194. Don’t Fumble Your Bags - Here’s How to Actually Sell Your Crypto and Profit

Bull market is live, people are making money and we want to start preparing you ready to start to sell your crypto.

When it comes time to sell, you're going to be very emotional. You won't have built that muscle memory and there's a lot of things that can go wrong along the way.

These moments of panic when you're like peak bull market, you're trying to sell a bunch of crypto and the wallet doesn't work and then you want to update it.

What you're going to do is crack open your hardware wallet, blow the dust off it mates, you're going to connect it to your computer and your computer is going to go mate. You need to update. Yeah, exactly.

The most likely thing that's probably going to happen now is that you're going to be hacked as so make sure you've got a really good password, 2fa, all the basics.

So the goal of this episode is to get you to sell $5 worth of your coins this weekend.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift alongside Ms. Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling the leading crypto research company company here in Australia. And if you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a subscribe if you're on YouTube or follow us on your favorite podcasting apps. We are closing in on 200 episodes. Holy moly. Bull market is live. People are making money and we want to start preparing. You ready to start to sell your crypto because for a lot of you, maybe you haven't sold. Maybe it's been a little while since you've dusted off the ledger. So we're going to do a little, a little live Benneberg's workshop. We're gonna, we're gonna bring you folks and lovely listeners on the journey with us and Bergs is going to do a little, a little test, I guess activity bit of homework for us all, Bergs on actually selling our crypto because this is not something you want to be around with when the bull market's in full force and you're trying to sell your crypto, you don't know where your ledger is, you don't know what your pin code is. It's been a minute, you're sending crypto your sweaty hands, you stuff it up you send it the wrong address. This happened to a friend of mine the other day. He sent me a message going, hey, I just sent my, you know, my crypto, some of my crypto from my coin spot to my ledger, but it didn't show up. It's been a week. When will it show up or when will it return?

It doesn't work like that. You're lost money gone forever.

You suck.

Mate. I like the way you say live workshop when it's not live at all. We're recording this and people are going to view it later on, mate. You just got all these, like, sayings in your head, mate.

You just.

Come on, mate. You're leading people down the garden.

Words roll at the time. It's not live. What we're going to do is we're going to get you to go away and come back. I mean, it's not like a know.

We're not going to do it here with us, mate. They're not doing it live.

They're going to be live. You're going to be live.

Redefining line live, mate. Time is a construct. It doesn't exist, man.

Time doesn't exist. This is 4D. This is in your own world. You're going to take the podcast into your own world and bring it back.

This is great. We're taking this to 15D and what we're going to do, it's always a sales strategy. We talk a lot about constructing your portfolio, your sell strategy and how to think about it. But now we're actually going to build that muscle memory, get those reps in and get you to sell this weekend. So the goal of this episode is to get you to sell $5 worth of your coins this weekend. This is very important because when it comes time to sell, you're going to be very emotional. You won't have built that muscle memory. And there's a lot of things that can go wrong along the way. We're going to go through three scenarios. One is if you've got your coins on an exchange. One if you've got them on a hot wallet, soft wallet, on your phone, something like that. Another one is if you've got it in a cold wallet, like a hardware wallet or a paper wallet, you have somewhere that's in cold storage. Right, let's go through the really simple one. The goal here is to sell five bucks worth of whatever currency I recommend doing. Like most people have Bitcoin and some Ethereum or derivative. Do five bucks of each, just to see how the networks work. Because they are very, very different. So on exchange, relatively straightforward. This is, you know, your SwiftX, your coin spot, your Binance, you've got your coins on an exchange, you'll go in there, you'll select whichever coin you will go to sell, you'll choose $5 worth and then you'll get a bunch of options. So the options will be like sell it now, sell it at a limit, order at a certain price. In the future you could spot, sell, you can go to the exchange version, whatever that is called, with lower fees. And this will get you used to the user interface, the different buttons you have to click, the hoops you have to jump through. And even if you stuff it up, it's only $5. This is where you want to stuff it up, take your notes and learn. Because interfaces change all the time, you might not have logged into your exchange for a while. And you also need to make sure that there's still a market on that exchange for the coins you have. Classic with me, Power Ledger was no longer on the exchange that I was on. I couldn't sell it, so I had to move it either to another exchange or to a custodial wallet and then to uniswap to sell. And it was all a bunch of nonsense. So you're in your exchange, select something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, go to sell, make it five bucks worth and transfer it to whatever you want to do. That can be Australian dollars, US Dollars, whatever you want, or stable coins. And from there either move those stable coins, leave it on the exchange if that's what you want to do, or move those few dollars worth of stable coins to your non custodial wallet that you own and control, or take that fiat currency and put it into your bank account and you are done. So there's a lot of steps there. You can even do OTC stuff. Ben, I know you've done a bit of that. Yes.

So if you're working with more than $25,000 at a time in terms of transactions, I would recommend using otc. And a lot of the major exchanges have otc. OTC stands for over the counter trading. So you're essentially getting the best fees and the best spreads on the market. Like if you go and use a, you know, a Swap feature on SwiftX or Coin Spot or one of these major exchanges, like you're going to probably get charge anywhere between 1 and 3%, but an OTC you're probably getting somewhere around 0.7%. So you're getting better fees and spreads, but you need to have a minimum of 25 000. And what had the way it usually works is you, you know, you, you register an account, you'll jump on a call with them, you'll have the crypto in your exchange, you'll ring them up and they'll execute the transaction for you and you'll, you'll get those, you know, those best sort of transaction fees. So just be aware of that. If you are selling a lot of crypto that you can kind of get whacked on the.

Exactly. Yeah. And when you're doing this you'll understand how spreads work, how fees work and it's only a small amount so you're going to learn tons and it's going to be worth, well worth the five dollar lesson when it comes time to sell a lot more crypto.

Yeah and like, like Berg said, always set do a test transaction, especially when you're, when you're sending money back, like you need to be always very cautious. You're doing the right thing. So if you're sending money around, always do a test transaction. Make sure it comes through before actually executing it. Another thing I'd also say in terms of a lot of people ask me what whether I do stablecoins or fiat, it really depends what you want to do with the money. So if you're selling your crypto to buy something else like outside of crypto, like property or a car or paying off your mortgage, well then obviously you want to push into fiat. But if you're wanting to put that money back into crypto, then I would keep it in stablecoins because the banks, especially in Australia are getting worse and worse to try and get big dollars back into or any dollars into the crypto ecosystem. So if you're wanting to redeploy that market back into crypto at some point in the future, I would just keep it on stable coins and put it into your. Into your wallet.

That's exactly right. I think stable coins have been de risked significantly and to make this more real with an example, let's say you have 100k profit. You cash that out, you put it into your bank, you now want to get back into the market. You're hit with the 10k monthly limit from your bank, it's going to take you 10 months to get back in.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Which is absolutely crazy.

The other thing too, like with, with your ledger and stuff, like if you've got your wallet, what you'll notice if you haven't got it out in a little while is it's going to need updates. Your software is going to want to update, the hardware is going to want to update. One of my ledgers actually said you can't charge this anymore because it's like it's getting, it's getting out of date. Like it's too old. So like these moments of panic when you're like peak bull market, you're trying to sell a bunch of crypto and the wallet doesn't work and then you're trying to update it. Or maybe you're trying to use an altcoin and you're sending it to your ledger, but the ledger doesn't support it. So now you need to download an add on in your ledger live to look at the blockchain for an altcoin that you don't even know where it is. And now you're trying to send it somewhere. Like this is the shit you're gonna have to deal with. And this is why we're doing this episode, because we want all of you to be able to do this because you've done it, you practice it. You know what you're doing when the market isn't going nuts. So when it's time to sell, you're not fumbling around and just going to stuff something up.

What you said there was beautiful, but classic Ben, you've jumped like two steps ahead, mate. The notes are literally in front of you. So let's, let's continue on the path we were on, mate. Exchange.

This is how I set something up, mate. Step one to step seven, you know.

Two, two, don't worry about the detail for everyone else, mate. Classic Ben. How are you still alive? Oh, there it is. There.

I didn't scroll down the note. Sorry, sorry folks, I just skipped ahead this guy.

No, what you said was spot on. And we'll go into that in more detail. But before we get to hardware, wallets, there's a step in between. So soft wallets, hot wallets, whatever you want to call them. This is a classic example, is like the metamask extension on, in your browser or on your phone. So if you want to sell from there, there's a couple of options that you have. You can go into your metamask on your phone or in your browser, you can send coins to an exchange and then you follow the process that we just went through there. And by the way, with your exchange, you're also going to have to make sure you've got the right passwords, the right2fa, you can still access that account. All this sort of stuff that you're going to do way ahead of time so you don't freak out. So you can send your coins from your metamask to your exchange. Great. Or you are now in the defi space so you can go to a site like Uniswap, and with your tokens, you can then swap from, let's say Ethereum, take five bucks worth and then swap it to usdc, usdt, a stablecoin or another coin. And that'll be a capital gains event. And you will go from having an asset that's volatile to one that is now stable and that's taking profits in the ecosystem. You can then relax in the future. You can just spend those stables or you can send it to an exchange and cash out to Fiat. So this is. A lot of people will be doing that where they have custodial wallets. A lot of people have hot wallets with some money on there. I recommend if you've got more than a couple hundred bucks worth of crypto, do get a hardware wallet. And a lot of people don't actually know. You can connect your Hardware wallet to MetaMask. So if you got a ledger or Trezor, you can open a new MetaMask wallet and it'll give you, you know, 12 words. That's your seed phrase. But then every account that you add, you can click a little button and you can add a ledger or Trezor account in your MetaMask. What this means is for those accounts, every transaction you want to approve needs to be done on your hardware wallet. And the 12 words for your wallet doesn't matter at all. That is nothing. That's just like a dummy wallet. You can throw that in the bin. You'd probably only want to keep that if you're hoping for a future metamask airdrop. But you could literally open another wallet and then reopen your tres on ledger accounts. No one can approve transactions on those accounts apart from you because you hold the physical device.

Yeah, bang on Bergs. And I think really what you need to be careful of is the, the hot wallets like your Metamask or, you know, Atomic Wallet. There's a bunch of different ones you can have even on your mobile phone. These are most prone for you to be hacked because you'll click on a link or there'll be an email that'll be sent to you that says, oh my God, Dennis, you're losing on your money. Click here to reset your password. It'll be a fake email. You'll click on it and then your wallet's drained. With a cold wallet, it's completely disconnected from the Internet and you know it's much, much less likely you're able to be hacked. So like Berg said, if you're going to have some money in there, just keep it a small amount. If you are serious though, I, we would recommend moving it to a hardware wallet. The major exchanges are a lot better. I do have a lot of people, platinum clients that have multiple millions of dollars in major exchanges. And that's okay, you've just got to be aware that it's not the safest. It is safe. But the most likely thing that's probably going to happen now is that you're going to be hacked, as I said. So make sure you've got a really good password. 2fa, all the basics. So you're not interested. Yeah.

And with your exchange have an awesome password in a password manager. Pay the $10 per month for a password manager. Just pay the money and live your best life. 2fa don't do SMS. 2fa do one that you own where you write down the codes on paper and you have it in Google authenticate. That's a lot harder than someone jacking your phone number. And also if your exchange allows it, most do have a whitelist address. So that means within your account you set a whitelist address, let's say for Ethereum. So when you're withdrawing you can only send it to that address and it takes two days to change that over. So if someone gets into your account, magically finds your password, finds your 2fa, they can only extract your funds to an account you own. And if they initiate a change on that white list, there's a two day wait period and you will receive an email about that as well. So you've got more than enough time to act. Sometimes it's even five days. It's a really good level of security.

Yeah. Yep, great callbacks.

Now let's get onto mate hardware wallets. So Ledger Trezor Ben covered a lot of it before but these are self custody wallets. A lot of people will. If you've got a big stack you'll have your Bitcoin and Ethereum on there. So if you want to actually sell these, it's pretty much all the options we spoke about before. You can go into the defi world and you can sell through things like Uniswap and I'm sure there's bitcoin equivalents. I've never really sold any bitcoin so I haven't used it or you can send those coins to an exchange. So what you're going to do is crack open your hardware wallet, blow the dust off it mates, you're going to connect it to your computer and your computer is going to go mate. You need update. Yeah, exactly. No one's updated their ledger or Trezor software. So you're going to update that, the desktop version and you're going to freak out because you think you're getting hacked. So you're going to update that.

Yeah.

Then they're going to ask you to update your firmware. You're like, oh shit, now I got to do this. It's just another thing. Update your firmware, your seed phrase is somewhere else. You will be fine. It is all good. Update that. Great, now you're good to go. You can either hop into the Defi world, do what we said before, send it to an exchange, five bucks worth of whatever. Another thing you can probably do, I'm pretty sure Metamask has some of these as well. You can do swaps within the wallet or you can sell within Ledger and Trezor now to other coins.

Yeah. So the way this works is your assets are still in your wallet. However, Ledger doesn't do the transaction for you. They plug into defi products like 1 inch or as a few other like aggregators. So you can actually swap within your ledger. Just be careful though that the spreads and the fees are pretty, pretty big. Because Ledger makes their cut. It is easy. That's what I say to people that we work with. It's like if you want the ease of use, do it. But if you want to like save on fees and spreads, push it back to the exchange.

Exactly right. And you know, a big thing in crypto is, you know, proof of key day, proof, proof of Keys Day. January 3rd is when the Bitcoin network first started and everyone's encouraged to either move their funds off an exchange into a self custodial wallet, one that you own and control, or if you have one of Those already, move $5 worth of Bitcoin around between addresses. This is another thing as well. So we're encouraging you to sell five bucks right to your extreme exit strategy. If you don't want to go that far, crack open your hardware wallet, your soft wallet, whatever it is, and just move between a couple of addresses, generate another Bitcoin or Ethereum address and move some money. You'll be surprised because I was used to the Ethereum network and it got east pretty fast. Now with proof of stake and I was playing around on L2s as well. When I went to the Bitcoin network and I moved a significant amount of money off an exchange to.

Hardware wallet, I freaked the out because it took so long and it was so slow and I was like, oh my God. And this was just to test things. I've now moved that back to like another custodial exchange. But I was like, oh my God, 10 minutes and buy 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And it's just sitting on the network. I'm like, yeah. Oh my God, have I lost this money? I even did the $10 transaction. This is the hot tip. If you're going to send a significant amount of money, whatever that means to you, could be a hundred dollars to you. Send $10 first. If you lose it, absolutely fine. But make sure that transaction goes through first and then send the big amount of money afterwards.

Yeah, bang on. And I would do it. Yeah, I usually do with any transaction anyway. But yeah, like even last week Bugs, I was doing my maple to syrup conversion. I'm just moving like an extraordinary amount of magic Internet money like from one place to another. And it's like, this is crazy.

It can just feel like you're not doing anything or the value is not real. So you've just got to be really careful when moving anything. Always do a test transaction before, you know, pumping it over. And also be careful too. Like a lot of the exchanges now support different chains to move different assets, especially stable coins. So you can move stable coins on ERC20, on TRON, on BNB, they can send on different networks that'll produce different addresses. So just be careful. You're also sending the right asset to the right address on the right chain.

Yes. And also be careful when you are using things like uniswap the token you're swapping to. Don't just look at the logo like when you click it. Look at the contract address. Go to something like Etherscan IO and paste in that address and make sure it's the address ofTether or USDC or whatever you want to do. It'll say it within the contract. You'll see billions of transactions. You'll be assured that is the correct address. Also, with your hardware wallet, don't ever blind sign. So a lot of the time the contract address will be huge. Your wallet won't be able to display it and you'll just have to click okay and hope for the best. Try and avoid that at all costs. Get yourself an updated hardware wallet, a new one. Restore your seed phrase to that because things have moved on significantly since Trezors were first invented a long time ago.

And remember, yeah, you can have backup like ledgers. You just need to load up your. Your seed phrases onto that new hardware wallet to then, you know, load up your crypto.

Exactly. If you want to. And here's another thing. Whenever you first get a hardware device, this is what you should do. Load it up, write down your seed phrase on paper, put it away somewhere safe. Then what you should do is send $10 from wherever to one of the addresses on that ledger or Trezor. Then wipe the treasure, pick it up again, restore it from the seed phrase on paper to be reassured you've written down the right seed phrase.

Yeah, it's great.

That's the way to do it.

Yeah.

And honestly, if you guys need more help, go to the Collective Shift Security Center. It's free, it's on our website. Don't even want your email address. Just go over there. Get good. We do not want you to lose any money. And we don't want you to lose any money from sending to the wrong place, but also not in the future. We don't want you to fumble the bag when it comes time to sell. Do what we said here. Sell five bucks worth of something and build that muscle memory.

Just get good Burgs.

Get good Ben and Bergslis. Just get good Ben. Do you want some advice?

Get. What is it?

Get better.

Oh, yeah, that was good. That was really. That was actually a good little update. And it's good because, you know, this is going to become crunch time and we don't want you, like sweaty palms, making mistakes when it's. When it comes time to.

Really weak arms are heavy. Vomit on his sweater already spaghetti.

So good. I'll be doing this this weekend because I don't want to get caught out. I've got various devices and exchanges and all sorts of nonsense. I'm going to go through all of them, sell five bucks on all them, and I'll actually understand where my coins are, who offers what. Learn those user interfaces, the fees and spreads, and I'll be much better off when it comes time to sell.

Brilliant. Let us know how you go, folks. We'll be following up next week, so, yeah, let us know. Do it this weekend. Jump onto it, give it a test run and get prepared.

Proof of sale. Let's go.

Now, if you have any other friends or family in crypto that you think needs to listen to this episode, we'd love for you to share it with them. A friend, as you know, we do not do advertising commissions, affiliate leaks. This is a no bullshit podcast. We give you the beans, we help you along the way, but we'd love for you to be able to help us grow the podcast by sharing with a friend. So we can keep doing this and bring it to you each and every week. But thank you so much for listening as always, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Hang on. Before we go, mate, let's just talk about the Benneberg's live. That photo that came up where I just look like a giant and you just look so small, mate, you've been going to the gym for years. What's going on, mate?

Well, mate, you know, I have more, you know, sort of knowledge and, you know, things in my head that, you know, allow me to do things day to day. You know, you've had to.

You have knowledge in your head.

You've had. You've had to build, you know, things in other ways. You know, obviously, because.

Okay, so just before the pod, I was like, ben, all right, we'll go in 10 minutes. I'm like, do you know what 10 minutes is, Ben? He goes, yeah, nine plus one.

Sorry, folks. I had to bring up the live pod because Ben always gives me about the rig, so he looks small. So there we go. I got one back.

And you stitched me up on the podcast, mate. You put the bloody skipper's hat on my head.

That was Alice. I forgot to tell you. Alice did that.

Oh. Oh, she gonna get it.

Yeah. He's like, check out the thumbnail. I briefed this. She was so happy with it.

What is.

Keep up.

Oh, so good. All right, everyone, thank you for listening. Please sell 5 bucks worth of your crypto. Get good and we'll see you next episode.

Get good, folks. See ya.

Get good, champions.