Navigating the Crypto Jungle: What You Need to Know When Investing in Bitcoin with Rob Wolf

Welcome to pushing the limits the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Everyone, welcome back. If you're on YouTube, hi nice to see you. If you're on the podcast land, great for you to join us again, thank you very much. We really appreciate your attention. Today, I have Rob Wolff from Digital Asset News. It's a bit of a different episode actually, I haven't done something of this nature before. But this is one of the guys that I've followed for a long time, awful lot, and I thought he's got lots of valuable information that I want to share with you. Today, it is all about investing. It is all about crypto, it's about digital assets. It's a very different show. I do hope you enjoy it and get a lot of value out of it. And that you want to find out more if you're not already in the space. And if you are, you can definitely learn a lot from Rob. 

Before we head over to the show, just want to remind you to check out everything on our website  lisatamati.com. If you're into health optimization, health and fitness, high performance, check out the programs, the supplements, and everything that we do over there. From epigenetics to DNA testing to health and optimization, consulting, motivational speaking books. We even got jewellery range, of course, we've got the anti-ageing supplement range as well, if you're into longevity and anti-ageing and run coaching. Make sure you check that all out on lisatamati.com right over to the show with Rob Wolff. 

Hey, everyone, and welcome to pushing the limits. Today I have one of my gurus, I want to say. This is someone that I've admired and listened to every day. Someone I learned an awful lot. This podcast is going to be a little bit different than my standard ones around health and medicine and all that sort of good stuff. But I've got Rob Wolff with me today. Rob is an expert in everything, digital assets. Crypto, NFTs, all of that sort of fancy stuff. Welcome to the show. Rob. It's fantastic to have you.

Rob Wolff: As always, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

Lisa: Oh, I just absolutely love your work. And you're sitting in Texas at the moment. And you'll have half the year in sort of Puerto Rico and half. So half a part of the time in Texas. But you're from Texas originally.

Rob: Yeah, we do. Like I say we live in Puerto Rico, but we have vacation in Texas, which is the exact opposite of what other people do, but that's our lifestyle right now. Not a bad lifestyle to have.
Lisa: And everybody teases you on your channel that background is a screen, what do you call it?

Rob: A green screen. Yeah. They say, “Oh, it's a green screen, it looks like green screen.” Like if it was a green screen. Like it's hard to see the ripples and things like that or throw things in there like so. Other people believe me, so—

Lisa: I love it when you do that.

Rob: Everybody loves when I do that.

Lisa: That's not a green screen. Got a lovely pool. So Rob, can you give us a bit of a background? How the hell did you get into the space and where did you come from? You have a background as a medic and a nurse and military. Tell us about that.

Rob: When I was younger, as most people do, they usually they get they start out young, they go in the military and that's what I want to do. So high school and then right to military, pretty much. And then in there it was I was a medic or a combat medic, and then did that for quite a bit of time. And then they said who wants to get out of the field and I raised my hand and said, great, you can go get cross-trained as 91 Charlie, which was a nurse. And I was like, great, I don't want to be in the field anymore. So we did that. And then when I got out of the military, then I went into home health management. And then from there went into medical device sales. It was a company called KCI. It was a wound vac company where we actually put these hydrophobic medical grade sponges inside wounds, tape them up, and then it actually compresses the wound. 

It helps with offloading the fluid and then leaves the granulation tissue. So did that and then I realised that it's never a great idea if you really want to really, really get ahead to work for somebody for too long, and you really want to start to work for yourself. What I did was I started an online education platform for nurses. I helped them figure out the whole process of getting through the nursing program. I would record myself doing basic things like doing a pulmonary assessment, doing a neurological assessment and just put that online and that was my first kind of alternative income and then I started there. And then we got in there, me and my wife, got into real estate, and that was a little bit more profitable. 

And then we got into—we have a sports facility here in El Paso, sand volleyball and sand soccer. And then from there, everything was good for quite some time actually just kind of did that. Didn't have to since 2015 I was terminally unemployable because I was doing all the entrepreneurial things that I wanted to do. But at some point, I figured out that, I mean, this is great everything with me is getting a little more investing. The first exposure I had to crypto was in 2012. Early, early days, my son comes home and he says, “Hey, I've got this hard drive. And it's got 500 Bitcoin. And my friend at school was selling it for $500.” 

And I looked at him. I go, “What is Bitcoin?” And of course, we even today, it's sometimes like, you get a little tongue-tied to describing what Bitcoin actually is. And this Alan was young kid, he's tried to give me his best explanation. I'm like, “Alan, that makes no sense.” It makes absolutely no sense. It's never gonna work. It's just ridiculous. We never bought those 500 Bitcoins at $500. And it just, it just slipped through our hands. And then, like a year or two later, I remember a story coming out about how China had banned Bitcoin. And I said, “See, it'll never work.” And then for some reason, around 2017, it was just becoming a little bit too big.

I did a lot more research and looked into and I said, “Oh, this would be interesting. This would be the first money you actually own not printed by governments available for you to custody.” You don't have to rely on central authority, any kind of Federal Reserve of the banks, and you actually own it. And there's a finite supply of only 21 million, I can get behind that. So I bought it at I think the first when I first got it was like 7500 bucks. And that was in November 2017. And of course, you think you're a genius. Because in like a couple of weeks, it goes to 10,000. And I'm like, “Oh, I'll buy some more there. 10,000.” And then it goes up to 17,500. I go, I'm a genius again. I'll just keep buying this and let it just double and triple. Because everybody on YouTube at that point said it was going to go to a million. 

And of course, when you first get into it, and you don't really have really great investment strategies and techniques and the mindset, you kind of fall for that stuff. And before you know it, I bought the last time I bought Bitcoin before the crash. It was 17,500. Which sounds ridiculous now right now we're taping. Everybody loved that. But in January, we went down to 16,000, then 13,000. Then around late January, early February, now we're down around five, six thousand. And of course, that's when you feel like, “Okay, was this? Yeah, was this a real Ponzi? Was this a big scam?”

You do some more research and you figure out no, it is good. I told my wife at that point ago, that I'm not in the business of losing money. What we're going to do is we're going to do this thing called dollar-cost averaging. I'm gonna keep buying a little bit along the way, and we'll see what happens I did that for the last —well I still do it, actually. But in 2018 2019 2020, just dollar-cost averaging, put a little bit in Bitcoin, Aetherium, and other ones like Cardano and chainlink. And before, you know it, whatever, two or three years, it becomes pretty sizable, when the market cap grows from 300 billion to back to a trillion than 2 trillion then 3.2 trillion. Now, of course, we've already come back down to like 1.3 trillion right now as of today.

Lisa: Yep. So sorry, steaks at the moment.

Rob: Yeah, so there's a whole another topic of how to dollar cost average, but also to know when to take profits and not get stuck with all your eggs in one basket. So that's the, that's the longer version of how I got in.

Lisa: That is absolutely amazing. And you know what's exciting about that, as you came from, you know, a traditional sort of background of military nursing. Normal jobs, if you like, and then have built in this fantastic empire, really. And what was great is that you're taking us along for the ride. And what I love about your show is that it's just new guys have to go and follow Rob on YouTube, and see what it's all about. We'll put all the links and do all that later. But it's about the truth. Like you just share the good, the bad and the ugly. 

There's no hopium on there. There's no sort of crazy predictions or anything, and it's very level headed. And I really love that.  For someone like me, who's a new investor, I've been in the crypto space now for nearly a year. And when I first was dabbling around in it, I'm like, “Oh, God, I wish I'd gotten a few years ago,” as we all did new lending 500 Bitcoin slipped through your fingers. It's just like, “Oh my God, that's even worse than my investing mistakes.”

Rob: But you know what, I'll tell you real quick about that one. Even though it slipped in my hands. I can guarantee you because if you don't well, as with crypto if you just look at it as numbers go up. If I bought 500 Bitcoin at $500, and let's say it was just me it was $1, back then $2. As soon as it doubled, I would have sold them all. Because that is the mentality before you really go down that rabbit hole and kind of figure it off yourself. You'll never, once you make little money you're out. And that's not where a lot of the wealth is. Now, this is not investment advice, because I'm not a financial planner, financial analyst or anything in that situation. But these are just the things that I've done in the mistakes that I've made. 

Lisa: Yeah, that's absolutely brilliant. And like, a lot of people have heard about Bitcoin and crypto. And there's a lot of negativity, it's a scam, it's just Ponzi schemes, it's this that. People generally when I talked to my friend circle, there's the ones who are so to speak, taken the orange pill, and they know what it's all about. And then you've got the other 90%, shall we say, who are like, “But isn't it too late to get it?” And yeah, I've heard my friend made money on it, and, you know, 2019, 2020, wherever. In the last run, but is it too late now, it's so expensive now, and it's too late to get in.” 

And when I started to research, Bitcoin, especially it was like, “Holy, this is a life philosophy.” It is really expanded my mind about decentralisation and sovereign owning money actually owning it, as opposed to having it in the traditional banking system. And I can't even explain what I have now understood, and I'm sure you can explain it a little bit better to people. But this is just really crucial that people take a couple of dozen hours to study this space because it's coming at you, whether you like it or not. And whether you think it's a Ponzi scheme, or you think it's real, I can guarantee this is going to be moving and changing the space in the future. And if you're not on board with understanding it now, then you're in trouble. What would you say to that Rob?

Rob: Yeah, so it all comes down to education, and just figuring out what it is. Because, again, if you just look at it, as numbers go up, it's not going to be a thing. I always say, in sales or marketing, there's this thing called the elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is essentially what you tell your client, the basics of what they need to know. So they can make that next decision to buy your product. So I always call it the “Bitcoin Elevator Pitch.” And I say like Bitcoin is digital gold. It's scarce, it's only 21 million and it's market insurance. And unlike gold, you can send it to anyone, anywhere in the world, within minutes for next to nothing. It's the best performing asset class ever. It's better than gold, oil, or any stock ever used to be worth a nickel and now it's worth $30,000 and it's why I'm heavily invested into it. 

You do something like that and we'll go, “That sounds interesting, maybe I'll take a look at you know, what makes it so good.” And then I think when people start to realise, and this is the bigger opening of the consciousness is when people these days figured out about inflation. Because there was so much money printing, and that's been it's been at the centre of what people are talking about. If people go, “You know what, man, this money that is being printed, which is fine. I mean, governments have to print money.” The thing is, though, is that they look at everything around they go, “Man, the things that I used to buy, milk used to be 2, and now it's 3.50. And then diapers used to be $20 for a pack. And now it's $32. And guess geez, gas, I remember when gas was under $2. Now we're looking at 4.25, or even 7.25. If you're in California.”

The thing starts to become like, well, of course, we talk about supply chains and the issues that are going on there. But they have to take a look at well if the central government keeps printing money, doesn't that devalue the whole dollar and what it is, and you can look at a chart since the early 1900s, all the way to the day, that $1 That your grandfather used to say, “I used to be able to buy a car for a nickel”, whatever they said, right? Well, that was true back then, because it was worth a lot more. And because they keep printing, this is what happens. Now we're in the situation where we see or we understand what inflation really is. And it leads us to like, “Well, is there an alternative to be outside the matrix?”

Well, there is and that would be called Bitcoin because there's only 21 million, that's how much it will be ever you can't increase that supply and that's all. Then people will also say, “Well, how do we get 21 million to the hands of 7 or 8 billion people in the globe?” Remember, it's 100 billion Satoshis per Bitcoin. It's not like you have to buy one Bitcoin for 3000 You just buy a fraction of that. And that's worth X amount of Satoshis. Kind of like there's 100 pennies for $1 or there's so many Satoshis for a Bitcoin

Lisa: That is absolute gold. The way that bitcoins come about and it was really like gifted to humanity from Satoshi Nakamoto, who nobody really knows who this is. And it's really one of the greatest gifts to humanity I've ever come across. And people will be like, “But isn't this just an investment? Isn't this just you wanting to make some money and speculate on it?” Actually, no, I want to hold my bitcoin forever.  There is such a limited supply and it was 21 million, there's probably only 14 million actually left because a lot of it's been lost and locked up. And so it's even rarer. But people ask me, then will digital — it’s just code, it's just digital? Can it be changed then? Why can't you go and say, “Well, we're going to print more Bitcoin, we're gonna make more Bitcoin.” Why can't that happen?

Rob: And first of all, before we go on, it was I was replaying what I just said, in my mind, it wasn't 100 billion,100 million Satoshis for one Bitcoin. Then to answer your question, why can't we just go back and just go, I own Bitcoin, let's change it to 42 million instead of 21 million total? Well, you can't do that. I mean, you but you, who are just an individual holder of Bitcoin. Now, you have to get all different nodes that are out there, as far who holds Bitcoin or the actual miners to say, “Hey, let's change this whole thing around. And everybody has to agree with me.” So you have to get hundreds of 1000s of people, at least 51%. To say, “Yes, we're going to change this over. And we're going to make this to 42 million.” I think that'd be very short-sighted. 

Well, first of all, try to get anybody to agree on anything. Look at Congress here in United States of course, New Zealand's different for you. But it's very difficult to do that. And then second of all, the value of Bitcoin lies in its scarcity. So think about it. It's not that and first of all, it's not even scarce. It's not really scarce. It's finite. Gold is scarce. Gold, I mean, some people will say, well, it is finite, because there's only so much on the planet. But if you believe that you can do astral mining from asteroids, which is I think they actually talked about, then it's not really finite. That's a lie. 

So bitcoin is only at 21 million. And that's what gives it that value. The same thing with going back to the dollar. What happens to the dollar when we print so much? Well, it becomes devalued. What happened in Greece? The same type of thing. What happened in Venezuela, it's the same type of thing. And actually, if you look back at the history of all fiat money throughout the entire existence of humankind, every single fiat money has gone to zero at some point. I've actually learned that from Mike Maloney. He's got a great YouTube channel and he was and still is a big gold investor. And then he found out about Bitcoin. Now he's a gold and Bitcoin investor. He's the one that was one enlightened me that said, “Hey, all these dollars are all these paper currency or paper, Fiat. They all go to zero at some point.” And there's always a fall of civilisation or organisation. And that's why I think they're going to do pretty well, this time.

Lisa: Yeah. In this thing, like, it's just paper money, that's digital. The people say like but digital is not real, it's just a theory. No, with paper money is no more real. It's just that we've grown up with with traditional banks, and bank accounts, and paper folding money. So it's a lot to get your head around if you're not in this space like we are. And you don't understand the whole mechanisms at it.
Rob: Let me back up. Because what you said, if people don't do this, I'm not going to stand what I just said, as far as like, the nodes and the miners and things like that. Let me just break it down easily. Everybody has a bank account. I mean, not everybody. There's a lot of unbanked out there. But everybody understands what it kind of like a Bank Ledger is or a ledger. It's just a spreadsheet. Let's say Lisa has $100 in her bank account, here's 100 bucks. And then Lisa bought some pants for $10. And here it says minus 10, 90. And Lisa went out and she bought coffee that was $5 now she's got 85. And that ledger is there's one and it is in the bank. And that's called a centralised ledger.

For Bitcoin, it’s a decentralised technology. You get a bunch of people 1000s 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s as it grows, as Bitcoin was created in 2000, or came into existence, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto. And you say, “Okay, we need some node operators.” So over the last decade, plus, we've had more node operators keep that ledger. And it's the same ledger that we just talked about, but it's an all these different nodes, and 10s of 1000s of different areas throughout the entire world. And actually, there's one in the International Space— I think of the International Space Center where they have a node I know they have one that's launching a space on a satellite. If even if we have like some people say, What about an EMP Rob, and electromagnetic pulse? And like, first of all, I've never felt that, and we're going through, but if it does happen, you're still going to have a node, which has a record of all the Bitcoin transactions up there. 

Lisa: Wow, that's cool. 

Rob: Yeah, so for every transaction that are out there, they have to come to consensus. And okay, so like, Lisa, you send me one Bitcoin, great. So it went from this wallet address, Lisa’s to my wallet address, in the traditional sense. And the bank, they just record, they write it down, or they typed in. But for the decentralised ledger, it goes and it gets transmitted throughout all of those nodes, and those computer systems. And it says, “Okay, this transferred from Lisa to Rob, and these, these, these nice little wallets, or Bitcoin wallets, and this goes from you to them.” For me, that is the decentralised part of what Bitcoin is.  Again, to get people to change from 21 million to 42 million, or whatever different types of things, you have to get more than the majority to agree to do that. And I don't think that's going to happen, especially as we start to expand and grow even bigger.

Lisa: And this is something that's outside the traditional marketing, monetary system. Back in, I think, was 1972, when Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, and, of course, the gold standard as the reserve currency for the world. That was the beginning of the basically for fiat currency. It has to devalue over time, and is gonna go to zero, at some point of view, studying, you know, Rob Danio’s work, and it's just fascinating, the whole rise and fall of different empires. And we're heading down that trend. We know that that's coming and it's accelerated since the global financial crisis in 2008 ad then also the COVID pandemic, when they started printing, like there was no tomorrow. I mean, I don't know what the trillions that they printed, but it was like, something like 60% of all money that was ever printed, or something got printed within a very short time. 

And we're feeling the consequences of that now. So if we look at the current, macro backdrop at the moment, Rob, we're living in very uncertain times. We've got the Russian Ukraine war going on, we've got sanctions here, we've got supply chain issues, we've got COVID, it's just, rampaged around the world and shook everybody up, we've got all these things going on, does that make you more scared to be in something like Bitcoin or in the crypto world? Or does that make you actually want to go there more? Because it's a safe haven, a digital gold? How do you see that?

Rob: So the easy answer would be, which would be like the person who invest a lot in cryptocurrency, which I do, which is “Yes, no problem, I have no problem getting into it. And it sounds like a great plan. I'm just gonna get rid of all my cash and go into crypto.” But here's the reality. The reality is that I believe we're in for some pretty bearish days. And I believe that the traditional stock market on Wall Street, we're going to see a pretty big decline with the S&P 500 and NASDAQ as it goes down. Because people are scared. They don't know exactly what's going to happen and they're going to rotate into cash. And I know people say, “Well, you just talked about how cash devalues?” Yes, it devalues. 

But over time, so I think people are going to get into cash right now and hold it. And then they'll get into what they consider risky assets. If we look out into a broad range of 10, 20, 30 years, and we take a look at it, well bitcoin is probably it is the hardest asset out there. I mean, it's essentially digital gold, like we talked about gold 2.0. Yu can transfer it wherever you want to go throughout the entire world. And it's even though it's volatile, as time goes on, will become more stable. So right now, what I think would that cause me to go more into Bitcoin? What I do is I can't predict the future. And what I say to people is, “Look, you got to pay your bills, right? You can get into Bitcoin to pay your bills, but what if bitcoin goes from and we just saw this went from 40,000 to 30,000, in less than two weeks or so?”

Is this like a huge store of value in the short term? Not the greatest. But over time, it'll grow up or it will grow a little bit better. So for me, I dollar cost average, and I put my money into it every single day. So I buy a little bit a little bit a little bit. So some days, maybe 30,000 To make 40,000, maybe 20,000 the future and as time goes on, because I have a three-five and 10-year outlook. It will work out. But for the people that understand in this short term right here, it's extremely important to make sure that you're making the right decision for you and your family. What works for me is not going to work for a single mom with four kids. And what works for me is not going to work for Mark Cuban, it was a billionaire, and he just throws money around. 

So you have to be aware of that. I think I wouldn't like right now the stock market probably be a little bit volatile. I wouldn't get into that real estate, not so much right now I see some declining times. For me, it's I rotate a little bit into cash, and I wait for those dips, and I start to layer myself back in.

Lisa: So you use a $2 million cost averaging. So for people who don't know what the heck that is, that's just putting, regardless of the price really just putting little bits, like a savings account away all the time. You just keep on going in, in building up a nice nest egg into whatever. And that's definitely what I'm doing. And we are living in —since I began with crypto, and we saw this huge rally up, which I was like, “Yeah, I'm brilliant. Superstar, and this is easy.” And then we've, since November or so the whole crypto market has taken a big nosedive. And it's in a bear market and at the moment, we are underwater. And then people will look at you and go are you you're stupid. You're the genius when you're you when you're waiting, you're the idiot when you're not. 

And actually I have but I have I was we talked about this previously, before we get on the recording. Mindset is everything. I've spent this year deep and the research, studying learning from people like yourself. And I understand a little bit what's going on, and understand the process that I have to go through to get to the other side. And know that over time, we're looking at a really fantastic asset.

And so I have that long term mentality in everything that I do in life. I don't look for an immediate quick fix. I just did a video called magic bullets don't work. And but a lot of people have got this, “I took the pill today, I want to be healed tomorrow”. Or “I bought Bitcoin today. I want to be rich tomorrow.” Why am I not dead? That's the mentality that gets you in trouble in my mind. You have to have a strategy. And this is what I've been learning from me from you and other colleagues of yours is that mindset in there and having an investment strategy? Tell me a bit about that.

Rob: It's the way because well, I mean, first, you're an ultra marathon runner. So you know how to grind. How to find out those, those initial miles, the middle miles, and the last ones that probably just destroy. And it's the same thing. It's the same thing with investing. It was Pete Schwab. And I think he's your show, I believe he said, everybody has the mentality to invest. But the question is, do you have the stomach? Because really, that's really what it comes down to? If you can just go you know what, I'm going to grind this out, it doesn't really matter. And that's it.  

When I was talking about the back of that last question, which is would you just keep getting into it and really make you want to go into it. Everybody's different. Here's an example. Diddy from the Bitcoin family. I don't know if you know about him, but he's the guy that sold everything that he had, he sold his businesses, he sold his cars and sold his houses to go into bitcoin exclusively. If he would have done that, in 2021, at 67,000, it'd been very difficult. Because now it's 30,000. It was half of his value. And he didn't in 2017 He bought Bitcoin $1,000. The thing is, like when people say, “Well, why don't you just go all in right now?” You can, I mean, that's bad. It's not like I'm saying on average, just go all in. 

There's a possibility that you could go all in. But then the thing is, can you stomach it, to see this huge volatility and swings? To go from 30,000? What it is today, if you went all in today to 40,000 Great, I'm a genius, then it goes to 28,000 “Oh, no, I've lost.” But if you can just say “The timeline doesn't matter, because I'm gonna see your three, five and 10 years.” The most, most stable asset and the most volatile market would be Bitcoin and Aetherium. And that's what I kind of bet on. So if you're gonna say, You know what, I don't really care about mentality. I know how to grind not to be an ultra-marathoner, or I don't know before, then you just keep plugging away like I do, and me and you both do this kind of just wait for it to do that. And that's pretty much the basics of it.

Lisa: Yeah. And it's just having that they're not dropping, buying high and selling low because things are getting tough. And there are times where like we've just gone through in the crypto world massive earthquake with one of the crypto terror in the lunar collapsing a collapse to zero basically. And that was one hell of a shakeout for the entire market and it was a new technology and algorithmic stable coin. And a lot of very, very intelligent people got caught out with this one. And that shakes the hell out of your confidence. And then you're like, we'll just—do I just chuck everything and run and take what I've got left and run away? Or do I go well, yeah, learn lesson and that one.

I learned a lesson from that one. And we didn't have a lot in there. Thank goodness, we didn't get too wrecked. But was there in a bear market, and I've heard you say, altcoins are probably not the thing that you're going to be giving, you should be getting into right now. So altcoins being anything but Bitcoin and maybe Etherium. Because with the way the bear market is you sort of want to be in the safer OG in the space, where you can go and ride it out. And then when you're in the bull market, and that mean, it's overly simplified, obviously.

Rob: But to do it, so—

Lisa: That's what we're doing now, we've sort of, okay, learn, learn that little nasty lesson. And, a lot of people got really, really hurt from it so it was just dreadful. But it doesn't make you go, “Oh, the whole thing's a Ponzi scheme.” There are 18,000 or 20,000 different coins out there in the crypto world and most of them are going to go to zero, a lot of them are scams, a lot of them are crap, a lot of them a little projects just starting out, but some of them will succeed and some of the bigger ones, and I'm just sticking to the bigger ones. I watched your DGN channel, but I haven't been brave enough to pull the trigger on any of those ones yet.

Because it's not probably the time for that sort of playing around. Like when you're in the bull market. And when you've made a little and you want to play then that's that's a gamble, basically. But right now, it's about like understanding the basics of the of the of the space in how to do it and how to do it safely.

Rob: Yeah, the basics are just like getting any investment, you take a look at the project or the company itself, and just do as much research as you possibly can and go, “Do I want to invest into this? I'm going to invest only what I can afford to lose.” And if you start off with that basic position, you really can't go too far off from there. I think it doesn't make sense. But talking back to it to what you said about the DGN parts and altcoins and different parts of the market, I will say this, I never made any money in the massive bull markets. Of course, you can sell, you do your thing, but the money is not made there. The money is not made for you when you're doing ultramarathon at the very last couple of miles, the money is always made for you when you're doing all that training. This is the time that really we're doing those initial miles which is the bear market. You're gonna get whatever you buy or get into or wanna invest into, you're gonna get those all coins, you wanted that or Bitcoin at a much less price than when it starts to go for that parabolic mass run up. 

And of course, if you can do that for—let's say this, this bear market lasts 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, wouldn't it be great just go “Okay, I'm going to put my money into this. And I'm going to invest and I'm not going to sit on it. I'm going to buy this every day, every week, every other week, every month, whatever it is, whatever I can afford.” And then just wait and then it kind of it just takes off there's I think that there's there's a time to be safe and I think that's the one that safer ones as time moves on. I will tell you I did make a lot of my money in the bear market. And it wasn't just on Bitcoin Aetherium it was as time started to kind of flatten out was all coins like a Cardano, like a chain link, like those types of things. I just put a little bit into it. 

And I remember buying I remember when Cardano was a nickel answer seven cents. I remember chain link was like under a buck. And then before you know it Cardano became $1 $2 and $3. So imagine dollar-cost averaging for three years, or two or three years and it's gonna like the company just “Okay, I'll go to $3 and I was gonna do just kind of well.” You just kind of grind it out. 

Lisa: And this is where like small amounts too, like a lot of people like well if I haven't got $100,000 to put in there, it's not worth doing it. And when listening James has always been talking about on his channel invest answers, which is another fabulous channel. He's always talking about trying to become a whole coiner and that's become like, okay, that's what we're doing and we've got that and the whole coin is worth less than it was. But the whole coin is—but the thing is, that is one of 14 odd million that are out there in the space—can you understand that that is one of those small amounts and institutions are coming into the space. 

And that traditional, the governments are fighting around with a regulation and that's a scary space, but hopefully, it's necessary. And we'll talk about regulation in a minute. But over time, this is just going to be a no brainer and that's Bitcoin. And Bitcoin, the biggest sort of the big gangster in the space, Bitcoin that's been around for decades, that has all the history that has a good safety record, is still going to move a lot less than the altcoins overtime. The altcoins are gonna go up and down. But they are more risky, because they're more volatile, and some of the projects will go to zero, like Luna. So you have to sort of weigh those risk factors up, obviously, and put a little bit into the risky ones and a lot more into the safer ones of your bag. 

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Rob: And that's where it comes down to the investor preference. Because that's how me and you do it. But I've as I've gone on my channel, I read all the comments, some people like why would I do that? Their idea is this. I want to be more risky. Say like you got a kid who's 19 years old. He's like, look, I make some pretty decent money at wherever I'm working at. I'm just gonna be risky because it hopefully they have the mentality to stick around for like 5, 10 years. Like I'm gonna put in this risky stuff. All dollar cost average. Let's say Solana, for example. Solana I think it peaked at around 200 Some somewhere around 

Lisa: 250 or something. Yeah. 

Rob: And now I think it's like what 34, 40

Lisa: or 50 I think it was yesterday.

Rob: 50 right. Let's say you just drove to put in. I'm just going to buy that once a week. And as I know it's risky Rob But you told me I want to go Bitcoin. And you just do that for like two or three years now let's say it gets back to its all-time high of 250. That's not too bad. And then as time goes on, you're like “Well, for me to double or quadruple or whatever else they go to Bitcoin.” Remember bitcoins market cap has the highest market cap, I think out of $1.3 trillion, or maybe 600 billion or 700 billion that means it has to go up 1.2 to 1.4 trillion to double in Bitcoin. Something like that go I don't want to do that. However, it is more risky, more risk, more reward. I personally just do 95% of the safe stuff Bitcoin Aetherium and then the 5% of the DGN crazy plays which is pretty much gambling let's be honest.

Lisa: Yeah. And then hoping that you hit the right horse that takes off and it becomes the next Etherium

Rob: Perfect because like when you said Luna because like we talked about dollar-cost averaging the same thing could be said for same it could be several Luna. Let's say somebody, because even I did this, I bought a bunch of Luna I dollar-cost averaging. I don't like to put everything in and I had been doing that since February of 2021. Then around November, December, we had to make some we had to buy some more property. And I said “Well, I'll sell a good portion of my Luna.” And I sold that actually the best thing I ever did. However, as soon as that happened, that was in November, December, I didn't do much because it was a really volatile market just dollar-cost averaging of Bitcoin. 

But I started back on Luna in January. I dollar cost average Luna for January, February, on March, April, and then it crashed and went to zero. I lost a good five figures on that one easily. However, I was putting money into some other altcoins, which didn't do so great. But I also put money into Aetherium and Bitcoin and those did okay. So I don't care if one of—let's say, out of five different investments that I do, let's say three or four, don't make it, I don't, it's not a big deal, because the other one will take care of the other stuff that I just lost out on. 

Lisa: Yeah. And sometimes you're not ever going to win everything. And if you go through life, always too scared to fail, then you're not going to start. And I think it's better to learn some lessons along the way and we certainly all learned from that one. And hopefully, we'll be a bit wiser and a bit of a better investor in the next coming years. And that's the way you got to see it and not cry over spilt milk for what it is. But only ever invest like what you can you need a time horizon of at least three years, really, if not longer? And if you haven't, then the volatility in this market is not for you. But why is volatility not the same as risk? I tried to explain this to my brother the other day? And I'm like, How do I explain, like volatility, it's very volatile. I go here, that's the whole bloody point because that's where you got to make the wins. And it means it's, it's actually a better asset over time, because it's volatility but volatility does not equal risk. Can you explain that?

Rob: It actually depends on on the asset itself. Sometimes when you have a ton of volatility, just because we're in price discovery mode right now. Nobody can really evaluate exactly what Bitcoin is because I mean, it's just over a decade old. And then there's a lot of cryptos that aren't even two years old. We're on this big price discovery. If you take a look at the risk factor of the of the volatility, there is, again, the time horizon that you look at could be a lot different. If you just say, “Well, I know that there's a lot of volatility, but volatility first of all, if you're a day trader, that's exactly what you're looking for”. There's huge amount of upside for that I'm not a day trader, I'm not, I'm not that guy. I just I'm very conservative.

But if you look at it, and just go over time, and there's a great website called dcabtc.com. And if you just put that in and you can put it in for like how much you want it. You can start on just like an example, January 1st 2013, I'm going to put in $10, in Bitcoin. And you can see how volatile it is. But you can see over time, it's an asymmetrical bet that you're going to be doing as far as like a lot more as far as the revenue that you generate from your investment in Bitcoin. So yes, it is super volatile. But again, it depends on the asset that you're investing into. And over time, its doesn't work itself out. Over time, people have to understand exactly what it is, and they start to invest more into it. So volatile is okay, as long as you can stick around for the long horizon.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And, I think you talk often on your channel about you think we need regulation, and a lot of people in the space are anti-regulation. And we're all sort of freedom fighters and freedom type people generally. And there's a lot of—we want sovereignty over our own lives and their own wealth and their own and I'm definitely in that camp. But I understand the need for regulation. Biggest fear, of course, is that they'll back it up because they’re quite good doing that. Especially when you've got a lot of politicians who even I, as only been in the space for a year, but I listened to them. And I'm like, you've got no frickin idea what the hell you’re talking about. And here you are talking about how it's or it's that and you're like, “Oh, my God, and these are the people making the regulations.” That's scary. But why do we actually need some regulation? Because we've got institutions coming into the space now and they need more regulation in order to come in and make the asset class grow.  What's your, what's your take on the whole regulatory?

Rob: It's a fine line.  We had take a look at history as far as regulation. First of all, we all know that government is gonna get it wrong. No one is perfect. Let's just start with that assumption and work our way forwards. If we take a look, let's start with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Act. And as this is back in the 1960s here in America, I'm sure there's other ones throughout the entire world.  The whole thing was, why did they enact that? Well, they enacted that because there were so many deaths on the job. And there were these corporations who were like, “Well, these things happen to our employees. And of course, asbestos is probably not so bad, I'm sure would be okay if they breathe a little bit.” And then before you know it, there were a lot of people with cancer, there were a lot of people that were killing over and dying.

And the government said, “That's just not how we should do these things. Let's just put a little bit of regulation in.” And it worked out okay. Now let's fast forward to the internet. The internet came about early 90s, depending on which time for me to look at. And one of the things the problem was that the people who control the domains and control those blog posts, and control all the different social media aspects were like, “Look, if some crazy not so it's a talk off about, some things that are very acknowledged in distaste, but actually illegal and talking about illegal things. Am I going to be the one that that's going to share the brunt of that because it was on my website?” And they came out and the government said, “You know what, we should probably enact law 230.”

Law 230 came in and said, “We are not going to sue anybody if something happens, or malicious act happens throughout on these websites.” If it's different, like, the way that they phrase it was, it was freedom of speech, but if its mass, not mass, but illegal, and what will be considered in the public. And of course, we're going to take action. But it allowed these things to actually happen and to flourish so that the websites wouldn't actually be shut down, which led to the internet actually moving forward and actually being able to think more. Now we fast forward to cryptocurrency and digital assets. Here's the problem. We don't even have guidance as to what it actually is. In the military as a medic, you want to triage patients that come in. Are these people who are salvageable? Can this one or this one live? Who's going to die? And how much medical care are they actually going to need to triage? 

And the same thing here, I think in America is what we need as far as regulation. We just need to know, let's triage these cryptos. Okay, which one of these is a security? Okay, you're a security, and that will be overtaken by the SEC. Which ones of these are a commodity? Like gold? Well, that's the CFTC and then you guys would go over there. Okay, now, which one is actually a currency? Okay, you're gonna go with the OCC, the Office of the Controller of the Currency. If you can just give us a little bit of that, I think we can move forward. And that's just to save the basics of the basics. And then the next thing would be, and we just saw this with Luna and their algorithmic stable coin. If it's not backed by anything, I understand the whole concept and it sounded good. You could algorithmically peg that to the burn mechanism of the Luna token. Sure. Great. The problem is, is that you had about a group, or maybe one person depends, we don't really know. And there, they were able to buy a massive amount, put it back in the system and take it out. And now it's not backed by anything. And it's pretty much like having a run in the bank, then everything went to zero. 

With the stable coins, if it is pegged to the dollar, then show me the assets of what it actually is pegged to so people don't actually lose everything. Because, you read all the comments on Twitter, you saw it and I see it every day still, even on my show where people go, I lost my life savings. I can't— I collateralize my house, I can't pay for this again, for that. It's because they invested more than what they could lose, and they got ahead of themselves. And that is a big problem. If they're going to say “Look, if you want to do a stable coin, show us what it’s backed by, show us the paperwork of what it is and we'll do audits every however many months it takes and then everybody's on their happy way.” Just start with that.

Lisa: I think stable coins is the place to start because for those listening, it provides liquidity to the whole crypto market to have these stable coins that are USDC or but they have different mechanisms by which are staying and with the Tether, US Tether, at the moment, that's a little bit scary. Is that guy is that really backed? They're not very transparent so I'm definitely not but putting it in Tether. So having some regulation around that is a bad one to one because this is the problem. This is not just crypto by the way this is really what happened in 2008 was the banks leverage your money, they leverage it up the wazoo, so they take one of your dollars and they give it out 20 times or whatever it is.

Rob: Fractionalized lending. That's right.

Lisa: That’s the word I'm looking for. This is not happening just in crypto, but this is in particular in this one. And it's actually the opposite in crypto, there's usually a lot more collateralization. I'm on the Celsius platform and do some stuff on there. And that's pretty phenomenal how Alex Paczynski set that all up. And, I know there's all regulatory risk and all that and they've changed that for Americans that only what do you call them? Accredited investors? You can actually get a yield from there. Or was it staking or yielding? I always get those two mixed up,

Rob: Yield. and they just they rehypothecated. So If I put one bitcoin into my account, they say, “Okay, we're gonna take that Bitcoin, we're gonna lend it out to income institutional investors, they can do what they want, but they got to collateralize that too.” That is the big difference between like the bank fractionalized lending, where they just take your 100 bucks, they go, “Hey, you, here's 98 bucks. Do you need anything from me? No, we trust you. Don't worry about it.” And then, so when that one person goes to the bank and goes, “Where’s my 100 bucks?” “Well, I only got two of your dollars. So you got to wait.” If everyone the bank, there's no collateral. In Celsius, what they're supposed to do is I give a Bitcoin, they give the institutional investors and supervisors give them back collateral. And if there's a margin call, then it all works like that. But if you don't, that’s not how it's supposed to work.

Lisa: It's an exciting platform in what it allows you to do it's pretty exciting.

Rob: It is, and I will stress for everyone who's watching or listening is that even on those platforms, never put on more than what you're afraid to lose because we've seen it in the past Mt. Gox is a prime example or there were hacks and all that is gone. Is it worth enough of your Bitcoin for a 6.25% yield? If you want? Yeah, it's up to you.

Lisa: And its centralised. And it's not your keys, not your crypto is saying in the crypto world. And there's pluses and minuses of that. For people who aren't good at keeping the keys safe and knowing what the heck to do with it and how to do all that, then having it on a platform like Celsius is perhaps a good idea. Because maybe there's more risk that you're going to lose your keys or not, whatever. But there is risk when it's on a centralised system and crypto really is all about decentralisation. So, there's a whole centralised versus decentralised in some, a whole lot of the altcoins. Some are more centralised, some of decentralized. And Aetherium. And Bitcoin are the most decentralised. And that's why— love those two, really, because it can't be fucked with really— putting it bluntly, you can't really go and take over 51% of the network on Bitcoin. It's just never gonna happen when there's hundreds of thousands of like you say validators and nodes all around the place.

Rob: Yeah, I will just say that if the people are deep into crypto, they'll always argue with you. And they'll say no, no, that's not the most decentralised like at this project X-Y-Z. It's super decentralised. So everybody out there listening. Sure.

Lisa: We can split. But I was gonna ask you like, what do you eat? Like, I've listened a lot to Raoul Pal, as well, from Real Vision. fantastic guy about the adoption curve, and Metcalfe's law and the speed at which the internet was adopted back 20 years ago. And the adoption, I think it was something like 69% year on year sort of adoption was the fastest adoption of technology. And we've all seen it in their lives and how much it's revolutionized the absolute world. And crypto was going at twice that or 139%. I don't know where it's at right now. It's probably slowed down a bit.

Rob: It probably slowed down right.

Lisa: But but still phenomenal adoption. So for people out there like this is all going to go away in five minutes. What's your take on their whole adoption curve?

Rob: I love this question because when I got in 2017, it was a real possibility. Because we had a market cap below it was, we topped out at 840 billion. And if people think about that, like that's a lot of money. Well, no. The market cap of gold is around 12 trillion, the market cap for the entire stock market is over 100 trillion. Real Estate globally is 264 trillion. And derivatives is over at one quadrillion. When you take a look at this, it was under a trillion. It could have gone away, the government really could have stepped in and go “You know what, we're gonna make X-Y-Z illegal and exchanges and make it so hard that maybe wouldn't wipe it out, but it would have really extended it.”

So let's fast forward to today. So in 2017, nobody in Congress was talking about this. They weren't bringing this in forth the CFTC and the SEC, which is what we're going on now. We didn't have these big names like Ray Dalio, like a Bill Miller, like a Paul Tudor Jones, who were like investment legends. We didn't have like, not just Bank of America, but Fidelity offering 401k and then also I mean, just right now, JP Morgan, just last week, said that they are going to do away with most of their real estate investments. And they're going to put it into crypto as it as a pristine asset and that's JP Morgan. Jamie Dimon since 2016 has said, it's a Ponzi first there was a Ponzi. Then he said, like get wiped out. And then like 2018, 2019 is like maybe 1%. And then all of a sudden, they were offering it now. Here we go. So that's that one part. 

And then the next part is this, I think this is the most important part. There's too much money in the space, and we know how much is going to grow. And then also the governments—if you're a government entity, and you just printed a boatload of money, like we just talked about, we like taxes, as far as government goes. There is no way they're going to say that we want you to stick that money, which we did that way I talked about people rolling into money, we want you just to stick that money in the bank account and us not tax it, probably not. We want to give you more of a vehicle so you can invest into and of course you can invest into those, you're going to have either long term or short term capital gains. And we'd love those, because those are between 20% and 44%, depending on where you're at in United States. And then of course, globally, I don't know where it is. 

The governments look at that and go “Just too much money to be lost. We got to keep this around, we're gonna tax it.” And then finally, there's another big reason is job creation. In Texas, great state of Texas where I'm from, we've had so many different Bitcoin miners. Thankfully, China shut down their Bitcoin miners, they all came to New York, Georgia, Arkansas, and one of the big ones is Texas. And it's a massive boon to build up for these miners and these warehouses and the people that need to actually do the construction that actually build it to maintain it as job creation. And of course, nobody loves job creation how much they're doing for the community than the politicians that's—

Lisa: —Going to shoot themselves unless you're in New York and they go for some reason they've been really harsh on it “Hey, like on the mining stuff.” And Texas is huge like what's happened there like the amount of mining that is centralized now when Texas which is actually a little bit of a risk because there's so much in the United States, in general and huge amount of mining and for those listening who don't know what mining is, so mining is going — how do you explain mining Rob.

Rob: So it's where somebody takes his big pickaxe and they break open these computers! All it is, is there are there are Bitcoin miners or computers before in the old days, as far as Bitcoin mining, you can just use the regular your regular computer. And you would have to solve an algorithm or a mathematical problem and the ones that could do that would have the most CPU power, they were awarded X amount of bitcoin every, every four years it decreases what it is. Let's say you have 100 different computers and they're all trying to solve this mathematical problem, the one that solves it, they are awarded these Bitcoin, this is from the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper so they get this Bitcoin, right. 

And then well, the other night I like “Well, I don't want that I need a more powerful computer.” So it went from your home computer to ASIC mining, to now these like super like ant miners and things like that, that are very, super-powerful computers, just for this one prospect of not only to solve that mathematical problem but actually to secure the network. Because like we talked about to do so now you have all these computers, all these miners and all competing. And it's a multi billion-dollar company. So when people say to me like “Well, Rob, Bitcoin doesn't make much sense, because that's all it does. And we're just using this computer and electrical power.” But you understand, just like TCP IP and HTTPS, where it was a protocol. Bitcoin is now a base layer protocol. And you can use that and build on second layer solutions, kind of like a lightning. And you can do transactions and guess what you're built on the safest computerised network in the entire planet. Because you cannot attack that and break it open. 51% attack, it's not going to happen. Now you can do that for Wells-Fargo because that happened to me in my information. So take a look at it like that is something that I think people should know.

Lisa: And this is something that Michael Saylor, who owns it was the CEO of MicroStrategy and a huge one of the biggest Bitcoin investors out there, explains that this is the safest transferable in time. He did an analogy once which was really fantastic about if I own a building in Peru somewhere, I can't transport that building and stick it in London, but I can do that with Bitcoin. And it's transferable over time and it doesn't leak. It doesn't have expenses. It doesn't have any costs associated with it. For transferring generational wealth or anything like that, it's the perfect vehicle. And to go back to the mining things like China last year banned mining in China. How did that work out for them? Also, well—

Rob: Worked out great for Texas, that's all I know.

Lisa: Yeah, worked out very well for Texas. And they just shot themselves in the foot, and this is why it's not, I don't think it's gonna go away too, because the politicians are starting to realise, number one, a lot of politicians are actually invested in crypto now, because they've woken up to the whole thing. They don't want to shoot themselves in the foot. And they usually pretty good at protecting their own back pockets to say, cynically. Then you've got the fact that there's so many powerful consoles, constituents that are into crypto. If they're going to go against that narrative, like you see someone like Elizabeth Warren, who's always on a crusade, it’s evil, but it's a good point. It's like shooting yourself in the foot because you're going against so many people in your constituency.

Rob: Warren, Elizabeth Warren, she was really anti-bank. And she, I guess, she kind of looks at this and going well this currency, this is in the hands of, of really powerful people and that can’t happen, we got to break it up. But what she doesn't understand is that it's really I mean, there is a centralization of some of the top Bitcoin that's, that's owned by the exchanges. And of course, there's some people that own a ton of a Bitcoin, Michael Saylor, and MicroStrategy but that's a corporation. But over time, and you can take a look at it. There's, that's what's great about the blockchain itself. We can go to BTC info charts, and we can take a look at all different wallets. And you can see how many people or how many wallets have less than 10 Bitcoin. So it's like, it's like one of the highest numbers out there. 

Then, of course, you know, 10 to 100, 100 to 1000, so on and so forth. So I get, she thinks of it like that. But I think if she realizes, like, “Oh, wait a second. All of these companies that are  charging remittance fees to send money back and all the different transaction fees for all these small businesses well, if we can use Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin, well, that goes away.” And there's a reason why Visa partnered up with USDC, and Circle, because they're like, “Wow, our whole model is about to go away. We need to get some of that pie.”

Lisa: And this is interesting, Visa and MasterCard and Koa shaking in their boots are being wise and collaborating. Now, you're right, because they're charging 3% or whatever they're charging, on a few things, someone like Amazon is charging 3% that you're getting charged 3% by the Visa and Mastercards of the world. And then they can do it for nothing on Bitcoin on the Lightning Network.

Do you think that they're not going to go hang on a minute, eventually, they're probably going to wake up to that and start doing it. And what I really love about that, also is that you've got all these unbanked citizens of the world something like 1.7 billion people or something, have no access. I mean, you and I, we live in the first world countries, we're lucky we have bank accounts, where we have identification papers, we have an address, we are part of the financial system. 

If you live in deeper Africa, in a tiny village, where you live in heaven, in education, you haven't had a chance to get a job and to get an address and to get identification papers and you can't get a bank account. Think about that people you are cut out of the whole financial system. Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, if you've got a phone, which even in Africa now you can rent them super, super cheap a smartphone, you have the ability to send money backwards and forwards between each other. Now that is game-changing or if you look like we have a lot of people from Tonga who live in New Zealand, and they send a lot of the money back to the islands because the islands don't have a lot of money and a lot of ways to make income. And that's why Tonga has been we're hearing rumours that they possibly going to take Bitcoin as one of the as a legal tender, I don't know if it will happen or not. But it's apparently in discussion. 

They make sense because they get over half of their income as remittances from the patriates overseas. And that's costing like Western Union right now, or Paypal or whoever's sending that money. And when I had a situation recently where I had to send a friend, she sent me something from Austria, and I had to pay the postage back. And it was like $70 Like nothing, but I and I, she didn't, she's not computer literate and savvy and whatever. She didn't want to do it over PayPal, right. So I hate to go to the bank and do a telegraphic transfer over the bank system. Oh my God. They wanted to see what I had for breakfast. They wanted to find out what’s this for, who are you sending it to? Is this illicit activity is this whatever. Like, they asked me private questions that really delved into my private sphere for $70. And I was disgusted, absolutely disgusted. 

And this is what they do with your mortgage, they want to know whether how many coffees you had this week, they go through line by line, if you bought a dress last week, and you put it on layby, this is a grip into our actual freedoms. Now, when we were talking about freedom, that sort of stuff really irks me. If we want to get political and, you know, look at the truckers in Canada, how anybody who donated to that legal protest in a free country in a democracy had their bank accounts frozen. In other words, you don't own your own money if