comments today like yall finally want to talk about it now that it's up over 100 thousand I'm like ah young and you haven't been here since the beginning uh we actually spoke about it in one of our early episodes with with uh with a Fitz Fitz patri uh uh was it Fitz Patrick char Charles Patrick yeah uh so that was early on green table um shotgun mics we were talking about uh cryptocurrency even back then this is 2019 so if you're a

newcomer um go back and do a little homework but tonight we're GNA give you this is this is one of them ones where you're going to get all the information that you need to know to make informed decisions going forward um so like we said we're we're never going to tell you what to invest in we're gonna give you all the information that you can make an intellig intelligent decision and tonight is one of those ones where intelligence will be displayed at a high level all right all right so um let's let it marinate hit

the like button and share so we're going to bring our our good friend up uh Caleb silver who is the editor and chief oh here he goes there he is quick what's going on my brother what's going on got unform got the water bottle you see that cool you see that shirt good the good EO Polo they don't make these anymore these are special very rare that's very rare actually stitched um Caleb somebody who we connected with years ago and um just a brilliant mind as far as in the world of Finance editor and chief

in Investopedia a site that I've been using for years even before ear Leia it's a encyclopedia for anything financially related so if you have questions like you could ask it what's the blockchain what's crypto what's EF and uh Investopedia has all the answers and um we connected with um with Kaleb and then we did an episode and then we had them onk Mondays and we had in London when we did invest Fest Europe then we had him at invest Fest a few times so I mean he's done so many different things as far as in-person

events and then also just been a great resource he's been able to connect us with a lot of great people um a lot of you know high regard people you know come through his uh his Network so he's he's been somebody that we've um definitely you know utilized him as a resource and appreciate him for sure so when we we wanted to have this conversation I wanted to just keep it very neutral and I want to have you know a a sway towards one coin or try to get people to invest like we really we

this this is purely for informational purposes only we're not trying to actually you know pump a meme coin we're not trying to sell you anything We're just trying to give you some information so he was the perfect person because because you know that's um right up his alley so uh here he is here he is thank you for joining us appreciate it is an honor to be here you guys have done so much for financial education and for spreading the good word fighting the good fight out there more than anybody I know and it's really

an honor to contribute to the platform I always feel blessed to be able to to join you and your audiences so thanks for having me and this is pure education this is what I'm good at I am not great at picking the next great meme coin I'm Terri at that but I am really good at trying to understand it because I want to be an educated investor no matter what I do and this is an area where we all need more and more education because the hype machine is in full effect you say you're not

here to pump coins they don't need your help those coins are being pumped plenty on their own plenty of hot air under this Market but there's a lot to learn and a lot to understand so I appreciate you sharing the platform and letting me bring some uh some of the resources that I've used at Investopedia and other places to get a better understanding of this my myself because I'm an investor in the space but I am by no means an expert but I do think I have a general understanding of it I'm excited to share

it with your uh your audience thank you that's a fact so yeah I mean you know the stages set um cryptocurrency you know our our first experience with cryptocurrency was 2017 yep um and we had a collective a group of guys that um just invested in crypto everybody kind of invested you know different amounts of money but um at that time it it had that's why this thing is kind of works in Cycles because at that time Bitcoin was going crazy and I remember um me personally when I first purchased Bitcoin it was $5,000 and

I remember talking to my dad and he just didn't understand it he's like why would you pay $55,000 for something that's not even real like $5,000 $5,000 for Bitcoin like that's that doesn't even doesn't even make any sense like you can't even comprehend yeah that that would only get you 20% of a Bitcoin today that's yeah yeah yeah that that was that was a time and at the time I remember I still remember that I remember when you purchased it uh it was three things you could buy was uh Litecoin Litecoin ethereum and Bitcoin I

bought them all yeah everybody was like well let's just buy them all we weren't really understanding of it we saw that run up up to 177,000 it was like this is the game changer I remember saying this to a lot of people we don't want to get left on the dock when this ship leaves right if this is the airport we don't get want to get left at the terminal when this plane takes off because it's going to take off and slowly people were like uh kind of hesitant kind of hesitant and now I mean

this this this the ship has has it's leaving the dock uh so we we got to make sure that we have enough information that we're on this journey called Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and as a whole yeah so a long story short obviously it's it's come a long way since then from $5,000 to1 $101,000 so let's um let's go through this journey if we can hit the like button please and share but uh Caleb I know you you you have some slides and we really gonna go full-fledge education with this so what we're going to do

is we're g to go through some slides then we'll ask some questions and then we'll ask we'll take some questions from the audience if people interested in the audience and have questions um so yeah I'll let you um I'll let you queue it up you know I guess you want to start with this you know introduction then from what Bitcoin and then just take it from there cool all right just let me make sure I can I can move those all right cool I can move them around well again thank you for having me Investopedia

has been around for a minute we were founded in 1999 we're 25 years old celebrated our 25th anniversary this year and we've been educating investors about money about investing about personal finance about all the aspects of how to live with money in your life but especially about investing in wealth building for a very long time we are a free site come one come all if you search something up on the Internet like any of these terms Bitcoin blockchain proof of work proof of stake you're going to see our results near the top because we've been

doing this for a minute so we are delighted to be here uh and and I'm delighted to represent as the editor and chief I've been a business journalist for 30 years so I am not as I said a crypto expert a trading expert what I am good at is learning these ecosystems and then sharing that information so if you like what you hear if you want to hear more follow us on Investopedia follow me if you want um I do a lot of this stuff uh a lot of the the front-facing social education stuff for

Investopedia and I'm on TV and and on the radio and I've been privileged to be on your stage a few times as well so let's get after it everything or most of the things I'm going to talk about today um I got from our guides on bitcoin and cryptocurrency at Investopedia but I also grabbed some resources from some other places so if you're very new to this for the first time and I'm talking too fast or I'm saying things that go over your head a throw it in the chat and say what does that mean

b scan this code so you have it so you can look at our guide it's pretty robust on all things crypto but especially Bitcoin which is uh sort of the the the king of the coins uh in the cryptocurrency patch so to speak so scan that scan it now scan it later but this is all free and easy stuff to digest if I uh go through something that you don't understand so I recommend you do that let's talk about Bitcoin itself again the king of the coins and guys interrupt me as you see fit but

this is a cryptocurrency virtual money some people call it digital gold gold but it was created about 14 years ago to be outside the control of any one person or group so Banks and governments aren't needed to produce it to regulate it or oversee it and think about when it was formed in the ashes of the great financial crisis right Occupy Wall Street was happening at the time there was a lot of backlash against Banks too big to fail a system that was broken based upon uh uh mortgages that shouldn't have been carved up and

sold right there was this lack of trust in the financial system so Bitcoin was born out of that along with a lot of other Technologies but this was the big one um again when it was born it was born as a as a as a digital currency but it was really a software program and a problem solved by a mysterious figure whether this person is an actual person a group of people a Consortium a man a woman an alien we have no idea but they go by the name of satachi Nakamoto right the creator of

the Bitcoin currency who basically created this idea for this digital currency through this white paper and scan the code if you want to geek out and read it it gets very dense very fast but they they created it for a reason to create this currency that lived on a blockchain a digital Ledger away from government oversight away from the big bad banking institutions so if you really want to get into it you can read about Satoshi or you can read the white paper itself I've only made it through a few pages and it really knocks

me out uh because I'm just not that smart but people that love to geek out on computer programming really are into the white paper and it makes a lot of sense for them but he created this idea for Bitcoin to be this coin this currency that traded on the blockchain you've probably heard this name a lot the blockchain what is the blockchain well the blockchain is like a digital Ledger if you think about you know if you ran a small business years ago or you had parents that did it and they had the accounting sheet

the assets and the liabilities and every transaction was recorded on a real Ledger on a real piece of paper this is a digital Ledger but it's wide open to everybody so all records are transparent and it's impossible to alter the blockchain it is a digital record of transactions of work of insurance it's used in a lot of different ways right now and if you think about the way cryptocurrencies in the blockchain are related think of the blockchain like the highway right the highway is built out there for all of us to get around and then

the the cryptocurrencies and the tokens are the vehicles on that highway so this is the underlying structure of of all of these cryptocurrencies they're on this open blockchain where we can see everything and you're going to hear a lot if you haven't already about centralized versus decentralized versus distributed networks this is only important so you get it conceptually um but when you think about a centralized Network think about like our banking system right there's your bank could be City Bank could be J could be Chase could be any Bank of America right but all banks

are part of banking networks right they may be IND idual retail Banks or chains of banks but in the middle of it all is the central bank right the Federal Reserve the Federal Reserve is the Central Bank of the United States and then there are 12 Regional central banks and then all banks have to work within their n within their rules right so that's a centralized Network right in the middle you got the big circle in the middle like a solar system and all the things running around it our solar system is a centralized network

if you think of it that way a decentralized network is what blockchain is right this is where it's open to everybody everybody can see what's going on there is no one person or thing or entity in control of a decentralized network and that is the promise of the blockchain and ultimately all the cryptocurrencies that are trading on it that live on it or that are programmed into the software of it and then there's distributed networks think like your your cell phone company right there are cell phone towers and there cell phone companies everywhere but they're

distributed all over the place so you have your Sprint Tower over here and you have your AT&T tower over here that's a distributor network but for the purposes of understanding cryptocurrency in the blockchain it's really a decentralized network that you have to get your mind around super important to understand what that is so guys interrupt at any time but just so we can get through some of these Basics because we're going to refer to some of these words where is the blockchain being used today in 2024 and really for the past five or six years

well one of the big reasons that Bitcoin was created and the blockchain became such a big thing especially in the wake of the great financial crisis was the ability to transfer money to people either the unbanked or the people that did not Trust Banks anymore that wanted to transfer funds right now globally there's money being transferred from one country to another people here are transferred back home to where their families are money transfer has been a huge business but you think about the fees and the friction in a money transfer if you're transferring a 100

bucks you know to to uh uh you know your aunt in Jamaica you're probably going to pay 15 bucks on that for a money transfer fee and there's multiple layers of friction that it has to go through so the blockchain was used to sort of eliminate that and you can transfer Bitcoin without paying a fee smart contracts that's where the blockchain is being used as well think about insurance or real estate how many you know stacks of papers do we sign and fill out and how many files are there for one real estate transaction there

are hundreds of them if you've ever bought a house or a piece of property you'll sign your name 50 or 60 times and the paperwork's all over the place a smart contract is on the blockchain everybody can see open it up like a digital file internet of things very similar you know your refrigerator knows when you're out of milk uh it's already placing the order for you right this is blockchain less friction sort of the digital world connecting to itself and then there's things like healthcare where we're using blockchain Logistics non-fungible tokens you may have

heard of right those live on a blockchain and you trade those through through digital currencies like ethereum even the government uses blockchain and in the media we use blockchain as well for file storage combing through files right it's already in use so if you think about this infrastructure think of it like a highway it's already out there and it's been out there for a number of years again I mentioned the fact that the blockchain is the highway but then the coins and the tokens are the vehicles that trade on that Highway and they serve different

purposes so Bitcoin is a coin obviously you know the name right but then there are other things like tokens utility tokens or Dow tokens Bitcoin is a digital currency similar to a physical currency but in the case of Bitcoin it's not backed by anything right it's not a store of value for something like gold you can't base its value off of you know what it would trade in for gold but it does have a a numer it does have a number a a fee a a a dollar amount associated with it that we'll talk about

in a minute but they operate on their own blockchain with their own protocols you can use them as a source of payments Bitcoin is the big one in ethereum you probably heard of that as well in coins we talk about smart coins and we talk about sort of dumb coins bitcoin's kind of a dumb coin not that it's a dumb technology you just can't do much with it but collect it trade it now you can purchase things with it ethereum is a little bit smarter tokens are a whole different thing they don't necessarily operate on

their own blockchain um you can use them for payments and for signing digital agreements so think about that real estate purchase right you may uh use tokens in a digital blockchain world to complete or parts of that purchase or part of that paperwork right they're more used use ful but they're not like a digital currency right really quick because a lot of people when they hear cryptocurrency they hear Bitcoin they hear blockchain they think that they're all the same thing so I just want you to touch on that just really quickly because blockchain is a

technology obviously Bitcoin is a coin that operates on that technology that's right that technology exists in the real world right you gave some great examples already but I think people just need to understand to differentiate two right blockchain is going to exist and going to continue to ex exists in all all the things we do Bitcoin a different thing not the same in the same sense it's just that it operates on it that's right think of that Highway metaphor right blockchain's the highway Bitcoin is you know one of the vehicles maybe it's a Cadillac on

that Highway an Old El dado because it's been around for a long time maybe worth a lot right now but then there are faster cars and then there are cars that came out of nowhere like a Dogecoin really doesn't have anything backing it but it's kind of the fast car that speeds along the highway and you're like where did that go so they're very different chain is a very useful piece of technology it's it's vast and it's in use already across the banking system it's very uh prevalent in the bond market even in the stock

trading Market blockchain is basically this massive digital infrastructure that is being been built out for the past decade and will be built out in through the next decade or two so the building of the blockchain is a very big deal think of like the building of the American railroad think about the building of the American Highway this is what blockchain is doing in the world of technology and these coins and these tokens and these dollar-based coins they all trade on it they all drive on it you need the blockchain for Bitcoin to exist if it

weren't if the blockchain wasn't here we would never have it had a Bitcoin so I'm giving you a massive list here of a bunch of the cryptocurrencies but there are literally thousands of them this you can look at it on coingecko.com if you want you can look at all of the digital currencies that basically exist and are trading right now I just threw up 30 or so of them so because maybe you've seen a few of them before but Bitcoin rules the roost it's the biggest of them all and then you have others like ethereum

and you have tether and they all serve different purposes but bitcoin's the big popular one that gets all the attention and it's got the biggest price tag this is just a way to look at a lot of the symbols you may have seen before I encourage you to do your research on all of these but we're going to talk mostly about Bitcoin today because that's getting so much of the attention the thing about Bitcoin when it was created by Satoshi Nakamoto whoever that entity is it has a limited Supply if you go back and you

read that white paper you read it on your own time the way that Satoshi whoever Satoshi was set it up was that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins to be mined and when I say mined you might be thinking of like gold mining like literally going underground and picks and shovels and digging into the Earth to to extract gold it's like that but it's actually done with software and it's done with computing power and it takes a lot of energy you may have heard stories about how much it cost to produce just one

Bitcoin in terms of energy you could power a small city right a lot of that's true but it's getting a little bit easier to uh to that the energy use is not as intense as it used to be but because there's only 21 million Bitcoins that that will ever be mined that's a limited Supply and that's one of the attractive features of Bitcoin especially as we see it at these very high prices we're at about 19.8 million that have already been mined there are not that many more Bitcoin to be mined the thing about Bitcoin

though because you have to mine it solving a software equation or a math equation with software it gets harder and harder for programmers to solve it it takes a lot of computing power it takes a lot of smarts and it takes a lot of time so as we get closer to 21 million and we're at about 19.8 million it gets harder and harder to mind these things which kind of raises the value tighter Supply more difficult to produce that's helping boost the price along with a bunch of other factors right again it's a supply demand

issue we're here right now and well we're here a little bit further in 2024 not that many more Bitcoin to be mind a lot of it's already out there it's just more difficult to mind and it has a scarcity issue when you have a scarce resource that a lot of people are interested in prices go up I don't care if we're talking about Air Force Ones I don't care if we're talking about you know a brand new special iPhone you know scarcity of a product that people want and are interested in always drives price it's

Supply demand and it's Mania and it's and it's hype and bit coin has all of these aspects uh associated with it right so in terms of a asset something you can buy and trade and invest in well Bitcoin has Ruled The Roost in the capital markets for the past 10 years really but in the past five years alone just look at the price appreciation of Bitcoin it just blows out all these other things I'm going to read you if you can't get if you can't see it close enough bitcoin's up about 1, 290% in the

past five years right the S&P 500 our stock market the 500 biggest companies in America is up 91% in the past five years guys that's outstanding right those are great returns for stocks but when you look at Bitcoin it doesn't even compare the Dow Jones Industrials they're not all Industrials that's up 56% gold and I use the ETF as the proxy is up about 78% in the past five years and the dollar is up about 10% so Bitcoin in terms of an investment has returned a lot more or generated a lot more what we call

Alpha in our business because of this scarcity because of the interest in it and a lot of that has come in different waves Rashad mentioned he first got introduced to it in 2016 2017 Bitcoin had already been around I remember back in 2014 when it was two bucks and no I didn't buy it because I didn't understand it but the the more scarce it gets the more interest there is and the more adoption there is by both investors like us individual investors or institutional investors like the Fidel ities of the world the black rocks of

the world the Goldman Sachs is of the world and yes they're interested and yes they're mining their own Bitcoin well that's just going to drive price even higher so in the past five years it has blown out Stocks by a long shot but let me take you back five more years beyond that $10,000 invested in Bitcoin 10 years ago that's wor 2. $2.9 million today now you want to talk about fear missing out or you know I wish I you know somebody would have told me about this and I just would have put a, well

we can think about that with everything Bitcoin is super unique with returns like this 10,000 10 years ago worth $2.9 million today we have never seen anything like it in the capital markets and I've been doing this for a very long time so we can talk about why that's happen but still even with that massive price appreciation Bitcoin is still it's much bigger than that it's about a trillion and a half now but it's very small compared to the market capitalizations of big assets that are already traded in our Capital markets real estate being the

biggest worldwide the $330 trillion Market Global debt we're talking about the bond market we're talking about us debt Chinese debt Japanese debt European country debt that's a $315 trillion dollar market fiat currency we're talking about dollars Euros yens right that's $120 trillion Doll Market Bitcoin is a trillion and a half dollar market it's come a long way in 14 years but is still a very small asset class comparatively speaking and given the hype that it gets barely anybody owns it but the people that own it own a lot of it especially some of the bigger

companies so we'll get into that in a second just keep that in mind though when when Rashad mentioned that 85% of uh people surveyed say they don't own it well you know it's still pretty young and it's still pretty small and it wasn't until like the last year or two where it really became available for us to put into our retirement accounts to buy like an exchang traded fund like we would buy an exchang traded fund that tracks the NASDAQ right it is still kind of a I wouldn't call it a baby but I may

call it like an eight-year-old or like a 14y old because that's actually what it is and that's what and that's why not to cut you off but that's why I wanted to have this is like you know we talk about this stuff on Market Mondays all the time and I mean you could just go out and just buy Bitcoin xrp whatever you want and that's fine but I feel like you you know the being that 83% of people still have not invested in most people are still not educated in it so you could just buy

something just because you know we you say like this is a good buy but like I said this is just to kind of give you education on it because it's asset class that most likely is only going to get bigger it's gonna be here for a long period of time it's extremely complicated and most people don't understand it even if they buy it don't understand this so you should never invest in anything that you don't understand so the whole purpose of this is to give you a real form of education so you just have more

confidence and knowing what you're actually putting your money in to as opposed to just blindly just you know throwing it and not even knowing what you're actually doing right so that's the purpose of this it's not to debate whether xrp is better than salana not it's to actually just give you some education so you can have some level of understanding um that gives you more confidence but then that also just builds a more solid foundation um going forward because like I said you know you saw that chart it's still relatively early that's the crazy part

about it right so it's not going anywhere so you know you don't have to rush to just go out of your mind and just put your life savings and like you know just take your time educate yourself dollar cost average the same rules apply as the stock market but you know a lot of times people don't don't get that education so that's why this this whole thing is just designed to actually educate you we're gonna talk about the onboarding process and stuff like that but you know first you got to kind of know the history

the trajectory the fundamentals this is how you you can you know learn a little bit Yeah I want I want to go to one of the slides that you brought up uh the percentage increase versus the S&P versus the Dow which is interesting because when you do the history you start something very important this this is being mined and most people say well it's being Min it C it takes a lot of energy that shouldn't sound unfamiliar to people who have been watching Market monies and followers for the past five years because these things are

were being mined in what we call data centers right and you know the efficiency that it takes to have a data center when it comes to gpus but that high Computing was started because of Bitcoin right right so when we talking about the new technology of artificial intelligence this is very familiar in the same sense where it was like we needed data centers we needed to have them running at a high efficiency to do Quantum comput or Advanced Computing this sounds very similar to the day we're in right now when we see Nvidia running we

saw broadcom today running because of the same things AI predominantly inside that data center segment so these two things are running power lot at the same time yeah and absolutely and you know what stocks are doing very well as Bitcoin goes up power companies energy companies that are producing energy to power these data centers every time you go on a flight right now if you're flying out of the I don't care where you're flying in in the United States you fly over a bunch of warehouses you see them all they or you're driving on the

highway and all you see your warehouses well half of those are fulfillment centers for Amazon and Walmart and everybody to get you your goods right away the other half are data centers full of super servers right that are doing massive computing power either to mine crypto or to mine AI use for AI Computing purposes to mine data to sell us more things right data is the currency of the 21st century Bitcoin is in that ecosystem and so is the blockchain the blockchain is part of the railroad of that ecosystem and to to Rashad's point right

this is about knowing what you own now you could buy it on a whim you could buy any of the coins I put up there on a whim you could have bought Bitcoin a long time ago and just said I don't know I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a whirl but it's always better to know what you own so you have a better understanding whether you want to keep owning it or own more of it potentially or when something big happens you have a better understanding of it it makes you a smarter investor and you

can make better decisions based on that we can't tell you which one of these is going to go up a th% I wish we could if we could we probably wouldn't be here right now well we would we'd be teaching you from the yacht but what's important is to know what you own and understand this whole ecosystem and the history of it so when people start talking to you about it you can be like I actually have a little bit more of an informed opinion than that all right can we go back to some of

the companies that are using because I think this gets into the use case and then we'll talk about how to get into it if you're not into it yet or you want to teach somebody else how to get into it let me see if I can get back in there all right cool so again this is a 14-year-old technology Bitcoin is been around for 14 years the blockchain has been being built for the last couple of decades but more and more financially institutions and processes are been preparing for this future and the future is actually

now right PayPal is very involved in cryptocurrency you can pay people with cryptocurrencies through PayPal Mastercard allows you uh to use some of your rewards to buy cryptocurrencies Black Rock the biggest money manager in the world right it's got1 13 trillion dollars it is offering um Bitcoin exchange traded funds and ways to access bitco Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through trust obviously Square the pment payment platform is in there Fidelity Investments one of the like the most uh you know stodgy sort of money Financial managers in the world that's been around for the last 100 odd

years they've been mining their own Bitcoin for the past 10 years Abigail Johnson the woman who runs that firm is fascinated with this technology and the Fidelity is offering it and bny melon which used to be the Bank of New York the bank that Alexander Hamilton founded by 200 plus years ago they're into Bitcoin too so this is not like it's maybe happening it's it's happening today the biggest Financial firms in the world are using it the biggest payment firms in the world are using it but what can you actually buy with it today besides

turning it into Fiat what can you buy with cryptocurrency well you can go out on a limb in some places and buy some property that's priced in Bitcoin the price of Bitcoin changes very frequently so you got to watch those prices but there are some Brokers and in places outside the US mostly that'll allow you to buy in Bitcoin some of these retailers will allow you to to use Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies like ethereum to buy gift cards and some of these retailers will allow you to place orders using cryptocurrency uh Uber Eats will let you

do it in some cases in some cities GameStop's been accepting it for a while right it is out there and it's in use but you're not going to go to Burger King or Carell if you will and go p with Bitcoin right now it's just not that widely held but ethereum which is a another type of cryptocurrency a smartcoin we call it you could go buy non-fungible tokens like the pudgy penguins down there those are like 10 grand each I don't know why those are non-fungible tokens these are art that exists in a unique way

on the blockchain there's only one of one of these and that's another aspect of the blockchain universe so the you can't buy a pizza necessarily except maybe one or two pizza parlors and at the Dallas Maverick Stadium they'll allow you to use Dogecoin to buy pizza but in general there are very few places that accept it as a means of exchange right now um but there are growing but if you wanted to get into it and you wanted to own some cryptocurrency the first thing you have to do to trade it to buy it to

sell it to give it to somebody to accept it as a gift is to have a wallet right you need a digital place for this cryptocurrency to go nobody's going to hand you a stack of Bitcoin there is no Bitcoin right it's just digital technology it's a software problem so you need either a cold wallet which really looks just like a a hard you know a a uh what do you call those thumb drive some of them look even fancier um that's called a cold wallet or you can buy you can have a wallet on

an exchange kind of like you do with your cash app or your bank app right that's called a hot wallet that lives on the internet and if you open an account with a coinbase or a crypto.com or a kraken or any of them you're going to be opening what's called a hot wallet a little less secure because it's on the internet and all kinds of things happen on the internet with hacking um but a cold wallet is sort of an off-site storage right you have your own passcode for that you have that one thumb drive

that has all your cryptocurrency in it you better not lose it we've heard stories about people losing their thumb drive or forgetting the password and losing millions or billions of dollars worth of it that happens that's real but it's your choice questions on this guys yeah okay yeah the on boarding for Americans you got to go through like coinbase and you could take it off of it but that's important because um when you buy the crypto like let's say you use coinbase for example because I think that's probably like the most recognizable exchange you do

have the option to just leave it on coinbase in that regard coinbase is kind of like the custodian of your actual Bitcoin right which leads to problems um could lead to problems you could you have the option of of buying it and then taking it off right and then using the wallets right um now this is important because like you said if you if anything happens to that right let's say you're using a cold wallet and you lose your you lose it there's there like when you buy a stock there's federal regulations and there's oversight

and these companies you you don't just say like I'm done right this that doesn't exist in the world of crypto so if you have $5 million on your cold wallet and you go to Turks and Kos and you bring it with you or you don't bring it with you and your cleaner comes in and thinks that it's a USB drive and throws it away there's no recourse to to get the $5 million back there's no 1800 there's no 1800 number that 1800 Bitcoin where's my Bitcoin on and that's a big deal right when we say

unregulated we mean there's no sheriff in town here right right now we've heard of these big crypto platforms like binance where they've had fraud or where there was uh you know bad dealings and millions were lost some of that can get recovered because you can trace the digital sort of footprint of some of these things but there is no security an Exchange Commission right now there might be in a couple months that is overseeing crypto there is no sipc like there is in stocks where that your your Investments are being protected up to a certain

amount there's no FDIC like there is at your bank that protects up to $250,000 of your money in the bank should something happen to the bank right there is phrase I think the phrase is like 24 letters something like that I I was want to touch on it yeah Special phrase yeah I'll show you what one looks like it's crazy this is important and it's a word of of the wise especially if you're going to use a code wallet that seed phrase can be 20 to 24 words make sure that you store that make sure

that you never lose that because you won't be able to get inside that Cod wallet but here's something that people need to know if you're going to purchase a cold wallet number one please purchase it from the direct company right so a lot of times you'll go on Amazon or you might go on Walmart and you'll say hey there's a cold wallet and I need it next day shipping the problem is you don't know where that code wallet came from and sometimes somebody has used it they've already created the seed phrase and you get it

you upload all your assets and in a day you can't get back in because it's been hotwired already has that happened before yes that happens to people and so to alleviate that what you want to do is get it and I see a bunch of people putting get it directly from Ledger get it direct uh directly from Tresor there's a reason why they're saying that because that is a cautionary tail that can happen to people it's a new space right it's unregulated in this sense and so you want to make sure you take every precaution

and every step is possible that c phrase again I would store it I would put it in a safe just so that you know that it's there and if anything ever happens you know where to get it from because again Beyond losing it if you lose that phrase it you you can't get back in once it's gone it's gone right and again there is no sheriff in town at least not yet and that's kind of the point of cryptocurrency it is supposed to be unregulated Bitcoin was designed to be unregulated but we can all see

transactions we can see when it happened where it happened if somebody steals Bitcoin you always hear about people you know stealing x amount of million in Bitcoin you can really track trace them down because they leave a digital footprint but if you lose your passcode or you lose your cold wallet it is gone for or or if you send it to the wrong address so that's said like how do you so they say if you buy it on coinbase you have you have an address and then you send it to another address so if you

send it to another if you send it if you send it to the wrong address if you miss a letter um number you're done and that's happened to me before so everything that I'm speaking on it happened firsthand experience so the chase thing when I went to chase two years ago and um coinbase and they were saying that so many people were coming into Chase Bank trying to retrieve money because their coinbase account got hacked that they make that wasn't on national news or anything like that but this is this is people this is the

banker telling me firsthand like how ramp it coinbase hacks was people customers how many customers was actually coming in saying that their coinbase got hacked and as a result their bank account was compromised and that happens like that it's not a fairy tale like it really happens so the security aspect is something that's definitely real I mean you could choose to do whatever you want you can leave it on coinbase you can leave it on you can buy Robin Hood you can transfer it to your own personal wallet but no matter how you no matter

what you do there is some level of security that you should just be aware of yeah and it's on you it's on you the right this is again you went to chase because maybe their Chase account was linked to their coinbase account but I'm sure Chase was like we can't help help you right coinbase is not ours but if you are setting up a wallet and I use coinbase here um for the first time if you're opening an account and setting up a hot wallet on a coinbase it's as simple as signing up for basically

any app you've ever signed up for or if you're signing up for the gym or if you're signing up for a you know online banking the app for your bank City chase whatever it is it looks just like it right you pick your username you pick your password you back up your wallet as Rashad just mentioned you protect your wallet with a double factor factor authentification uh a face ID that could be an extra text this is all about setting up a secure hot wallet so it's as protected as possible and that's what you need

to do as soon as you want to get involved and start your and start your investing Journey right and then when you start using these apps and I went from coinbase there to crypto.com just to give you a different flavor because guess what they're all kind of the same once you start wanting to make transactions on these platforms again they look just like sports betting sites they look just like regular online trading sites or Banking online banking sites you are basically looking at a watch list of the things you might own and then you're deciding

whether to buy sell deposit money into your account which would come from your bank account your Fiat Fiat is dollars Fiat you fund your crypto account with real dollars that's where that you know these two things come Clash right and then you just transact you make transactions you can buy you can sell you can buy with limit orders and I'll show you what it looks like I actually did it today for you guys you got me so inspired I went out and bought some Bitcoin and I set a limit order for some Bitcoin if it

ever Falls to 75 I'm gonna buy some more so let let me show you how I did that first screen here this is my coinbase account I wanted to buy a $100 of Bitcoin I looked at it on my watch list then it asked me what kind of order just like it would if I was buying a stock on on schwab.com is this a one-time order or do I want to buy every month on a recurring basis dollar cost averaging as Rashad mentioned or is this a limit owner I only want to buy Bitcoin if

it hits a certain price the screen on the right is that $75 price I'd like to buy some Bitcoin if it goes down to 75 because I think it's going to go back up again if it does or again a recurring buy and my dollar cost averaging in then I set my order I'm paying with my checking account there's my schwab checking account hopefully the number's not there anymore um they'll only let me buy $5,000 worth in a day they said a limit for me thank you very much um and then I review my order

if I'm happy with it and look I don't have to buy Bitcoin is trading near $100,000 per Bitcoin just like stocks you can buy fractional or dollar amounts of any cryptocurrency you don't have to buy the full price tag of it so if I'm buying a $100 worth of bitcoin today I'm buying 0.0095 437 Bitcoin right a fraction of a fraction of a fraction the smallest most possible uh tenous denomination of Bitcoin is called atoshi a Satoshi like a penny so cute but I'm with a 100 bucks I'm buying just a very fractional amount but

that's the whole thing I don't have to afford $100,000 to buy Bitcoin today I just want to buy a little bit every month because I want to keep owning it and that's kind of the way I operate as an investor I picked five or six coins and tokens that I understand where I think I know what's going on and by the way I don't really understand the way the business works because there is no business behind these coins it's mostly belief but I understand what their purpose is and could be I buy the same five

and I buy the same five in the same amount every month if a price drops a lot I maybe I'll buy a little bit more but I set up recurring buys for myself and sometimes I set limit orders if I want to buy it at a cheaper price but it looks just like any online broker you've used before just like your bank account right but there are a ton of risk factors in investing in crypto Rashad just mentioned Troy mentioned a couple of them one of those is losing your password or having your account hacked

and that happens all the time but also these are super volatile assets when I say volatile we're talking about extreme beta right they prices gyate on these things for no Rhyme or Reason it's not like you can look inside these coins and say oh they had a bad quarter these coins don't sell anything or the CEO left some of these coins have no CEO most of them don't right or uh there's you know uh the economic winds are shifting and all of a sudden this is not working anymore anymore it's not fundamental like that it's

really based on belief and that's a big thing you have to accept if you're going to own cryptocurrencies whether it's tokens or coins you have to understand that a lot of this is based on belief and we can talk about that more in a minute we talked about hacking right and we also you know although some financial institutions are allowing you to invest in it and even transact in some cases it's not accepted by the Federal Banking institutions by the fed by the Fed Reserve at least not yet and I put the word yet there

because we have a new presidential Administration coming in and president-elect Trump has promised to make America the crypto capital of the world he said the United States will mine its own cryptocurrency it will never sell or hodal hold on for dear life forever to the cryptocurrencies that are already in our treasury that the United States Treasury got from you know arresting people that hacked into other people's accounts right it may happen that it becomes regulated which would be antithetical but another huge risk and I boled it for a reason is that there is an intense

amount of ownership concentration especially in Bitcoin a very few institutions groups and individuals own most of it and should they decide to sell at any point well that could really drop the price a lot and that's a very big and important factor not just in cryptocurrency in any security but you want to make sure you understand this well it's got these things going for it it's got a really tight Supply Bitcoin right I told you only 21 million will ever be created it's got a lot of demand and a lot of hype it costs more

and more to produce it gets more expensive and timely to produce it's got competitors now but it is you know the King of the Hill up until now the SEC has not really been that friendly to it the Securities and Exchange Commission the top cop on Wall Street but we got a new Securities and Exchange commissioner coming in with the Trump Administration he sounds more friendly but Bitcoin gets a ton of media coverage a ton of media coverage for small as it is and all these things affect its price okay I talked about the fact

that it's uh heavily concentrated and that you know just a few entities own most of it and when you have this heavily of a concentration in an asset Anything Can Happen the price spikes a lot why oh because one or more of these entities decided they wanted to buy more of it oh the price dropped what happened well some of these entities decided that they didn't want as much of it anymore they can really impact Supply demand and ultimately price and as an individual investor or somebody who's trying to trade these or hold these or

buy them for my kids for the long term I have zero control over that and not a ton of visibility but when you look at who holds the most Bitcoin coinbase that's us individual investors that are buying into our own accounts Satoshi whoever that is it's an entity a mysterious entity but they do have a digital signature so we know it's out there we just can't track the person down binance Black Rock the biggest money manager in the world world this company here micro strategy this is a publicly traded stock that used to be in

the uh you know making uh equipment for for servers right it used to be in the AI intelligence business but it's changed its business completely and for the past five years its CEO Michael sailor all he wants to do is collect Bitcoin and basically it's a Bitcoin Treasury and one of the best performing stocks this year here's the interesting thing uh about this this chart Caleb I know it says as of November 24 happened we saw Bitcoin run Black Rock has actually increased their ownership they now have over 528,000 Bitcoin so we talking about the

largest treasury of money from an Institutional they're seeing a value in it whereas before maybe five years ago it would this TR would look nothing like this absolutely not absolutely not I think that's important like I said it's not we're agnostic about the situation so just giving you the information it's not just not debatable facts um just so you can be informed Bitcoin is held by institutions for the most part that's that's not that's not something that is debatable it's that's an actual fact now it could be a good thing because you could say okay

well if Black Rock owns this much and they're not gonna they're they're very intelligent people right they're not going to own something that's not going to go up in value that's a sign that it's going to go up in value that's a sign that you know it's going to be it's even safer going forward or or you can look at it and say well if they own this much then they're going to control everything and it kind of goes against the whole principles of it being decentralized and d and the small guys ever win but

this is this is the world does not work on fairy tales the rich run it the rich have always run the world right there's never been a time in human history since money was created that the rich didn't run the world and they run they run Curr they run cryptocurrency they they own the most of it they control the price and they run it that's just important for you to know so it's not like this Utopia that some people think that it is that's just not the case and I have a strong suspicion that they

could still get because even you know in the Middle East when um October 7 happened they got the um hamas's uh crypto so Bitcoin so I don't know how they got I I don't I don't know how they how they did that but that lets me know that if they want to get you crypto they're going to get you crypto that's just my own personal opinion that might not be an actual fact but the fact that they actually got their their their Bitcoin so quickly I just think that they have some level of intelligence that

if Footprints yeah it's it's all it's all on The Ledger it's all on The Ledger now if you they can do some digital sleuthing to find out who is who on that ledger and that's probably how they got it but let me just show uh go back to that chart real quick if we can or as I present I got okay so you see there the US government number seven it owns a 213,000 Bitcoin at a value well now the value is probably $25 billion do but where did it get its Bitcoin right well it's

not like the treasury and Janny Yellen was out there scooping Bitcoin right and it definitely wasn't happening in the administration before that what is it from it's from the seizure of assets from criminal activity that the treasury keeps in its treasury right so United States owns Bitcoin and and Trump president-elect trump said they'll never sell it now he's catering to the Bitcoin crowd to help get him elected but we do have quite a bit of Bitcoin in our Treasury and if we're going to mine our own there's going to be a lot more and to

your point Rashad it's antithetical to the way that Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto whoever that was right it was never supposed to be this but it's gone capitalist real quick why because there's value in it and once there's value in something here come the Sharks right and if you wanna swim with the sharks as a pilot fish or a fish behind the pilot fish and make some of that money too and invest in it and learn about it you can do that or you can just say that's just capitalism run a mu I don't

want any part of it but I assume if you're watching this you're interested in it let's move on to the next slide real quick anyway there's more terms we're gonna call them the whales yeah they're whales they are the whales right Chinese government has a ton of Bitcoin Fidelity look these are big companies right um Robin Hood has a lot but that is held for clients like us right so so we do have individuals do have it now in terms of where it's legal and I borrowed this great chart from how much.now of countries are

way out in front of the United States on this Mongolia is big on it El Salvador may try to make it its you know it's uh its fiat currency that didn't work out very well because when they started it I think Bitcoin was at 40,000 then it went to like 18,000 U so that didn't work but you see it's these green you know the green shoots are are places where it's legal to transact in it China wants no part of it Russia wants no part of it although the Chinese government owns a lot of it

that it has seized its own way as well so that's where it's legal around the world now if you're thinking about opening an account right and you don't know where to do it or how to do it and you don't want to buy a hard that you know the thumb drive and and set it up that way because it seems scary and complicated you know want any to steal it or you don't want your housekeeper to throw it away and you're thinking about an exchange there are plenty of exchanges that would love to do business

with you we have the I want you to scan the code if you're interested in looking at this we do a very critical review of all of the crypto the major crypto exchanges to see which ones are best for who and if you want to look at our reviews they're written by our own editors who are crypto Traders and investors themselves and we have the best four various types uh of investors or Traders if you're a if you're a hardcore Trader you might want something with a little more horsepower um Kraken is that one for

sure but if you just want to open an account and start collecting it start investing it start learning about it all of these are fine crypto.com is good right coin um coinbase is good right if you're looking at even cash app will allow you to have a Bitcoin account there Robin Hood allows you to have Bitcoin accounts and you can access Bitcoin if you have an existing account with Fidelity or Schwab through exchange traded funds that we'll talk about in a quick second here so we talk about volatility before this chart's old I need to

update it I have my team update it but you got to have a pretty strong stomach to invest in Bitcoin and people will tell you that they know why Bitcoin fell from you know whatever that was 1,200 down to 900 in 2015 uh but they really don't know somebody didn't want it anymore right it's the greater fool Theory it's whatever the next person thinks it's worth and if enough people think it's worth a lot then it's going to be it's going to keep going up then why did it Spike to 20 in 2017 to 20,000

that was after the Trump tax cuts so it became a little bit easier on the capital gains front to own risky assets maybe that had something to do with it maybe not because it was going up from 2014 when interest rates were really low so again it doesn't have the fundamentals of a stock it has technicals you can look at patterns and how it trades but you can't really open up the hood and say what's wrong with the marketing department they're not doing a good enough job advertising the product or what's up with the gross

profit margins it's not that type of thing just know make sure that you know you got to have a a strong stomach and know that Bitcoin and all the cryptocurrencies are super volatile oh I didn't get to update this one but why has it been rallying since the election well as I said Trump promised that we would be uh mining our own Bitcoin he would make America the Bitcoin capital of the world but I wanted to uh talk about exchange traded funds right some of the biggest uh money managers in the world in 2024 in

the beginning of this year started offering what we call exchange traded funds ETFs you can buy them uh for stocks you can buy them for bonds you can buy them for Commodities but the fact that we can buy what we call spot Bitcoin ETFs these are spot Bitcoin ETFs right now and put it right next to my mutual fund or right next to my QQQ ETF and my my 401k is a very big deal now if you own these ETFs these exchange traded funds which are baskets of Securities you don't actually own Bitcoin you own

an exchange Trader fund that tracks the price of Bitcoin and here's a list of the biggest ones by assets under management when we talk about exchang traded funds you don't just go pick one off the shelf you want to look at the ones that have the most assets under management the most liquidity the most money running through them a track record they didn't just get here they're part of a reputable firm that has had good success launching these ETFs and a management team that you don't think is going to disappear into the Cayman Islands when

things get weird right so I put a list here but you could look at the top Bitcoin ETFs again you won't own the cryptocurrency itself you will own an exchange traded fund that tracks the price of that cryptocurrency and that's super important if you don't want to own an exchange traded fund if you don't want to own the cryptocurrency itself and you want to own stocks that are sort of tracking this whole ecosystem well here's a list of them I mentioned micro strategy the biggest Bitcoin owner out there it's basically a treasury for Bitcoin that

stock is up 200% in the last three months Kanan doio makes a lot of the technology for mining cryptocurrency High powerered fans and computer equipment that stocks up uh 196% in the past few months coinbase itself is a publicly traded company and it's a broker that Stock's doing great up 91% in the past few months Riot platforms um makes uh equipment for blockchain um for the development of blockchain and then Bitcoin you can look at bitcoin's Price itself up 76% in the last three months of 50% since the election because we have a much more

friendly Administration coming in and a new SEC chairman who actually likes Bitcoin so that's one ways to do it now when it comes to taxes think of crypto in your account like a stock right if you make a profit on that stock and sell it and you have held it for less than a year it is short-term capital gains and you will be taxed at whatever your short-term capital gains rate is based on your marginal income if you've held it more than a year it's taxed at a long-term capital gains but if you have haven't

done your taxes this year or have you've been doing your own taxes for the past few years the first thing they ask you after your name after your filing status is if you own digital Assets Now this tells you that this asset has come a very long way if the IRS is asking you that out of the gate right that's the first question the real question they ask you did you receive as a reward or payment or property for services by sale exchange or otherwise dispos of a digital asset uh for a financial interest C

instru yes or no if you put yes then you're saying I made a profit on the sale of my Bitcoin you're going to have to file that as a capital gains it is a taxable asset even though it is unregulated the IRS is regulating it they have their eye on you one more thing about keeping your crypto safe and secure if you're opening a cold wallet uh Troy mentioned that phrase right keep your seed phrase confidential these are multi-digit phrases right write it down put it in a safe maybe send a copy to your mom

uh but don't distribute it widely store it away from your device you don't want the thumb drive and the piece of paper with your password next to each other ever use two Factor authenication if you're using a hot wallet that means what it means like get a text message once you try to log into your account to prove that it's you strengthen your passwords change them often right if you're opening a hot wallet you can do a Choy said download it from an exchange website onto a drive right keep all the security on your devices

up to date and back up that wallet because it's on you to make sure your crypto save now I'll take questions if you want we can talk about it some more but how do I get smart about this well I read a ton right but I follow some really smart people dcfp is the digital assets Council for financial professionals now this is really for financial advisors and planners but the way that Rick Adelman who teaches these classes and who developed the digital assets Council the way he approaches it helps people like me and you understand

it like everything here was not above my head I didn't need to be an a financial advisor or planner to understand understand this stuff he has a very clean way of of explaining it I really like the digital assets Council Lex suland is one of the most intelligent futurists that I know he used to he hosted our crypto investing class on the Investopedia Academy when we had that I trust him a lot he's a super smart person who sees around the corner coinbase has a great educational uh and learning part of their website if you

want to learn anything about all these cryptocurrencies we have one too coinbase is is more robust and if you already have an account there it's a good place to learn learn uh the black billionaires Club um that's our boy Lamar Wilson uh he's way smart software technician very high level thinker but the the black Bitcoin billionaires Club I learned a lot from him and he was at invest Fest years ago and then the Whiteboard crypto YouTube series I think is pretty basic and pretty interesting um if you want to learn these Basics and really geek

out on them and watch them for a while they do a nice job of explaining things again I'm Caleb silver we're Investopedia all this is available to you for free I want to make sure that folks got that uh that um barcode at the beginning if they want to follow our educational stuff scan that QR code I should say not barcode and that's the intro to bitcoin on Investopedia there you have it it's a lot Caleb well done well done appreciate it appreciate it let's take a few questions if if if people have questions um

before we wrap but um man just a lot of great Insight thank you from bringing it to the beginning all the way to you know stocks that people can invest in and there's different types of ways that you can invest right so you can invest directly with Bitcoin and hold it your own wallet you can invest in have the custodian hold it for you like the coinbase you can invest something that mirrors it ETFs um if you want you know a higher level of security you're not going to actually own the asset but it'll track

in the same direction as far as making money or you can have even more leverage with the stocks and even more leverage if you want to do options on the stocks oh yeah that leverages it even even higher as far as the volatility on it so it's a lot of different ways to go about it security something that's ve very very very very important for sure um yes okay I I I got something for you and and while we while we uh Cipher through some of these questions when when you made the purchase uh today

uh for Bitcoin there's something that's in there that people need to know because they might say hey I got $100 his $100 why didn't my Bitcoin convert over to whatever percentage it is of Satoshi talk about gas fees and transaction fees because that's something that people that's like a hidden fee that they're not going to realize like where did that happen I thought I had this amount but when I actually got my Bitcoin it wasn't the same dollar value right Bitcoin needs to be mind right at some point in time that Bitcoin that I bought

off the exchange at coinbase was mine right it took labor and I'm not talking about you know picks and shovels under ground I'm talking about computing power to mine it so when you're buying cryptocurrencies or you're trading them they are what we call gas fees they used to be transaction fees uh when we traded stocks the Brokers eventually did away with those because Robin Hood basically killed that business right and they just made trading free and now we are the product at Robin Hood instead of the actual transactions but that doesn't exist yet in crypto

because right we're not just trading shares of pieces of paper we're trading software that had to be mined and created at one point they call them gas fees you see it a lot in the ethereum which is a smart token you use to buy things like non-f fundable tokens Heavy Gas fees when you're buying and selling ethereum or using it as a transactional uh uh method you you'll end up leaking a little bit out a little bit of Vig as we like to call it on the street but that's what it is essentially it doesn't

exist anymore in the stock market but it does exist in the cryptocurrency market and another thing to notice that crypto is 24 hours a day too so that's something that's different from the stock market you can buy it at all times of the day and especially like ago a lot of it was getting moved by Asia so it was a lot of volatility that would happening like 3:00 in the morning stuff like that so um that's important just to keep in mind as far as uh if you are interested in buying crypto somebody Super Chat

uh had asked a question that their friend had like $50,000 to invest in his Bitcoin the safest this is just this is my personal opinion yeah I think that Bitcoin is definitely the safest the safest relative safe is a is a is a is a word that you know has different definitions depending on how you look at it but I I said this before you look at bitcoin's chart it's going up it's going down but it's going up and most of these altcoin charts have not followed that same comparison so the opportunity to just you

know 3,000 extra money in one day is definitely there probably on no name alt coin but there's also a probability that that coin can go to zero a lot of coin I've seen coins go to zero MH yeah Master notes and all of these stuff like you know that was a big mistake all of these coins that I invested in I would have just been better if I put more my money in Bitcoin majority of those coins either a never made it back to their alltime Peak that happened in 2017 or they disappeared they went

to zero like that happens that that does happen the coins go to zero so um dollar cost averaging is always the best way too because it's it's it's definitely um a volatile situation you can't pick the top because you would have said 100,000 was a top a couple days ago we went down to 96 we could be at 102 tomorrow and there won't be any Rhyme or Reason but something that Ian says a lot uh on Market Mondays and and he's not wrong like we overd diversify sometimes we just try to buy it all because

we don't know like I'm putting on chips on all the roulette uh pegs buy five of the biggest coins if you're just getting into the market and you want to learn about it but Bitcoin rules the root right if you just bought Invidia you would have been great in the past few years now who knew that PS Nvidia was making gpus for mining cryptocurrency after it made a ton of money making gpus for video games it went on crypto and now doing it for AI why is it video doing so well it's been in the

right place at the right time but pick five healthy coins that have a history a track record and a software that you can basically understand and dollar cost average your way in and don't risk more than 5% of your portfolio heck don't even risk more than 3% of your portfolio if you're scared make sure you don't have a loss that is unrecoverable and I would tell you that about stocks I would tell you that about gold I would tell you that about everything don't have an unrecoverable loss but Bitcoin because it's new and because it's

speculative and because it has all of these issues where it's not regulated but it might be you never know what's going to happen so don't make a risk that's so big that it wipes you out completely yeah that's important to know and then each exchange is not the same right so some exchanges don't offer all coins right so like when people see Bitcoin and they see uh ethereum they said might see salano or UDC every coin is not on every uh brokerage or every platform so that's good to know the other part is and this

is why it's important to have education is like yes you can trade your us Fiat to buy Bitcoin right but some of these other coins you have to convert to bitcoin to actually purchase so you might have to get ether which means you'd have to buy ethereum this is when it gets tricky when you're trying to figure out where it's going how to send it I always recommend copy and paste copy and paste if it is available copy and paste can you talk about that process because I don't think people understand oh they want to

buy salana but they don't know how well that's why coin well coinbase that's why coinbase is good right most of those Robin Hood coinbase all those type of they have coinbase has a lot of coins yeah so you would have to go all the way down a coin that's not on coinbase you probably you don't want to own that exactly exactly and that's true right so so it's you know they may all live in the same Supermarket but you can't trade one for the other without converting one to the other in some cases right so

you want to buy um you know something that is more proof of stake you might need to use you know an ethereum for that if you wanted to buy something that is more tied to the dollar you're using fiat currency for a tether so it gets very complicated that's why you have to understand the rules of how these are traded and how they are and how you can operate within them so when Rashad says just by Bitcoin it's the simplest one to understand it has the longest price uh history in it you can see kind

of who owns what it's the easiest one to wrap your mind around but I pick a few of those but if you are converting between coins then there are transaction fees every time you do that sometimes you have to open a special part of your account or open it up at a higher subscriber level or pay a new fee because you're accessing a new asset class it is not like having a Schwab account where you're just like oh I'll take some mutual funds and maybe some index funds let me buy a few stocks over here

and some ETFs and I'll buy a couple of bonds for my portfolio as well all in the same Supermarket you're in the same Supermarket but you got to use different currencies to transact sometimes and it becomes very complicated so you have to have a very smart way of keeping track of what you do which really goes for all of investing but especially here because it's all digital right and uh a method to what you're doing otherwise you can burn a lot of money in in trading fees and in gas fees and yeah I think that

Eric Trump was just I think in Abu Dhabi and he was speaking about um cryptocurrency and it would probably the way that they're talking about this stuff you know one thing about Trump is that he billionaires hang around billionaires that's one thing I learned and um we talked about Tik Tok like when Tik Tok was gonna be in B I was just saying like you know Trump has too many rich friends I don't see it happening then today lo and behold they were saying one of his billionaire friends wants to buy a Tik Tok and

they waiting for him to get an office so that they can purchase the company so you know it's so much money so much opportunity to be made in crypto and if you listen to anything that they're saying whether there's anybody in that in the in the Inner Circle they're going to do everything that they possibly can to pump cryptocurrency for the next four years yeah and why is that because billionaires like billion billionaires like look at this H at this and doing favors to people that are going to help you get reelected or to get

the next person in your party elected that's the way the political machine works right you spend the first two years trying to maybe make good on your promises but then you're gonna spend the next two years getting reelected that means paying back favors who's on the cover of time is the most influential person or the person of the year today President elect who owns time Aire uh yeah p uh CEO of Salesforce yeah another billionaire right it's all connected it's all connected it's all connect that is a fact and you saw did you see that

meta for the first time in Facebook's history a million dollar will donate a million dollars to the inauguration of Donald Trump they've never do donated money to an inauguration President ever Jeff Bezos a million dollars right he bought the Washington Post so he could keep him out of office I guess things change and for the and for the first time in Washington Post history they didn't they didn't they didn't endorse they didn't endorse it they didn't endorse the candidate right so and now he's the second wealthiest person in the world to requote the wire you

want it to be one way but it's the other way all connected sometimes it's the other way Caleb your cultural relevance never seems to amaze me I know I'm old that's a fact that's a fact so yeah I mean following the money if you follow I say that to say if you're following the money it looks like it looks like the wind is at the back of crypto right now yeah yeah so some people asking so which exchange uh and we we experienced this right it was like we were trying to figure out an exchange

do we keep everything on one exchange right we talk about this formula especially where we're investing in the market where we have maybe Fidelity just for our stocks and we have ER trade strictly for our options and we might have you know B we separated by platforms what's your thoughts on having a coinbase and at I mean maybe having a kraken and you know at one point I had binance and I had gate.io and all these things Gemini I had Gemini as well and it just becomes a lot to to to to track and try

to keep a account for what's your thoughts around that sounds like your sneaker collection Troy you know me well um I'm all for Simplicity and for not over complicating something that is already very complicated we gave you a list list of exchanges if you really want to get out out on the edge Kraken is the place to go where you can do very very exotic type trading and access a bunch of different platforms if you just want to start dollar cost averaging and building a portfolio of crypto assets then any of these Brokers are fine

even Black Rock will help you do that even Schwab will help you I think custodian some ETF some crypto uh ETFs but Fidelity is allowing you to do it today uh coinbase is definitely that's what they do Robin Hood allows you to do it today you really can't go wrong unless you really want to get very complicated with it and even like a tasty tasty trade will allow you to do some options play interactive brokers if you want to do it on the international front they all allow it to a certain degree but for basic

investors that are building positions and trying to just make sure they understand it I would keep it all in one place for now and if you decide that you need to get a little bit more advanced and the platform you have doesn't access allow you access to the coins you want or the tokens or the types of Trades you want then it's okay to either take on a new one uh for those types of Trades but Simplicity is best in a complicated asset there you have it that is a fact that is a fact and

uh yeah you can you can um keep it on on a ledger but just be careful that's it keep it on like I like if you had if you had $10 million right speaking into the audience put it in chat if you had $10 million in cash would you rather have it in a vault in your basement or would you rather have it in Chase Bank neither one is a wrong answer but if you're Giannis you have it in 50 Banks 50 at least at least at least that's that $250,000 of it is protected by

each Bank MH but look at all these NBA players and NFL players are getting their house robbed when they leave town for a game schedule's out there for everybody to see they know the road game yeah so yeah so a lot of people saying vote so if you if you if you say vote then you should have it in a ledger you should have your own Ledger if you're saying Chase bank then you should have it with yeah that that was one of the things crypto.com or um coinbase one of the things uh Chris uh

was saying uh on Monday night which is interesting he he wants to be in control of everything he doesn't want to have anybody in control of it but themselves and so that's one of those things is until they until they take until until the house burns now they blow up your house right they blow up your house so somebody robs your house and now all the money's gone but if you're gonna have that level of control you you have to equally have that level of security yeah yeah you're the CFO you're the CTO you're the

CEO and you're the chief security officer that is a f and this is vitally important too have some when I was a financial advis thing called the beneficiary handbook because if I have life insurance and I I I brought a million dollar life insurance policy right let's say and I secure my life insurance policy in in a safe and um I have my will I have my trust I have all my documents I have my retirement plan I have it in the safe and I'm just a very paranoid person I have everything in the safe

d and um you know nobody's planning on dying but let's just say you know I just die one day right well if I never told anybody I have this stuff it doesn't matter point that is such a good you can't rely on on life insurance companies calling they're not I worked in the industry it's not gonna happen millions of dollars of life insurance never gets paid out because they were never notified that the person dies what ends up happening is that you're no longer alive so you stop paying your premium your policy lapses and the

company keeps the money I say that to say if you are keeping it in a ledger and you do have a a complicated security code well you got to tell somebody to the code or you gotta tell somebody the access to the code because if you die and nobody knows anything then you're screwed god with you I saw a stat that you know tens of millions of dollars in crypto is just gone disappeared either your people lost it died without telling anybody the code right that is very important I'm glad you mentioned that Rashad because

if you're working with a financial advisor or planner or a lawyer who helps you with your wills and your trust your revocable trust you have to make sure that you you are very explicit about the transfers ship of that custodianship of of your crypto assets otherwise it will disappear right you have to has to be very explicitly laid out in your trust or your will yeah yeah again we're still building the rules around this this is a 14-year-old asset so like the highways there was no rules when we first started driving there was a lot

of accidents until they started making rules rules and regulations around custodianship we need them especially in this really exotic asset class but that's that I'm so glad you mentioned that I forgot also helps the supply and demand situation because unlike the Fiat money if you have money in a bank and then you just disappear the money the bank's going to keep your money if there's no beneficiary and they're going to you know go to but I said like Satoshi let's say hypothetically he he or she died that bit that do that's gone it's not like

it's gonna go back into the supply chain yeah no so that's actually beneficial yeah that that that that's actually beneficial to people that have Bitcoin because it increases the value it's not like it's a it's a ongoing cycle of I lose my Bitcoin and now it just goes back into the supply then you can buy my Bitcoin I lose my Bitcoin it's just like it's burn game it's like I just burnt it especially a well like Satoshi you're talking about we've talked about that infin infinite supply of 21 million tomorrow if that 21 million now

turns to be 20 million you're gonna see this thing I mean this is really to the Moon yeah right yep so I already got a tight enough Supply so any big whale you know makes a big move with it that's what makes Bitcoin move it it's not you know because it wound up in the newspaper it's not it's because somebody big is buying it or selling it and the most important thing we were talking about this before we started is this belief system right we have an expression in economics and I'm not trying to be

rude or thret but it's called the greater fool Theory and in a lot of cases when you look at these cryptocurrencies they operate under that theory what is the next fool think it's worth because that's what the price is that's where the price is it's whatever the next person thinks it's worth and if people think it's worth a 100,000 and they own enough of it that's what it's worth today they could change their mind tomorrow a lot of this is about belief and you have to understand that and accept that if you're going to be

an investor in cryptocurrencies that's just the game there you have it okay all right I think this was a very educational conversation that we had it's been a pretty impressive week in terms of crypto for us yeah for sure we did a lot for all you crypto enthusiasts that said that we never talk about about crypto leave us alone we gave you education all week long talk about M bonds next week sure next week topic for sure we're going we're going real estate by condos in Arizona um we buying more data centers for sure all

right all right Caleb thank you always a a pleasure whenever we uh whenever we get to link appreciate your time short noed too I called you last week and asked you if you could do this and uh you said no problem so as always it's a pleasure for me and I appreciate that you sharing the platform and again you guys have done so much to educate people it's really it's an honor to be working with you and I'm glad we're friends and I'm happy to do this anytime and I also appreciate the the master Marley

uh pcture in the back um before we came on we were talking about uh the great country of Jamaica so I know you have a love for it as much as I do so I appreciate that my pleasure that actually came from tough gong studios in Jamaica about 40 years ago I bought that poster still with me so one love my God my Gody one love indeed one love all right all right my brother thank you appreciate you bye bye okay we can end this live gentlemen there's no more