202. What You Need To Know To Go From a Beginner To Pro Crypto Investor & Profit Now

Welcome back to 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. We're here to bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you crush this crypto bull market. Plus, get an exclusive behind the scenes look as we scale Australia's leading crypto research company. Today we are talking about some alpha crypto drops based on your skill level in crypto. So today we're going to be walking through some of the lessons and tips that we have. If you're a beginner, intermediate and where you should be to get to the advanced stage of crypto. To give you a bit of context, beginner is pretty much when you're just starting out, you're just learning your lessons, you're most likely going to round trip. If you're in this period of time, we're going to try and help you try and pass that beginner stage as fast as possible. Then into the intermediate stage when you're taking some profits, but not really crushing it just yet. And then where we really want to get all of you is into the advanced area. We can absolutely nail the bull market and have all of the lessons to try and avoid all the riff raff of crypto and make some money along the way. So, Bergs, beginner man, let's start out there. This is where you're going to learn all your lessons. What are the stages of someone that's just starting out in crypto? What are the things they need to really nail? What are the things they're doing? What does that look like?

The first thing is to get off zero. And for everyone listening to this episode, this is the episode to listen to. Even if you've been in crypto since it was invented in 2009 with like January 3, 2009, you're around, you should be listening to this episode because you will pick something up. There's always gaps in all of our knowledge and this is a collective thing that Ben and I have done together to really get succinct lessons that will really accelerate your crypto journey. So if you are a beginner, you need to get off zero. That is the main thing here. If you have no crypto at all, get off zero. You do that by jumping on an exchange, a crypto exchange. So this is coin spot, Coinbase, SwyftX, something like that. You can either download the app in the app store or you can go to their website.

Or you can contact them for otc. If you want to do a massive trade, download it, do the kyc. You'll need a photo of your license, a few other things to verify your account. And then you can either use your credit card or you can send money to that exchange. Once your cash hits that exchange, I want you to buy some bitcoin. That's all you need to do. Just get off zero. Buy Bitcoin. The goal for a beginner should be to get at least 1% of your investable assets into Bitcoin. So if you're in shares and real estate and everything else, get 1% into Bitcoin. And Ben, you want them to hold for at least a year.

Yeah. So one of the things I see a lot of beginners make mistake of is they're too impatient and they're trying to make a gazillion dollars overnight. Like that's just not reality. So what I really want to see, the beginner level stage, is huddling for 12 months. Buy and hold for 12 months. Get off zero, as Berg said, maybe even DCA in start to, you know, add some, add some Bitcoin. Like even if you, you know, I, I, I even say to some people, use Bitcoin as your savings wallet. Add some savings in, build your bitcoin, stack up and leave it for more than 12 months.

Absolutely. And when you buy things in bitcoin, it becomes cheaper over time. If you, Sorry. When you save in bitcoin becomes cheaper over time. Goods become cheaper over time. When you save in fiat dollars, things become more expensive because of inflation. And the reason we want you to hold for at least 12 months is, is because if you are new to investing or you've been in something like the stock market, the way the crypto market works is very different. It's a 247 global decentralized market. It's very different to the stock exchange where it's open six, seven hours a day, Monday to Friday, has circuit breakers and all of these rules. You might see your crypto go down by 50%. If even Bitcoin can go down by 50%. You need to be able to understand that is normal. You need to, you don't need to sell and you can stomach those losses. The reason that we like bitcoin is because of its volatility, and that's volatility in both directions. If you don't want to get on an exchange, there's an even easier way to do this with a service called get paid in Bitcoin. And this is just dollar cost averaging in so there's a guy that does it. I believe he's out of Tassie. And you fill out a couple of forms, he contacts your payroll department and every time you get paid, you can put in 50, 50 bucks straight into Bitcoin, into an account that you own. Definitely do that and become a part of this. And as you're doing that, you can start to learn. And I think one of the best places to start learning, obviously the Collective Shift website, but also where Ben and I started, and that is watching an Andreas Antonopoulos. He's not as active as he once was, but he is one of the pioneers in this space in terms of education. He's written university level textbooks on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Look at, listen to some of his talks on what is money, how things work. You can even buy his book, which is very easy to read. It's called the Internet of Money. That is an amazing place to start because he talks in metaphors and analogies so you can get upskilled really quickly and understand what Bitcoin is.

He. Yeah, I think that's a really important one, like understanding what money is. That's always where I really go to explain, you know, the value of bitcoin to people. Because if you don't understand what money is, you're not really going to understand the value of bitcoin. So I think that's a really great place to start. And yeah, and Andreas has some epic, epic beginner videos.

Yeah, I still listen to him and go back. It's incredible. He talks about quantum computing and everything like that, how to fork the network. It's incredible. Yeah, and don't try to walk or run before you can even crawl. Like, when people start, they ask questions like, do I need a hardware wallet? How do I trade this? How do I get into this meme coin? What is a dex? Don't worry about all of that. You're not missing out. You've got plenty of time. You're going to have years and years. You're ahead of the majority of the population here. Like you are literally like the 1%. If you feel, if you're going through and listening to this podcast, because not many people know how to even do that on an exchange. So don't feel like you have to get in quick and you're going to miss out. This is about learning gradually. It is a journey. It is very different. It's foreign, it's weird. And just know that it takes time. Take the first step. Buy some Bitcoin on an Exchange.

Oh, very valid points, Berg. So you've been around for a year now. You've dollar cost averaging. You got some bitcoin, man Hodling. You're off zero. You're heading into the intermediate stage. This is where you're doing a little bit more research. You're starting to figure out some other coins, starting to maybe interact with some crypto, maybe because you've seen some, some emails, some scams that you. You're not really sure of. What are these things you're looking at at an intermediate level to take that next step up and start to take some profits.

I think the first thing you need to do really is.

Let'S go with the research side first, then the nuts and bolts. So start researching other coins. You probably want to branch out away from just having bitcoin. You may not. You might read about Bitcoin and go, this is it. This is the one for me. That's all I need. That suits my level of risk. That's what I want to do. Great. You might want a little bit more risk and you might go, oh, these are going up a lot faster. And this will help me build my bitcoin stack or it'll help me get to my goals quicker. So start researching other coins, of course. Collectorshift website, Great place to do that. Bennenberg's podcast. Start looking at what other coins do. Look at things like Ethereum, Solana, Sui, other layer 1 tokens so you can understand their point of difference to Bitcoin and how they fit in the market. And all of these are available on exchanges as well. Another thing to really do is study Bitcoin and understand inflation. Once you truly understand Bitcoin, you understand how amazing that asset is and the journey it's actually been on. And when you truly understand inflation, what's happening to your money, how you're being inflated away, that's a mindset shift on where you should place your money and how you should invest.

Yeah.

And then of course, Ben, you need to protect that. So to protect your crypto, what should you be buying?

Yeah, ultimately you want to be moving on to a hardware wallet. I think we've probably become a little bit softer on this over recent times because the exchanges are, you know, a lot better in terms of their security. But ultimately, if you're holding a lot of crypto, you really want to move this across to a hardware wallet. You know, getting a ledger, getting a Trezor and really understanding how that works. Because at the end of the day, the reason we all got into Bitcoin was because, you know, be your own bank, right. No one can ever take it off you, no one can ever steal it from you. You can never be. Well, you can be hacked, but not from a third party.

There's risks on both sides. So if an exchange or someone else is holding your crypto, that's called counterparty or third party risk. If they hold it, they control it, tomorrow it could be gone, you never get it back. If you custody your own crypto, no one can take it from you. But there's risk as well, because you have to secure it and you have to make sure you don't sign the wrong contract. So a way to do that and take possession of those coins or control of those coins. This is a key point as well, Ben, because people think with hardware devices, your coins are on the device. They're not. Your coins are on the blockchain. And this is wild. They're not even coins like in Bitcoin. They're.

User transaction outputs, unspent transaction outputs. They're literally just things moving around. And your, your hardware wallet. Yeah, it'll bend your head. Your hardware wallet is just saying, I had the authority to control those coins and decide where they move around. And you essentially move them around until you die and then they go to someone else. So a hardware wallet should just be called a signing device. Yeah. So if you want to have authority and make changes to those coins, move them around, send them elsewhere, you need that device. That's very important because if you've got just a Software wallet like MetaMask, or a browser extension or a mobile phone wallet, or even in exchange, if people have your password or you've been hacked, they can send it anywhere. They don't need that physical device in their possession to be able to send it across.

Yep, very important.

And one very important thing is about, is how to actually, when you buy a hardware wallet, first of all, ledger, Trezor Cold Card, something like that, buy it from the manufacturer's website.

Only you never buy secondhand ones.

Yeah, don't buy secondhand ones, don't go to third party retailers, don't even buy it from officeworks, they offer ledgers. No, just go direct to the manufacturer's website and ship it. Now how do you actually use a hardware wallet that we've got full explainers on our site. Long and short of it is get your hardware wallet, install the software that it needs. So Trezor suite, ledger, live, whatever it is. Then when you plug your hardware wallet in, it'll give you a series of 24 words. Write down. First of all, no cameras in the room. You know, don't record this on any electronic device. Write down those 24 words on a piece of paper. You can add a 25th word as a passphrase if you would like. Don't have to do that. And then create a pin for the actual physical device. Then it'll open up and you'll have all these different accounts. Go to Bitcoin or Ethereum, whatever you have at the time. Send $10 from your exchange or your soft wallet software wallet across to one of those accounts and then just verify in your software that it's there. Verify on the blockchain. Amazing. Then what I want you to do is wipe that device, so literally reboot it, delete everything on there and restore that device from the seed phrase, those 24, 25 words that you wrote down. And what that looks like is you plug it in, you go to restore. And on the physical device, you don't type these words in anywhere. You start to press the buttons so those words come up on the device. Once you've restored it, hopefully your $10 is still there and you now understand your backup process is safe. You can send the rest of your funds across. Laminate that those 24 words, put it somewhere safe. Safety deposit box in a bank, engrave it on metal, do whatever you want to do so that you're comfortable. Have it in multiple locations where it's safe, and tuck that away. You also need to know that if someone has that 24, 25 words, they can take that, they can open your wallet and they can take all of your funds. So that is the risk with a hardware wallet.

Yeah, this is really, really important stuff.

Perks.

And I think the most important key takeaway here that I wanted to make sure that people remember is that it's so much easier to do this in a test environment when you've got a little bit of money. You're testing some transactions, you know, you're pretending to, you know, you know, reboot or restore your device. It is way easier when you can control the variables versus when shits hit the fan, you click the long, click the wrong link, or you've lost your wallet and you don't know what you're doing, and it's full panic stations.

It's.

It's nearly as good as gone at that point. So make sure you do it before. Be proactive, don't be reactive. So you're much more knowledgeable and confident around your devices than when it hits.

The fan you are, the security risk. It is not someone trying to hack you, it's you doing the wrong thing in a moment of panic or you've had too many beers or you haven't slept. And when people come out and say, I've been hacked. Happened a week ago, I think it was Exodus Wallet. Someone came out and people started to freak out. First of all, I don't think a hardware wallet has ever been hacked. It's always user error, They've signed a malicious contract, they've put their seed phrase somewhere electronic where a hacker can get it. There's been some point of failure, something that they have done. It is never actually a hardware wallet that I have seen, because a lot of people would be in trouble at that point. And there's checks and balances in place to make sure that thing doesn't happen. So another thing is you may want to experiment a bit more and interface with some contracts. You may want to sign some contracts on Ethereum, you may want to buy NFTs and sign contracts, and that is branching out a little bit. That's very different from buying a coin and sending it to your wallet. This is now giving authority on that address. So you want to make sure that your digital hygiene is good. So let's just go with Ethereum because there's a lot of stuff on there. You might do some defi. You might do some NFTs. Just make sure that the address you're signing, first of all is trusted. It's. Sorry, the contract you're signing is trusted. It's the right one. Never blind sign, which means you don't read it at all. You just click yes, yes, yes, and have account separation. So have accounts. These are addresses where you just send things to have other addresses where you give certain authority for certain assets within them and you'll be a lot safer. One thing people don't know, Ben, is you can actually have your. Connect your hardware wallet to a software wallet. So you can have your Metamask wallet. You open that, it has its own 24 words that you don't care about. And then you can add an address from your ledger or Trezor into there. So you can add that address, it interfaces with your Trezor. So now you've got all the flexibility, all the compatibility of a software wallet. But when you want to sign something, the contract address and what you're signing comes up on your Trezor or ledger and you have to press okay. That's an added level of security. That is pretty awesome. That Most people don't know about.

Yeah, really, really good points, Burges. And I think the other next level to that is also understanding what chains there are. So one of the big complications I think a lot of people have is they might have some random altcoin and they're not sure where to send it because the wallet doesn't sort of support that coin. So really I want you to understand the different types of layer ones. Right? So you've got Ethereum, Solana, Sui, Cardano, xrp, you've got a lot of different layer ones. The most important ones are really going to be Ethereum and Solana because that's where most of the coins are built on. If there are Ethereum based coins, like an ERC20 token, you're going to send an ERC like a syrup, for example. You're going to see that syrup isn't supported on ledger, you know, quote unquote supported, but it's an ERC20 token, meaning it's on Ethereum, meaning you can send it to an Ethereum address. So you can actually send Ethereum based coins onto your Ethereum wallet and that's going to show up now if you send a Solana based coin. So if you send a popcat or a Whiff to an Ethereum address, it's going to disappear and you're going to lose it. Right. So you really need to ensure you know your chains.

That's a key point. So there's no real interoperability. That's bullshit. Yeah. So we've lost a lot of money. Even now if I'm sending like a thousand dollars, I'll still send $10 first to make sure it goes across and then I'll send the rest. Rest. I always do a test transaction. There's. The user interfaces are a lot better now and there's address checking, but it is not infallible. You can send like random coins, Ethereum, to a Solana address or something like that. The money will go out of your wallet and it won't arrive, hopefully. There's a lot of checks that stop you from doing that. But there is no Bitcoin management. You can't, no, no blockchain management. You can't call someone up and say, can you send this back? It is gone, you cannot retrieve it. So you need to be very careful. This is the area where you want to make your mistakes with the first $10 and if it doesn't show up. Okay, I understand this now also with contract signing, in terms of digital hygiene, if you sign contracts you can go to websites like Revoke Cash or Etherscan IO, look at one of your Ethereum addresses, you just need to type it in, you don't have to connect your wallet and it'll tell you what approvals you have on there, if any are malicious and if you need to revoke approvals. And also when you're using your software wallet, just disconnect from sites after you're done. This is just all good digital hygiene. And you know, we talk about having a long term stack and that's pretty much what we've talked about here. And then we're talking about, hey, go on interface and do these crazy things on these websites and everything else. What you want to do is have two different mindsets and two different intentions with two different stacks. One is long term, what we call a cold wallet that basically sits somewhere, you know the addresses and when you have some money, some Bitcoin, some Ethereum, whatever, you send it over there and that's gonna stay there for months, whatever, you don't sign contracts with that. So you only move a bit of money around when you have to take profits and you want to buy something. But, and that's the majority of your stack, that's like 80 or 90% with that 10 or 20%. That's going to be your more fun play kind of area where you might have software wallets, you might be signing lots of contracts, you might be experimenting, you might be getting into the latest Solana coin on punto fun that's five minutes old and has a $3 market cap. That is the stack you want to play around with, you want to gamble with, you want to experiment with. And when you make significant money there and you don't care if you lose like portions of that because it's a very small stack, it's experiment one, it's a different mindset to your long term one. And when you make profits there, you can send from that account over to your long term stack. So you've got that mental and physical separation.

Love that. And that's, that's really our ultimate goal here is to increase our knowledge, increase our ability to make money, move it into something like Bitcoin, stack your profits and live a happy life.

Yeah, and we've talked about the kind of experimentation, technical side, getting into it, doing some reading. But one of the key things you want to do after you're evolving from that beginner phase is to set up a crypto strategy. So we've got a free one on our website that guides you through it, it's like a 10 page PDF and it's got different resources in there. Uh, we don't even want your email address. Just go and do it. Like, we want to make sure people have thought about these things and these are things like, you know, what are your different goals? What do you want to achieve out of crypto and what is your time frame? And then we have different model portfolios there as well based on your risk tolerance, how often you want to be looking at this thing and also what you want to achieve in the specific timeframe. And Ben, maybe you could talk a bit more about this because you go through this quite a lot with a lot of our members.

Yeah, I think the timeframe, a lot of people.

Sorry, overestimate what they can return in the short term and they underestimate the long term. So I think really trying to stretch your targets out and your timeframes out longer is going to give you a better ability to make those returns without putting pressure on yourself, unneeded pressure to return that in a shorter period of time and then get upset if it doesn't happen. So, yeah, really being able to set those timeframes up. You know, I've even started to think about more like, you know, from a crypto perspective, like how much Bitcoin can I accumulate? Not even the dollar value, but I'm looking at the bitcoin denominated value. Like how much Bitcoin denominated Bitcoin can I create or hold? Like that's. Now we're starting to really think long term in terms of our bitcoin savings.

Yeah. And when you think in multiple cycles what you want to achieve, things become a lot easier to do. And when you have written that down and you have a North Star that is guiding every decision that you make, things become easier because a lot of people we see come in to this space and they're like, well, I just want to make money. And we're like, great, how much and what are you going to do with the money? Because unless you define that, that is a treadmill where you're never going to stop. You're trying to maximize every single dollar and you're probably taking on way too much risk than you need to.

Totally agree. And I think we see that with, you know, people with less money. Like, you know, know if someone comes in with 10 or 20 grand, usually they're the ones who want to make a million dollars. It's like, well, look, that's not really reality. You might see someone online that makes that but that's like one in a gazillion. You know, don't, don't, don't start to compare yourself. Otherwise you're going to, you know, start to make some poor decisions.

That's another key point for the intermediate stage. You're going to start looking at some social media, listening to some podcasts. Comparison is the thief of joy. You're never going to be that crazy guy that got this insane trade. And, and even the guy that got the trade is not the guy because he has lost lots of money along the way. I remember one, and a lot of people are bullshitters. They're just trying to sell you something or make themselves appear a certain way. Ben and I have met these people and they are full of fucking shit. You can tell when someone is, is wealthy and has made it and they talk the talk and you can tell when someone is posturing, posing, putting on a front. They've rented everything. They don't really know what they're talking about. We're talking about basic concepts that they don't understand. You can tell they haven't done the thing.

Yeah, yeah. Bang on now, Bergs, we finished our intermediate period. We've been in crypto for a couple of years. We've taken some profits. We've got crypto in our hardware wallet. We're aware of the digital hygiene. We've got a bit of a strategy. We kind of know what we're doing. Now. How do we get into the advanced area? What do we need to do to crush the bull market? What are the things we need to be thinking about?

Let's go for it. A lot of you. And again, you don't have to do all of these depending on. I don't do a lot of these depending on the strategy and what you want, but these are some of the things we see in the advanced category. So the classic one is to buy and sell on a Dex. A Dex is a decentralized exchange. Why would you do this? It's because the main reason is because you want to get in early, you want to front run everyone else. So when a coin is created, what happens is there's a smart contract somewhere. Someone creates it, they pay a little bit of money and it executes on a blockchain and bang, it exists. There's a few other things that happen around liquidity and everything else. Okay, so great, I create Trump Coin. I'm the Trump Coin creator. I put it on the blockchain, I execute that code. And this is all very easy to do. You can do it in, like, 10 clicks. Nowadays, you don't have to be a coder. There's, like, nice interfaces that do it. You choose your blockchain, you deploy a bit of code, and in 10 minutes you have a coin. All right, how do I find out about that? Well, a lot of people will be on something like a Dex screener, which allows you to see what are the latest contracts, who's interacting with it, how much money do they have in it, what's the market cap of them, and what's the name of it. And you may also see it on crypto Twitter, like someone's posting about it. You may see it in a discord. So you will need to hop on a decentralized exchange in order to get into that. And there's lots of examples of that. Like, what would be a classic example?

Like, what's the bloody. I've gone blank. What's the eighth one called?

Block Explorer.

No, no, no, no, no. This is so funny. Oh, it's so funny when you talk about something.

Remind me, what are you trying to say when you.

What's the dex. You know, the thing that you go through on Ethereum and you always swap coins that I've gone blank on.

Uniswap.

Uniswap.

That's it.

Yeah, yeah, There we go.

Sorry, I missed that.

Yeah. And all that is is like a very simple interface and it's got, what coin do you have? What coin do you want? And you can swap. There's even inside wallets now, like it's inside MetaMask. There's Solana equivalents.

You can even do it on a ledger, too. You can actually swap on your ledger now, which is really cool. They just use an aggregator between different. Like different providers. Pretty cool.

Yeah. And the reason you would do this is because you want to interact with those contracts and you get to buy that coin before it becomes easy to buy. It becomes easy to buy when it's listed on an exchange or more people hear about it and it starts to go on Twitter and then it'll be listed on a few more places. It might go to an easier decks than the one that you were using. Back in the day. We used to use, like Ether Delta, which was like the clunkiest thing in the world. It made no sense. It was absolutely horrendous. But we made a lot of money because we put in the effort and went the extra mile. You may also want to interact with some Defi bands. So this is without. Defi is essentially just. You don't have a central point of person controlling things. You're interacting with a contract to do certain things.

Yeah. So you might want to use something like AAVE or Maker or Syrup, for example, and take out some loans and try, you know, playing around with some defi stuff. Again, not something you have to do, you know, regularly, but it's worthwhile just interacting with it so you can get a feel for how these contracts work.

Yeah. And you could do things like you can place a bet where you lock up your money and you escrow it. You could do things on polymarket, you can lend out your money so you get yield on it. You could stake your eth, so you get yield on that as well. There's lots of things that you can do and you can start to experiment there as well. I personally don't do a lot of DEFI stuff because I just don't want to waste my time or learn about it because it's not in line with what my investment goals are. I do read about them and I may experiment with like a dollar or two just to see how things work and how the technology is progressing, but I personally don't do that with any of my funds. And really, you're getting in this space now, if you're going to be on crypto Twitter a lot, you're going to see a lot of stuff. You're going to have a software wallet with a small amount of funds in there and you're going to be signing everything. You're going to be interacting with new stuff. You're going to see how it works. You're going to be potentially farming, you're going to get significant airdrops, you're going to be spending a bit of time doing this in the space.

Yeah. You really want to be all around your wallets, understanding how that works, understanding, you know, bridging funds as well. So, like, you might want to be buying some, some base meme coins or maybe you want to get some money on a layer three on Arbitrum. So now you're really using some more complex stuff with your wallet. So, you know, we've got, we've got guides and tutorials over collectorship if you need help with that. But you're going to start to get to some areas where, you know, things are getting a little bit more complicated. You're going to really want to make sure you're spending the time actually thinking about what's going on. Don't just go barreling through and approving, you know, everything off your wallet because that's where you're going to get stung.

I actually. So I actually did quite a lot of that on Arbitrum. I was right into seeing what crypto gaming was like, bridge funds across, which was just dodgy at the time. It's like you send the funds, they don't show up. There's some guy in the background in a basement just feeding him pizzas. He's just clicking, okay, approving transactions on whatever dodgy bridge we used. And then we approved like millions and millions of transactions because it's like $0.01 to do on an L2. You don't care because you only got like 100 bucks on there just to experiment. But that was a lot of fun and it really opened my eyes to what an L2 can be. And you're going to want to learn like a little bit of charting as well. I think it helps. So this isn't. Ben and I both learned the hard lesson, as everyone does. We are not traders. Everyone thinks they are. They see these traders on Twitter with all these fancy things on the screen. Look, I predicted the Future. I made 10,000% gain. You can be a trader like me. You can earn this skill, learn this skill in five minutes. You can't. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of your life away. But one thing you can do is spend maybe an hour on a trading course and you can look at some basic things like learn about highs, lows, macd, Fibonacci, sequence, time, sequencing, a few things that will help you with entries. If you want to push into a significant position, they can really help, like especially when it touches on lines of resistance, pullbacks, rsi, those kind of things do help with entry. It gives you just a few more data points in order to make an informed decision on what you're doing. You don't have to do it every time, but it's just a nice thing to have in your toolkit.

And the next thing is also having your structuring, right? So you know, where do you hold your assets, how is it structured legally? Do you have the right tax compliance? You know, are you using the exchanges correctly? You know, are you using otc? If you've got high values, are you aware of liquidity and fees and spreads? So a lot of, like the more intricate pieces can, can add up to a lot if you've got a large portfolio as well.

And sometimes it comes into. It's not really about the fees, it's how quickly can I get in and out and what's convenient for me. Sometimes that's Just OTC and just on structuring. This is an advanced technique.

Even. I know a lot of people that are very advanced in crypto don't do this. And they really should. This is you speaking to your lawyer and accountant and looking at what you do and how to make it more tax efficient and how to protect those assets. And these are things like utilizing a trust structure, discretionary trust, family trust, those kind of things, sorry, unit trust. Having a company or having a company as a trustee of a trust. And these are very individual situations that you need to talk to your accountant, start with your accountant about. And these are actually very easy things. They're relatively cheap to do. They're easy conversations. And once you've set it up, this will save you so much over your life. We had Adrian Forza on from Crypto Tax Australia, and he has a lot of people that come to him where they've made million dollars, millions of dollars in crypto, and they're like, great, how do I get this out without doing this and that? And they're like, well, we can only do certain things to. To minimize this. You know, we should have done this a couple of years ago and set that up in those structures before you actually need it. So you can use them when you need it.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is again about. Because when you have a lot of money and it's income, you get taxed at your marginal rate. So if you're on the top tax bracket that's 47%, you want to be able to send that income to other places where it's taxed less or leave it in a company. So you're paying the company tax rate.

Yep.

So that is a very, very important thing.

Yep, yep. Bang on bergs, you know, and then the other things you can do as well as you're heading down that sort of more advanced route are things like, you know, loans you can start to lend against your assets. So you can use something like block earner, where you can, you know, lend against your crypto. You know, maybe you want to use a bit of leverage. You know, maybe you're starting to diversify into.

Other crypto assets or even into some of the, you know, crypto companies on the. On the stock market. Debt recycling as well is another interesting one. And I Burg has a little bit of that, so.

Oh, dude, let's go. So I think what really clicked for me before I understood it in crypto was debt recycling, where if you have a house and a mortgage like that rate was very cheap before. It's like 2%. Now it's like 6. And if you understand inflation, you want to beat inflation, whatever that hurdle rate is. So if you have access to cheap capital, consider investing that capital in whatever investment you choose to beat that rate. The advantage of debt recycling is say, I have a house with $100,000 worth of equity in it. I can redraw 80% generally. You know, speak, speak to all your professional services, financial advisors, all those kind of people. This is not financial advice for you. This is just the nuts and bolts of how it works. Redraw 80k of that. I can now take that 80k at 6% and invest it in the market. I believe in the next years bitcoin will outperform 6%. So that is where I put my money instead of against my mortgage. And I can claim a tax Shield on that 6% as well. So 6% is reduced by, you know, whatever my marginal rate of tax is. So that becomes very, very important where you can get access to cheaper capital and accelerate your wealth. It's something you should talk to your accountant about and a mortgage broker.

Love it, really do. Just accessing cheaper capital to outpace inflation and the interest rates.

And this is the beauty. This brings us to things like MicroStrategy, which is, you know, it's a, it's a stock. And once you start to understand bitcoin leverage inflation, you understand what MicroStrategy is doing. I remember in 2016 when I was studying economics in my MBA and they're talking about debasement of currency and a race to the bottom. I do not understand why a country isn't printing, you know, like a trillion dollars and buying heaps of bitcoin because that is going to dominate everyone else in the coming years. This is exactly what Michael Saylor is doing in micro strategy. He's printing script, so he's printing more equity. He's buying more bitcoin, which drives the price up, which allows him to unlock more equity to then buy more Bitcoin. He protects to the upside and downside. His options market is the biggest and hottest market there is. And he has said that his.

Market cap will be more than Microsoft, which is like 3 trillion and he's currently at like 100 billion, something like that. I completely believe that. And this is one of those things where it's uncomfortable to understand. A creative dilution where you're getting diluted in your shares because more getting printed but. But you're actually. Your shares are worth more. Very complex to understand, get your head around. But Once you understand it and like that photo, Ben, out of a hundred people one understands bitcoin. Out of a hundred bitcoiners one understands micro strategy. You are in the minority of minority. You are uncommon amongst uncommon people. This is something to learn about.

Love it. Stacking bitcoin, that's the ultimate goal.

And mate, even other advanced things like people come in and yeah, they'll buy a meme coin, whether it's on a dex or it's on a, an exchange and as soon as they buy it, they're kind of like, how much is going to go up? What's happening? You know, do I keep looking at it? They look at it, they make it go up, it goes up like 100, then a round trip, that goes down to 50. Then they round trip their entire stack. Everyone knows this. Here's the advanced thing to do. When you buy your meme coin, if you buy it at a dollar, determine what your sell order is. Place your sell order in that exchange or that dex, wherever it is and say, I'm going to sell half my stack at $2 and then I'm going to ladder out from there. Just put your sell orders in. So like I'm selling half when I double my money. So essentially that's just taking your initial investment out. Then at another dollar, I'm selling another 20%, another dollar and all these stretch goals and then you can go on holiday and if that coin goes well, all of those orders will just execute and you'll come back and you'll have the money there. You weren't sitting in front of a computer, you weren't freaking out, you had a plan and it worked.

Yeah. And you're not being emotional, that's a really important one.

And mate, so we've talked about the get rich slowly wallet and a fun wallet, but I think the biggest one here is really wisdom. And wisdom is knowing the long term consequences of your, your actions. Let me say it again, wisdom is knowing the long term consequences of your actions. So if you start to get out of the minutiary and start to think long term and think in multiple cycles, what am I going to do? Your decision making becomes so easy. You strip away all the noise, all of the crazy things that we've talked about, you get back to the essentials, what you want and then think in multiple cycles. And that is just so freeing and you don't get shaken by every little movement in the market.

Yeah, that's a big one that I'm going to keep driving home to anyone in our membership group on the podcast. It's just like, let's just be patient, guys. Yes, there might be a coin underperforming, but what is performing right now? Like, let's just take it. Take it easy. Like, we're thinking too short term. Think longer.

Yeah. And like, bitcoin is back at prices not seeing since last week. It went from 108,000 to 90. I'm like, Bro, what? About six months ago, it was like, 40. And this is where you start to go from mayhem to mastery. You start to. You see all the noise, you cut it out. You don't worry. You're calm and collected. You know that you're sorted. Yeah. And you really develop mastery in this space.

Yeah. Love it. That was awesome, man.

What an. What an alpha drop. This is like. These are years of lessons Ben and I have had to learn the hard way and spend and lose millions of dollars to actually. Literally. Yeah, yeah.

Hopefully enjoy those, folks. What a cracking episode. If you enjoyed this, what do you think there's someone else in your circle that would really appreciate getting these tips? Please, please, please send them this podcast to how we Grow the Podcast each and every week. No sponsors, no affiliates, no nonsense. No, it's how we grow, and we really want to help you grow and crush this bull market in 2025. So please share it around. Thank you so much, and we'll see you on the next episode.