53. How I Became A Millionaire From Crypto And How You Can To Starting With $0

Setting up an automated strategy that you forget about was the best thing that I ever did because I'm impatient and I just like, want things to happen fast. But investing isn't a fast thing, right? Unless you have a heap of money to begin with, you need to start out with sort of just recurring, slowly building up your portfolio. And over time it really does build up to a substantial amount.

This just rings true across pretty much all the finance books I've read. Everyone says, pay yourself first. Like take 10% of your wage and invest it in stuff. And how do you do that? And you do it every week. You. You automate it.

Welcome back to another episode of the Benneberg Show. With your favorite NBA and high school dropout talking everything, crypto, business and personal growth. Today we've got Berg's back from the dead.

He's.

He's been in surgery, getting a new nose, bit of plastic surgery. Bergs.

Oh, mate. So actually, I'll tell you what, so I got a call. This guy's doing my security doors, right? And he's like, oh, yeah, I got to come over, I got to fix him here to do this little thing. And. And I'm like, oh, look mate, I've just had surgery. I'm pretty tired and like, I've just had like a septum done. He's like, you vain bastard. He just starts bagging me out. I barely know this guy, right? He's just a tradie. I'm like, bro, what the. It's the inside of my nose. And he's like, oh. And then he lets it go. Anyway, I've had surgery. I'm a bit nasal today. But we've got a cracking episode today on crypto. I'm really looking forward to this one, man.

Just copying it from the trade.

Oh, made a copper from everyone. It's ridiculous.

So today we're talking about how I build a million dollar crypto portfolio starting with basically nothing. And this is not a bragging episode. This is genuinely just like sharing my strategy of how I've gone from basically starting with not much 6 years ago I was sharing a bunk bed with my brother when I was 18 to, yeah, building up my crypto portfolio. Exactly how I did it, lessons learned. And how you can do it too, with some things at the end, if you hold on to the end. We're going to share some areas that we think are good to look into from an old coin perspective as well. So I posted this on Twitter recently and I got a heap of engagement. So we thought it'd be a good opportunity to maybe dig a little bit deeper into the strategy, how it all played out and how we got here, and how you can follow that same strategy as well.

And this is incredibly impressive because you did this in not much time at all. And it was, you started off with less, less crypto than I did after I did. And you, you had a lot more than I did very, very quickly. So go through exactly how you did that because it is fascinating.

So I think it's a mix of having a simple strategy to begin with, but then also having to put in your riskier play. So for me, as I mentioned, you know, go back six years ago, I was still sharing a bedroom with my brother, the bunk bed, actually. We come from a middle class family. Like we didn't have a lot of money. Everything that I invested I had to sort of work for. And I had so much conviction in the crypto space, but didn't have any money to invest. So I was forced down the path of dollar cost averaging. And we all know what that is. It's basically putting in money regularly each week. And I just put, put in whatever I could afford to invest to begin with. So that was a few dollars to begin with. I did it through Get Paid in Bitcoin, which I still use in this date. So your, your employer can basically pay a percentage of your wage directly into Bitcoin. And I found that the best way to do that was just through automated, like an automated buy, because I tried to do it manually week after week and it's just boring and you don't want to forget about it's just all too hard and then end up spending the money in your bank and on other shit. Right? So setting up an automated strategy that you forget about was the best thing that I ever did because I'm impatient and I just like want things to happen fast. But investing isn't a fast thing, right? Unless you have a heap of money to begin with. You need to start out with sort of just recurring, slowly building up your portfolio. And over time it really does build up to a substantial amount.

The. That's right. And this just rings true across pretty much all the finance books I've read. Everyone says pay yourself first, like take 10% of your wage and invest it in stuff. And how do you do that? And you do it every week. You automate it, you get someone else to do it, you outsource it. So it automatically happens. It goes out of your bank account, you can't spend it. And that stack keeps Growing and growing. Warren Buffett, always be compounding, don't interrupt it unnecessarily. This is what that does as well. And always be buying. So you're going to buy the tops, you're going to buy the bottoms and you're going to end up somewhere in the middle. Like all those finance books, it just boils down to dollar cost averaging is the base level where people need to start. And it is so effective.

Yeah, spot on. So I started doing that for about six months.

About six months in this. So this was 2018. So I discovered Bitcoin 2017. I didn't buy for six months because it took me six months to really go deep and understand what I wanted to do. I then had a decent stack and I don't advise or recommend to anyone, but I was still living at home. I went and I still didn't have any money. I went to the bank and I think I've said this on the pod. I asked for a loan to buy crypto and obviously they just laughed me out of the room. They said basically, you know, get the, get the hell out of here. I then went back the next day and said I was going on a holiday to America and I needed money for a holiday in $20,000 for a holiday. And literally within three hours I had transferred me $20,000, 12% interest straight to my bank and I went straight to the Exchange and bought 75% Bitcoin, 20% ETH and 5% of small coins. And this is the start of when I started to diversify. Now I bought Bitcoin predominantly around, geez, I think it was around US$3,000, three to US$4,000 to somewhere around sort of five and a half, 6,000 Aussie was where I bought a lot of my Bitcoin. Late 2018, Ethereum dumped and I, I was at Ethcon in a Sydney in 2018 and that's when I first started to go heavy into Ethereum. So I had a little bit of Ethereum at the time, but I at Eastcon just got super bullish. You know, Vitalik was there, Kane Warwick was there when he was building synthetics. Like all the heavy hitters in Ethereum were there. And I was just like, oh my goodness, this is insane. At the time Ethereum I think was $80 Australian. And the talk of the conference was when Ethereum was going to get back to $100.

I just remember going, oh my goodness. Like this is, this is amazing. So I started to rotate some of my bitcoin into Ethereum. I also put more. I started to switch my dollar cost averaging into Ethereum and went hard on a project at the time called Haven. Now Haven now is what we known as synthetics. It's a defi exchange basically and they do synthetic assets now I bought into that project because I saw Kane Warwick talk about Haven at this conference. I was like wow, this is gonna be massive. Went heavy into Haven. It didn't do anything bergs for six months and as you know off the Richter ADHD impatient Ben Simpson over here said like this, this project isn't doing anything. After 6 months I sold all my haven't at sub 10 million dollar market cap. And then at some point during that year after I sold it it migrated into synthetics. It went from I think a 10 million dollar market cap to somewhere near a billion dollar market cap.

Oof.

Insane.

100X.

I haven't done the calculations because it makes me sick but it would have an X mate. There you go, there you go. Race would have been tens of millions, I'll put it that way. So that was my biggest lesson I learned in terms of like selling out of a project too soon. There's a fine line between selling out too soon and not allowing the project to deliver what it says to deliver and holding on for too long and the project, you know, you're just having hope and FOMO that not even FOMO just hope that the project's going to return. Now I was on the, on the earlier side, I wasn't patient enough. I didn't let the project do its thing and lost a lot of potential upside but it taught me a valuable lesson.

Exactly right. And it's hard to know when you have an idea of what you want the project to execute on what's going to happen in the next six months if they're not delivering. You just don't know. But again with, with any investing it's not always an on off decision. Like if you've got a thousand of a token you can sell 500 and keep 500. So you're still in the game.

Yeah, yeah. I think too many people think it's a black and white decision. Burks of like I'm either in or out. And I say that all the time on our one on one calls that we do with, with members is that like you don't need to be black or white. You can go half and half, you can go 75, 25. You don't have to be all out or all in.

That's right.

So the next Thing I did was I started to invest early into mole coins. One was Nexus Mutual, which is a defi smart contract platform that I still own some of today. And then also that I was in, I invested into a few early projects in the Metaverse. So there was Red Fox, there was Mana, that were the main two, there was a couple of others I invested in early as well. But this was 2018. So this was before the Metaverse was even a thing. This is three years before, four years before Facebook, you know, changed their name to Meta. And this was the biggest lesson I learned in terms of being able to take calculated risks on trends that are very early. And if you're very early on a trend and you can get the right project, it doesn't actually, to be fair, it doesn't even need to be the right project because when the narrative plays out, a turkey can fly in a hurricane and everything pumps because you're in a project that people aren't necessarily looking at the product. They're just looking at a project that's been in that space that now there's a lot of influx of money and money finds homes that can. That can talk to a narrative. And the Metaverse was the biggest, like, narrative. I remember when Decentraland just absolutely took off. Like, it was the day that met. It was the day that Facebook renamed to Meta, was the. I'm pretty sure the absolute top for Decentraland. And that was when I'd learned the lessons from 2017. I'd been working crypto full time, and I was able to take out sort of considerable amounts of profits during that time and rotate into to cash, fiat dollars, money on the bank money. And that was when I made, you know, the most of. Most of those gains.

This is such an important lesson. So there's a couple lessons here. The first one is be active at the top and the bottom. So when things go and they're starting to top, do something. If they're bottoming, do something. And in general terms, if they're topping and you got some, just start to average out in the bottom, start to average in with your cash on the sidelines. And I remember this point with Decentraland, I actually went and looked at their product and I went in, looked at their world, went into the Decentraland world. I'm like, what the fuck is this? Like, why is this absolutely pumping? And we're seeing this now with, with and even me, I had a lot of FOMO where I'm like, oh, I should buy this, I should do this. I Didn't end up buying because it was a top and it was a great decision not to do that. But we're seeing the same thing with AI and AI tokens at the moment, where just because they're in the AI space, people just like literally look for AI. That's great. Buy it and it pumps. And then because it goes up, it gets more attention and people start to buy more. And if that's happening and price is appreciating, you need to think, first of all, why is it appreciating? And who's on the other side of that trade? It's going to be someone like Ben selling his profits to you.

Yeah. Once everyone's talking about something, you're too late. You know, again, on these one on one calls, people are asking me about like crypto, AI tokens and whatever else. It's like, guys, the bubbles popped. It's already over. You missed it, you missed the boat. Yeah, it's time to, it's time to look at the next trend.

And Ben's talking about 2018, probably about then tokens that people were buying. I won't name the token, but a lot of people bought it and it was an AI token back then. And since then the project's been going along. They honestly haven't delivered that much. But because people were still holding that token since 2018, which is what, five years ago, they've still got big bags of it. They bought it cheap, AI pumped, they start selling it off, more people start buying it, they're emptying their bags, they're offloading it to you, and you're going to be in for the next round trying to offload it next time.

And I just wanted to give context to people that weren't around back then in crypto. So we'll use Decentraland. Decentraland was and still is probably one of the top two metaverses in crypto. You know, during 2018 when I would 2018, 2019 when I was, you know, buying.

Or accumulating some of these metaverse projects. Let's use Decentraland. $50 million market cap. So the price, the token back then was around 4, 5 cents ish, 3 to 4 cents. Bergs at the top of its run two years later. So it went, it went from 5 cents to a peak of $5. That's a hundred X in. In a course of a week. It went from this is when met, this is when Facebook renamed to meta. And this is, this is what I talk about mainstream narrative getting in beforehand when they renamed Meta to Facebook, no matter. Decentraland went from 81 cents to $5 in the space of about three weeks.

Yeah.

Insane. The chart is literally vertical like this. It is 90 degrees upwards.

It's crazy. I've just finished reading the Psychology of Money, and people really don't invest on, you know, numbers and facts. They invest on narratives. Like, is it easy to tell to someone else? Can I explain it? Does it make sense in my head? Does it fit with my cognitive biases? And then if I can understand that and I can explain it to someone else, they're likely to understand it, believe it, and go invest in that thing. So if you have a strong narrative with a few market trends and direction, that thing is going to take off, whether they're capable of delivering it or it's a great product or not.

I was lucky enough to be able to sell out of those projects. And by the way, when the market's pumping and you're making like, you know, you know, decent chunk of change, it is very hard to sell. And I didn't do this in the previous cycle, but 2021, 2022 was when I did sell. And the reason I was able to do that was because, one, I'd been through that market cycle before, but two, I was, I was, I had a plan. I wrote out on a spreadsheet before this happened, the targets for the prices that I wanted to hit. And I remember the day that I started sell, and it was like it was a decision of looking at the product, going literally going into the metaverse, literally seeing what these guys had built and what it was valued. And I'm going, no way on God's green earth is this thing worth multi billions of dollars. This thing is shot.

That's exactly it. It's like going in there, looking at, do these things match up? Because you've got to remember, these companies, they don't release their finances, their balance sheets, how much sales they have. They don't have any of that. It's literally a future projection of what this thing could be. The nearest kind of simile would be VC investing. We're investing early. It's hopes and dreams and you hope to get somewhere. And if you're sitting there and you've got an uncomfortably big bag and you're sitting pretty and you look at that and go, woof. I don't know if they're going to make that or like, if someone comes in and actually looks at this, it says, what really, what's really going on? I should start to get down to a comfortable position where I sleep well at night. And the other thing is if you start thinking oh, what bike should I buy, what car should buy or house or boat, that is a signal where you need to start averaging out.

Yeah, spot on burgs. So that was like a lot of the gains. And then for two years between 2018 and 2019 I actually took 100% of my salary in bitcoin. I was still living at home.

The cash I was earning from my previous job I was taking all in bitcoin. So I was just accumulating heaps. Heaps.

Such a lad. What, what a, what a boss move, mate. It's just like pay me 100 in bitcoin. Just all in mate, just jump in.

I was all in. And then, and then obviously I had to get a life and I was like, okay, I need some money. And now for the last two or three years I took a bit of a break between November 2021 and the end of last year because we ran from 60k USD down to 20 and I, and I thought we were overvalued. And then I started buying again as of December. So I take 30 of my salary in bitcoin and go straight to bitcoin each week. I own Ethereum, I own some NFTs and I own a couple of altcoins.

That is Nexus Mutual, the smart contract platform and also Maple Finance Defi. And that's not recommendations to buy, that's just from a transparency perspective. I've gone from owning 15 to 20 altcoins down to 2. And I've never been more bullish on bitcoin and Ethereum. Yeah. And that's where I think a lot of the value is going to accrue to. And I think for a lot of people that are sitting at home that maybe have a portfolio or been thinking about having a portfolio like the lesson here is that it's not too late. People always think it's too late. You know it was at this price I missed out and da da da da. I look five to 10 years in the future, right? Bitcoin right now is a half a trillion dollar asset market cap gold. Right. And bitcoin is the digital gold. Gold is a 10 trillion dollar market cap. Even if we are able to get 50%, if we're able to penetrate 50% of the gold market cap, that's a 5x right now on the bitcoin price. And that's just gold alone. Right? So like there is so much growth to come to sit there and say you're too late. You know, it, you, it's going to be so many people do it. Just human psychology, right? But then the, you know, moving forward in two or three or four years time, you'll be saying the same thing then about now, you know, it's never too late.

Exactly. And think about this in terms of like, think of it in 10 years. When you think long term, your decision decisions become a lot easier because you remove the emotion of the day. And one thing that pops into my head was my real estate agent, like.

Hey, I went to go sat in his office and he's got this photo and it's just a skeleton sitting on a bench and it's like waiting for real estate prices to go down. It was just hilarious, right? And obviously because he's selling, he's got incentive, he's got everything. But the reality is that if you're waiting for something to go down, to push all your money in time and time again, we have seen that is the wrong strategy to do. You need to build your. And this is any market, right, any finance book you read, you need to build your base. And something like over the last 10 years, the top 10 days have been responsible for 50% of the gains. What are the odds you're going to pick one of those days? Probably zero. Are you going to be at your computer? You're going to pick it. You're going to get your money in time. How will you know? You don't know what's going to happen in the future. Just averaging and build that base. And once you've got that base, do what Ben did, take a small allocation and start to go further out on the risk curve because those are the things, you don't know when they're going to hit. But there's such asymmetric upside that you can really bloom. Your portfolio will just absolutely bloom. That's exactly what happened to you, Ben, where you said you were uncomfortably long in an altcoin and that thing made you a lot of money and you are now able to do the things you are today because of that one move where you thought nothing of it at the time. It sat there, it could have gone to zero. That would have been okay because it wasn't a lot of money. But then it actually bloomed to this massive amount and you took action. That is a key thing, take action. You sold it into fiat and that changed your life.

100 it did. And we had some losses along the way. It wasn't just this one or two investments like it was all green and rosy like, you know, burks. You and I both got into some investments, early doors that like dingo the right way. Like, you know, early on ICOS projects went to zero. Like, you know, we're barreling sort of, you know, hundred dollar ETH into like ICOs thinking they're going to do well, and they all, oh, geez, I don't think, I don't know one ICO that actually like turned into a decent project.

It was horrible. So at the time, like let's say eth is a hundred dollars, right? And you put ten eighth into a project, it's $1,000 in terms of money. It's not that much. It's a thousand dollars. You. Let's see how we go. If I would have kept that like, it would have been at least today's terms, it would have been a 17x, right? So that 1,000 would be 17,000. And if I times it by all the projects I did, I kind of think like the millions that I would.

Have, I'm like, fuck.

And the thing is you offset those losses, but the losses themselves are really small because the cost base is small as well. And you know, this is just part of it. Like one thing is investing money and making money. The other part is keeping it and growing your wealth. And that is very hard to do. And you only learn by doing. You will get burnt, you will lose money, you will end up with a lot of lessons. Look, in life, you either end up with the money or the lesson, but that is the price you pay. That is the entry fee for investing. It's uncomfortable, but it's what you need to do if you want to be successful in investing.

Yeah. And I just want to reiterate, the best thing that I've ever done was implement a boring automated strategy that I forget about. We're at the 28th of March. It was fucking Christmas yesterday, it feels like. But three months have gone by where I've bought bitcoin every single week since December. And I look at my portfolio that just like my transactions up at this point I'm like, holy shit. Like there's a deep like crypto bitcoins up 70% since I started buying. I've doubled my money already. Basically like it. And I've done nothing and. But I haven't done this because I thought that was gonna happen. I just know from experience the buying in bear markets when it's boring with an automated strategy just works and people complicate the shit out of it. They start to trade, they try and get into D5. They're trying to stake and earn this compounding. They're doing all this crazy shit and guess What? I'm up 70% in four months. I've done nothing that is better and nearly guaranteed than any trader out there right now.

In traditional markets it's something like between 80 and 90% of just boring index funds outperform all the hedge funds and investment funds. Just that strategy or people actually trying to pick things and apply. These are really smart people. Apply their knowledge and their models. Only about 10% of them are better than a basket of goods from the market.

Bitcoin's annual compound growth rate averaged out of the last 10 years is over 100%. You just held Bitcoin from 10 years ago. You would beat every hedge fund in the world. Now we're not saying this metamorphs listeners to rub it in. We don't want to rub salt in the wounds. This is just like make it ultra clear. Because we hear people every day trying to come to crypto and just make these crazy investments. They have no bitcoin and they've got 17 altcoins. They're trying to like get from zero to a million in four days. 99% of the time. It's not going to work. And the reason I'm so passionate about telling you this is not to brag. It's just to say how fucking simple it is. But we overthink it.

So this is the thing we, we think like we get seduced by complexity where we want to think that to get ahead, it needs to be complex. There needs to be trading tools, there needs to be some kind of insight. But the reality is you don't need that. And it's so boring to say, but that is how you build your base. And then you get into the spicy stuff. And if you're looking at someone like Nassim Taleb and a few other people, they call this a barbell strategy. And I really like that name because barbell should be even on both sides, but whatever. And they say one side of the barbell is basically what Ben has described your Bitcoin and your Ethereum. If we're just talking about crypto and that's about 80 to 90% of what you do, that's on the left side. You don't touch that. You just keep dollar cost averaging and you do not touch it. Those plates just grow. And on the right side you got some spicy stuff. You can buy some NFTs, you could buy a couple of projects. You can run into some narratives. You can buy and hold those coins. And that is the asymmetric upside. If you lose that 5 or 10% on that side doesn't matter too much because you still got your, you know, 90, 95% on the other side. But if that hits and that blooms, like what happened with your altcoins. Mate, that's amazing. You sell that off, you put it on the other side of the barbell and keep somebody for yourself. Go on a nice holiday. But that is literally the, the way to, to succeed in these markets.

Yeah, spot on. Now we just want to touch on three sectors that we're looking at. Our team of analysts at Collective Shift are looking at. And if you don't know, we, we basically do investment research and analysis for over 2000 members globally. And that's why we speak from a position of sort of research, not just, you know, mumbo jumbo that we think three areas that we like. One is the layer twosbergs and you, you picked up a nice little airdrop at a helicopter. Money over the, over the weekend. Arbitrary.

Oh mate, how good. So I've been in Arbitrum for over a year. It's layer two Ethereum ecosystem, right? And really the, the point of difference here is you go over to layer two and instead of paying $5 in gas, you're paying like 5 cents. It's incredible. You can do really quick transactions. There was a game called Bridge World. There's a token called Magic. Got involved in that with a guild. It's got NFTs. It's kind of like, you know, one of those nerdy Dungeons and Dragons card games. You can send people on quests, you do all this stuff. So we're stuffing around in there. So all of a sudden they're like, hey, Arbitrum drop. Here you go. So I claim my tokens and just for me, I wasn't heavily involved. It was one of the lower allocations. But that was $4,000 an airdrop. Four grand bang just arrived. And then in the guild I was in, there's three of us and we both put in 1/8 each and we did a bunch of activity. That Guild got about $12,000, which is just incredible. So we'll reallocate that. And then the two other people that are in that guild, they ended up getting, I think $14,000 and $10,000 each. That is just from being early to an ecosystem seeing what it's about. Making maybe $20 worth of transactions is what I did. And then you get this amazing airdrop and These are the areas this has been on collectorship's radar for a while. We made multiple videos over a year ago about how to actually take 20 bucks, go over there, do a couple of transactions and these chains will reward those people. Like these are the kind of areas that you can get into for a significant monetary reward. It's incredible.

Yeah. And there's some other ones there. You can also look into Ethereum scaling solutions, which I feel as a Nick and Matt have been talking about forever. So you've got Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon, so you can check that out. You can also head over Collective Shift. We've done some, a heap of research on these tokens in simple form so you understand what they do, how they work over CollectiveShift IO for a starter membership, I think you get access to that, maybe Insider, but you can check over.

Yeah, yeah, Starter will have access to it, so all memberships will have access to that. And we've got the upcoming airdrops as well, ones that we know about and ones that we think are going to have future airdrops and how you carry out activities on there and potentially get rewarded in the future. It's just an amazing feeling. Just helicopter money straight to your face. Here you go. Brightened up my day, mate. I'm going to go to Japan.

The next sector that we like is gaming. We've been talking about this a little bit on the, on the podcast as well. But crypto gaming, there's been so much VC capital invest into this sector. A lot of the, the big VCs doubling down on this, on this industry and crypto gaming or gaming in general, just a massive, massive industry. Some examples there that we like Alluvium, Immutable X and Apecoin. Again, you can check out some of that research over Collective Shift and last but not least, liquid staking. So this is where you can stake your tokens, for example, Ethereum, and you can basically participate in the, the network to help the network run and you get basically rewards to do that. So some, some examples of liquid staking is where you group your capital together and you go and stake with larger amounts with, with different people. And some examples there that would like a rocket pool and also Lido, that's only financial advice or investment advice, but they're just ones that we're looking out to and you can jump on collective shift starter memberships, 19 bucks a month. It's absolutely donuts if you really want to get serious with crypto and build your portfolio.

And this is the thing like the majority of people will easily find out how to get into Bitcoin and Ethereum. And if you're on the other side of that barbell, the reason people don't go in there is because it's complicated. It's hard to understand, it's hard to set it up and it's hard to keep it. At Collective Shift, we just simplify that. You follow along with a video step by step and we teach you the ins and outs. And at the end of it, your crypto that you have will be safe, you understand it a lot more and you'll be ahead of 99 of people.

Yeah, yeah, spot on. And we've helped a lot of a lot of people recently. So go in there and check it out. That's how I built my one million dollar portfolio. We're starting from zero. Hopefully that's giving you some tips and tricks and strategies so you can start to build your portfolio and also some more risk on areas that we just mentioned about in those sectors. If you like these episodes, we'd love you to share it with a friend. Is there anyone else that's in crypto that's more been on the fence, not really sure how to start or needs a strategy? Send in this episode. We'd love to help them out. And Berg, it's good to have you back, man.

Mate, it's great to be back. Love that episode. It just is so reaffirming for me. I need to hear those things every so often just to remind myself this is the way.

Spot on, man. Well, thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time on Bennebergs. Catch you.

Thanks, champions. See you later.