Brad Hart- Cryptocurrency and Blockchain [Beginners Guide

Welcome to episode 28 of Escape the Rat Race Radio. I'm your host, Christian Rodwell. And this is your ticket to Escape the nine to five.

This is the closest thing to I drew a dollar, I drew a five dollar bill and gave me five dollars for it that I've ever seen in my life. This is pretty insane. You're literally buying codes, computer code when you buy a cryptocurrency. Had I just taken that 5,000 do and put it into what were 5 cent bitcoins at the time, you can do the math. I'd be worth Somewhere around 8 or 900 million today when you consider that bitcoin is split into different things a couple times and whatnot. So I call that my 100 million plus mistake.

Greetings, escapees. I hope you're doing well today. Now on this week's episode of Skate the Rat Race Radio, I'm changing things up a little bit and I'm actually going to share a live webinar that I hosted a couple of weeks ago with my good friend Brad Hart, the founder of Make More Marbles. And you may remember Brad has been a previous guest on Escape the Rat Race Radio back in the early days when we talked a little bit about Brad's digital marketing expertise. However, there is another side to Brad. Brad is one of my go to guys when it comes to all things crypto. Now, Brad was in the game when it comes to bitcoin back in 2009 when barely anybody knew about it. And at that time, bitcoin was trading at just 0.05 US cents. Now today, Bitcoin is up to around $7,500. It's gone insane. Now I want to make sure that all Escape the Rat Race members are well educated in this area. There's a lot of hype and a lot of talk about this cryptocurrency at the moment. And I want to prevent you from dabbling in something that you perhaps don't fully understand and getting your fingers burned. You're going to find out exactly what cryptocurrency is, why it's important and where it's heading. And if you don't know what blockchain means, you're going to get a clearer idea of what that is and how that works as well. So I don't want to wait around any longer. We're going to dive straight in to my interview with with Brad Hart and we're going through all things bitcoin, crypto and blockchain. Get ready.

Yeah. Thank you, Christian. And can Everybody hear me? Okay, Just raise your hand if you can hear me. Okay. Anybody? Anybody? Okay, great. So my background a little bit. So I started a hedge fund when I was 26 years old that returned 106% a year. But even going back further than that, in 2008, I was making apps as a side hustle right on the App Store. And basically back in 2008, when the iPhone just came out, you could just write a long essay about a topic and then pay somebody $300 to go code it for you. And then, you know, an app that would churn out, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month. It was really nice. And we did that a bunch of times. We thought we were super smart and we were making money, little bits at a time, all over the world. And I did that probably two or three times. A company came along and bought one of the apps for $5,000, which at that time was a lot of money for me. And I went to the guy who had been coding the apps. I said, hey, what would be like the thing you would code if you had all the money in the world, which $5,000 was at the time? He said, I would make a bitcoin trading app. I was like, what the heck is bitcoin? I never heard of it, right? This is 2008, 2009, so probably about early 2009. So I did my research, I looked at it. I'm like, I didn't really get it at the time and really understand it, but it seemed cool. I read the Satoshi white paper, I'm like, yeah, sure, let's make a bitcoin trading app. So this kid, right, he was like 19 at the time, wanted to go and create like, Coinbase, which now exists today. And you guys are probably all familiar with that's like the main trusted premier thing. And funny. Just side note, I actually met Fred Ursham, the founder of Coinbase, at Burning man this year. So that was super fun. But long story short, I give him the money, he doesn't. He can't get it done because he's not the technical know how, and he's trying to bite off way more than he could chew, and he fails. But had I just taken that $5,000 and put it into what were 5 cent bitcoins at the time? You can do the math. I'd be worth Somewhere around 8 or 900 million today when you consider that bitcoin is split into different things. A couple times there's been a few forks and whatnot. So I call that my 100 million plus mistake. But hey, coulda, woulda, shoulda, didn't. I did however, buy some along the line and I've been actively trading and investing in cryptocurrencies since 2012, 2013 and I bought some lost on that kind of whole cycle. And I've been following the space very intently, as I am for a lot of other kind of, hey, what's the next system that's going to replace the one that we currently have? There's an old Winston Churchill saying, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I think it could also be applied to maybe capitalism. Like we're an end stage capitalism. We're looking for better systems to support more people. And that's what technology allows us to do. So when you think about the blockchain, it's not just a cool investment property or opportunity or cryptocurrency. That's just the tip of the iceberg. It's exciting because people are making all this money and that's why people are talking about it. But the blockchain, if you think of cryptos as the car and then blockchain, is the road that the cars run on, creates so many opportunities for disrupting major, major industries like fraud, security, identity, health, healthcare, real estate transactions. Just there's so many pieces to it that are really exciting to myself and to others. So that's more what I focus on. And by the way, I've also, even though I made all those mistakes, managed to 50 plus X my returns in crypto depending on the day. That's been super nice as well. Again, coulda, woulda, shoulda wish I went way bigger on it. But hey, it is what it is and here we are. So I've been following space a long time. I've answered millions and millions of questions from everybody all over the world. Recently I was at a thing called Camp Maverick. Yannick Silver runs it and he's like, really? Coming with Richard Branson, a bunch of really great people. So Yannick at 3pm comes up to me, says hey, you're giving a panel on crypto in an hour. I'm like, did you forget to tell somebody about that? He's like, no, I think I told her. I'm like, oh yeah, you're giving the panel. Like you should have gave me a little bit of a heads up. But anyway, I get on in front of 120 millionaires, right? That's the Maverick does. They're like seven figure earners and tell them all about cryptocurrency. And I got so many great questions that I decided I would make a cheat sheet for them. So if they had that, that cheat sheet, I then opened up to make more marbles, which is my brand. And we touched the lives of, you know, a hundred thousand, if not a couple million people at this point with our content that we put out every day. And that got downloaded thousands and thousands of times that I can even track because I didn't put like a. You know, at first I was just like, here, here's the thing I made. And then it got so crazy that more and more questions, more and more cycles, more and more stages, more and more speaking opportunities, and now I do about two or three of these a week where I just answer people's questions. So that's where we landed today. And I'm additionally talking to some of the smartest people in the space where we have a crypto trading bot. We' on a course around the material and it's all with the lean of, hey, there's about 50 ways all of this could go up in flames today. No recourse, lose all your money. So be cognizant of that. Like, this is not the FDIC insured investments that we may all be used to playing in. This is really high on the risk portfolio. And if you're looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain investments, there's a lot of ways to see it all go toes up overnight without anything. But then again, I mean, the other side of it is like, this could be bigger than the freaking Internet if it comes to be what we think, right? Because it's going to change the way we fundamentally transact. It's going to distribute trust. There's a lot of pieces to it. So I think unless there's any, like, minor questions right now about my background or why I'm here today, I can answer those really quickly. Or we could just dive right into why I think cryptocurrency and blockchain are really exciting.

All right, cool. So why do I think cryptocurrency Blockchain is really exciting? So I'll just assume you guys know nothing and we'll start from there. Essentially, a blockchain is a public ledger system. So right now, society deals on the premise of a private ledger, right? So let's say I want to write you a check. George, for example, he's the first person I saw. So I write George a check. There's four ledgers in that transaction. There's my checkbook, there's my bank's ledger. There's George's bank's ledger and George's checkbook. All four of those need to agree that the money was there and the money has changed hands in order for that transaction to take place. They call it clearing a check. And it takes a while, right? It can take several days to clear that check, and then George has the money instead of me. Well, what if everybody in the world was working off the same ledger and 50 million computers around the world were all simultaneously deciding whether those transactions were valid? Does George have the money? Do I have the money? Has it changed hands? And is it in the blockchain? Meaning everybody can see that ledger from the beginning of time. So now it's like, to use novel Robin Kant's metaphor, a fly trapped in the amber. It would be impossible to change it without really messing up that fly's day, although he's already dead. So I guess it's going to be okay. But essentially this creates a lot of really interesting opportunities. So now instead of having to have a third party like a bank or a government come in and say, yeah, these transactions are valid, or, yeah, this, you know, this, this.

I guess this currency or this, this asset class exists. And yes, we can trade hands, and there's all these paperwork and middlemen. You can see how having this distributed trust system that's based on crypto cryptography, which is, you know, very big prime numbers, essentially, that allow those transactions to be kept highly secure. Now we can just do this in real time, and then it's in this ledger. Everybody can see the ledger, everybody has a copy of the ledger, and then we go on from there. So you don't change the past and you continue to write the future. And in order to pay for all this, because it does take quite a bit of computing power to run all these transactions, you get into what's called mining. I don't want to go super deep on mining right now, but essentially what it means is that people all around the world lend their computing power to this blockchain network that allows them to receive cryptocurrencies or tokens in exchange for that power that they give to the network in order to verify the transaction. So instead of like Visa having, you know, entire buildings of servers that they rent out, now this is distributed across the network, and then coins are rewarded to those miners on a regular basis in order for that to go. And so this is really exciting. This allows different things. Let's just talk about the public private key system for a minute, because I think that's important to understand. So any single person on the blockchain who has access to that information, you can just look it up@blockchain.info can see from a public standpoint, they don't have identity attached to it, what somebody owns at any given time. So, you know, there's an account out there somewhere that's just a public key. That's a string of numbers and letters that says this person owns 10 Bitcoin, for example. And then there's a private key on the back end that somebody has secured and is only known by them. That is a. It could be, again, a string of letters and numbers. It could be 24 key words. So I can go and claim, if I own those bitcoins, I can go and claim with my private key those 10 bitcoins at any time. And that's irrespective of whether I'm in Denmark. It's irrespective of whether I'm in the United States or Mexico or anywhere in the world. If I have those numbers in my brain or those. Those keywords in my brain, I can walk across a border with a billion dollars. When's the last time you try to walk across borders with cash in more than or valuable instruments in more than $10,000 increments? So that's a piece of it, the identity piece, the privacy piece. There's a lot of pieces to this that really make it exciting. Additionally, it allows you to share certain information through this public, private key function, but not other information. So let's use the example of I go to the bar and I don't know if it's 18 or 21 to drink in the UK, but it's 21 here. And what does the bar need to know about me to let me know if I can drink or not? Well, they need to know if I'm 21 years old, right? So you know what my birthday is. I right now hand in my id and then I'll be getting mailers from that bar for the next year. Because my ID also has, you know, my mailing address, it has my date of birth, it has my name, it has my all my identifying info. It has all the government records that are tied to that, and then their marketing system can track all that. Now, that's a pain in the ass for me. I don't really want that to happen, but I don't really have a choice right now. With blockchain, I have the ability to share specific pieces of information without giving access to other pieces of information because it's still encrypted. So if they just need to know my birthday, they just get that. And the same goes for healthcare records privacy. Any kind of marketing campaign you've ever been a part of, the people who want to collect all your data have to be approved to do so, and the specific pieces need to be approved. So that's an exciting thing. Think about a real estate transaction right now. Who's bought a piece of property before and dealt with 50 people in that transaction, right? You have to deal with the brokers, you have to deal with the lawyers, and you have to deal with the bankers. And they all want to know every single thing that you've ever done. They want to know your blood type, for crepe's sake. You know, it's like crazy, the amount of paperwork, when in reality it should just be the buyer and seller that can deal with each other. And the blockchain allows us to happen because now title, insurance, all these different pieces can kind of be eliminated from that and the end users can then transact based on a distributed trust system that verifies the transactions in real time. So any piece of property could theoretically, again, there's a lot of hiccups to figure out and this will be kind of down the road, but these are the opportunities that are coming. So let's just pick one more because I want to get into cryptocurrency, which is why you're all here. I think. There's also a huge, massive opportunity in the healthcare record space. That's a whole medical piece. But additionally, what excites me most is security and fraud. Right? So right now you have Fortune 500 companies in the United States and other places spending billions and billions and billions of dollars a year, and not to mention all the hundreds and hundreds of people or thousands of people that work at those companies. Buildings full of people to prevent fraud and to fix fraud once it's happened. In a blockchain system where all the participants are known, at least anonymously, that they have the money, that the money's been transferred, that it's in the right place, it essentially becomes a possibility to then roll back that system to before the fraud occurred and ultimately deter it completely. So just like when you have a backup on your Mac and you go back in Time Machine and say, hey, I want to roll back to when it wasn't that way because I messed something up. Well, you can do that with your finances and you can do that with your customer data. You can do that with your transactional data. Now so these are the types of opportunities that the blockchain will afford us when we worked out all the pieces. And I just want to make a few distinction because these questions come up all the time. It's not one blockchain. So the Bitcoin blockchain is different than the Ethereum blockchain is different than, you know, Microsoft's private blockchain, if they choose to build one. I'm sure they're already working on something, etc. So it provides a lot of opportunities for security. And all of these blockchains can be separate networks that don't talk to each other, thereby increasing the level of security additionally. So let's get into cryptocurrency, unless there's any questions about that stuff, because that stuff's really important to understand where this is all going. So let's get to the exciting part, which is money. Right? So why is cryptocurrency so exciting? Well, cryptocurrency, if you're familiar with the traditional banking system, all countries, But I believe three of which the U.S. is at war with, two, which, you know, I'm not going to comment on that, but it's an interesting way that that comes, have a central bank.

So the United States, the Bank of London, they're all central banks. And these banks are all typically held closely in trust with either governmental or private interests. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank. I can't speak to every central bank in the world, but the way I understand it, the Federal Reserve bank is owned as a private corporation, owned by individuals. We don't know who they are. Nobody audits the Fed. The Fed isn't a governmental agency even. They call it the Federal Reserve Bank. They work with the treasury to kind of increase the amount of supply and currency and mess with interest rates every once in a while and do things like qe, which is essentially printing money. They buy bonds that didn't exist before and the money's just there, right? That can do a whole lot of things to help and hinder the monetary system. It's also really, as Nathan Rothschild said, I believe in 1815, right after Napoleonic wars were won, he said a very chilling statement. He said, if I control a nation's wealth, I care not who makes its laws.

So central banking is a way to control wealth, therefore control a nation and then ultimately the world. If you believe that central bankers run the world. I don't know if you believe that or not. I don't know if that's true or not. I just, you know, it's A theory. So this is an opportunity to now take that power back and distribute it amongst the individual participants in that system, which is really exciting. So think about it this way. Now we have less middlemen in transactions that take a piece of everything. So there's more value in those transactions. The fraud capabilities are much lower, the security is much higher and there are multiple ways which we can transact with each other. So when you talk about cryptocurrencies, what you're really talking about are lines of computer code. I just want to be really clear. You can go on blockgeeks.com right now, which is a great educational website that I recommend everybody check out and I'll give you my cheat sheet. With all these different resources, you don't have to worry about it. I'll actually just put it in, in the chat right now.

Because I want you to have all the latest information. I update this pretty regularly. So this will tell you about all exchanges, all the different things. But the point I'm trying to make right now is that you can code a cryptocurrency in about 10 minutes if you know what you're doing.

So what does that mean? That means that anybody that has a computer for free and can watch a 10 minute video and figure out how to code this thing in solidity, which is an Ethereum based token protocol, meaning. So Ethereum is a type of cryptocurrency. It also allows people to code things on the Ethereum blockchain that are very like easy for a regular coder to do. So anybody that has a minor amount of coding knowledge can basically create a cryptocurrency like I'm the make more marvel sky. I could make a cryptocurrency called marbles and sell them to you for a dollar. They are not worth anything.

I would, you know, and anybody who can create their own currency can now go out and promote that currency as the next new hot thing that's going to be worth a bajillion dollars. And that's what a lot of people are doing right now. So I liken this to the pump and dump penny stock fads that were going on during the 90s, especially when the Internet was going on, you know, all the.com/era pump and dumps, like you have no value in this transaction whatsoever. Somebody made this thing up and now they're promoting it as if it's gonna go to a bajillion. And here's the thing, as people get excited, they start buying it and it does move because the market caps are so tiny. Right. If any participants start buying and selling this thing, it'll start to move and people get excited and it becomes a frenzy and there's more information, propaganda. And then a bunch of unsophisticated investors get together and say, oh my God, this thing's going to Pluto. And then the traders catch on and the traders bump it up more and all of a sudden you have a tulip mania happening.

So I'm going to say this unequivocally. 99% of these ICOs are garbage.

99%. We just don't know they're garbage yet. It's either a white paper or somebody coded a solidity contract in 10 minutes on Ethereum or, you know, it's a great team that means, well, that won't succeed at their ultimate aim and goal, which is also risk. Right? You can have the best team with funding and they know what they're doing and they just don't succeed. Or it's somewhere in the middle where, you know, they just, they're trying their best but they're not going to ultimately succeed. So let's say what's the likelihood that out of the 1% I estimate that are legit and really understand both sides of the fence, you know, both how blockchain works and also how to create what they got and they got a great business plan, it's actually valuable and all that stuff, what is the likelihood you're going to stumble on the one that's a long term winner? It's close to nothing, right? And just like any investment, buyer beware. Caveat emptor. This is not investing advice. I should have started off the call with that. Like, you know, again, I've run hedge funds, I've done this for a living. So I like to just put a heavy damper on everybody's expectations. Because guess what? Most of the stuff you're gonna lose money in, most of it, that's, that's just, you know, it's a future going to happen that just hasn't happened yet. So that's a really good place to start. And if you're going to invest money or gamble or speculate on some stuff, do it with an amount of money that's just so small it's not going to matter if you lose it all. That's my caveat. Right? So if you want to get involved in crypto, cool. I don't think it's the place to start. Most of the people, I would say 8 out of 10 people that come to me say this is the first thing I've ever invested in. They're just so hyped up about it and it's so easy to do because it skirts a lot of the laws that protect those types of people that are unsophisticated because the government hasn't caught up on the regulations yet. So right now in the United States, and I'm sure in other places there's something called accredited investorship, right? To be an accredited investor, you need to have a million dollar net worth or $200,000 for two years or 300,000 if you're married for two years in order to be called an accredited investor. That does not mean you're sophisticated. That means you just have enough money where they'll let you dabble in hedge funds and stuff. That's high risk. Right? And there is the other side of that law is that people that run those types of securities investment opportunities can only solicit and market their services in very specific ways to the people who have that accredited status. Again, does not make them sophisticated. And cryptocurrency is going to have that. Blockchain investments are going to have that. In fact, the SEC and I'm sure other countries are catching up, has already regulated all tokens and all ICOs as securities and they're treating them as such. And they will continue to get more granular on their their guidelines. But for now just understand that this is snake oil city, guys. All the scammers and spammers are coming out of the woodwork to get you to buy all of their crap. And I've written several articles about how to spot these Ponzi schemes. But I'm gonna, I'm telling you, a big Ponzi scheme still a Ponzi scheme. A billion dollars will go up in flames one day and somebody will freak the hell out in government and fix it. But don't get conned in the meantime.

And stick to the things that you have a reasonable expectation where you won't lose too bad if you lose 100%. And stick to things that you have a reasonable expectation that are going to be around in a few years. I mean, Bitcoin's been around for nine years. Ethereum has been around for four or five years. Like every day that they persist, they get more and more and more trustworthy. But it's also new guys. This is all brand new technology. So just that's my warning, my caveat, my grain of salt. Now as far as upside potential, I mean right now all cryptocurrencies are about a 200 billion dollar market, that's billion with a B all money. M1, M2, M3, M4 is estimated at 85 trillion. So if your thesis, let's say, is that cryptocurrency becomes 1% of all world currency and that let's just round number it is $100 trillion, then it still could 5x from here. Theoretically, if it became 1% 200 billion to 1 trillion, it could 5x from here, the whole space. And of those cryptocurrencies there will be some winners and some losers. So they might in fact gain even more than that. And a lot of them will go to zero too, or be worth next to nothing and just persist until they die out for a lot of reasons. But just understanding the scope and the size of the opportunity, that's like the difference between. This is why people get excited about penny stocks. Because if a penny stock wins and you buy Facebook for pennies and then it becomes a 200 billion dol win in orders of magnitude over whether you bought a Fortune 500 company like ExxonMobil. When is ExxonMobil going to double? Might take 50 years for that to happen.

That's why people get excited and that's why people are going to get excited about derivatives and options and futures contracts and all the other stuff that people are just aching, aching to put there on the market. And it will happen. But right now it's so small that the big institutional players can't really play it. The finras of the world, the Goldman Sachs, the JP Morgan's, they're only starting to now dabble. Because the other thing to understand about markets in general, and this is just good to know, is that if you are a billion dollar whale and you go into a $200 billion market, you're half a percent of the whole market. Who's taking you out of that position? You can't put the kind of money you're normally putting to work into the markets because you're going to crush your own bid and ask spreads and we have bots and we trade and we do all that stuff. But the key point I'm trying to get across is that this is so new that most people can't play here yet. Most big institutional SM investors can't play here yet. So the markets, you know, are the markets and if they're efficient, like regular markets, but there's not huge players in them, you can basically start to use strategies that you've used 10, 15 years ago that no longer work in the traditional markets. In these markets. So if you had a trading strategy from 10 years ago that worked really well in the, in the Forex markets or in the Nasdaq or in the New York Stock Exchange or whatever, and you were like a proprietary trader, for example, and that stopped working because HFT came along and ate your lunch, or some new algorithm that somebody developed in some billion dollar hedge fund came and ate your lunch. Now it might work again in crypto. That's why we built a bot to take care of those opportunities. And it's ready for demo pretty soon. It's not a pitch, it's just something we're working on. Right?

So there's cool stuff that you can do in crypto that you couldn't do as an investor in other currencies. And then additionally there's, you know, like I talked about all the different international pieces. It becomes a lot easier to raise money if you're a legitimate company. So like, for example, I'm working with an oil and gas company. They do million dollar deals in that space. What they do is they buy mineral rights that are about to be drilled and then they lease those rights to private equity. Sometimes they sell them to big oil companies. So they do multiple millions of dollars in transactions. So they're already a legitimate company. Now this is just a new fundraising tool by which they can make it easier for people to participate outside the country. Because here's the thing to understand. When I raised money for my hedge fund, I needed to only target accredited investors in the United States. But outside the United States, it didn't matter. They don't have those types of laws some places. So the guy in Switzerland or the guy in Hong Kong or the guy in Singapore could wire me 80 grand overnight. I didn't need to know whether he was sophisticated or accredited or not. I'd like to work with people like that. That's my goal, is that they can take the risks and they understand the risks and they're savvy enough to see what they're getting into. But also they're not under the US jurisdiction, so I'm not as tight about what I want to do. So basically you're seeing the mass democratization of investing happening. You're seeing the mass democratization of currency and value storage happening. You're seeing the mass democratization of transactional value adding happening. And it's a brave new world out there. So here's one thing I'll never do. I'll never tell you, hey, invest in this crypto or that crypto. I think they're mostly garbage. But if I was to give you a strategy, I would say take an amount of money, you know, a small amount that you're completely happy losing. And I'm assuming you have like, cash in the bank. I'm assuming you have good income. I'm assuming that you have like, you know, maybe a good insurance policy and, you know, a good stock portfolio already. You have all that stuff kind of built up over time and you're relatively stable financially. And then maybe dial a little bit in crypto, because that's really high on the risk profile. It's like 10 out of 10 and the whole thing could go toes up tomorrow and there'd be no way to get your money back whatsoever. So if you were to do that, and let's say you took $1,000, which I'm assuming is relatively a low investment for anybody at the moment, and you know, I could lose a thousand dollars and be okay. So I'm just gonna start with that small number. I'm not. Again, not recommendation. But if you were to do that, maybe invest in the top 10 cryptos, and then next year take another thousand and do that, and then next year take another and rebalance your portfolio on the top 10 cryptos, you might in 50 years have something.

Right. And that would be a strategy. I'd feel pretty good about giving somebody, you know, as if they were going to do it anyway, and I just didn't want them to screw it up too bad. That might be okay. Right. But if you start throwing around 50, 100 grands or a million dollars, whatever is a lot of money to you, you're probably going to get burns sooner or later. So I just. I recommend you tread lightly. Okay, let's grab any questions. I've been.

Approached by usitech in case you can comment on them. That would be great. I don't know who USI Tech is or what they're selling. Likely. The likely scenario is if somebody's listening to you. It is for a network marketing or affiliate scam or a Ponzi scam. Yeah. And just understand most of them are garbage. And the likelihood that you're gonna be able to spot a winner is so low that it's probably not a good. Like, it's not a good bet to make. And you know, I might be wrong. I might. These, these companies might be totally legitimate. One of them might be amazing. And I'm in a. Like, for example, I'll just use something for my own advice. I won't tell you which one, but I'm in a pretty large mining consortium that's based out of Iceland, for example. And if you read the list of people that are involved in this thing, you're like, this is total crap, right? But then again.

Even Ponzi schemes work until they don't. And it's possible to make money if you have a high risk tolerance doing stuff that, that most people shouldn't even touch. Like options trading, for example. Most people in the world, I would never ever tell them to invest in options or trade options rather, because you don't really invest in them. And the reason is because, like playing with dynamite, you're going to get your fingers blown off once or twice. I've lost a Mercedes in the day. I cry in the hot tub and I get over it and I go back to work. But most people will never lose that kind of money and they don't want to or they don't need to set themselves up for that. There's plenty of ways to invest your money that just, you know, if you guys are trying to get rich overnight, you're gonna, you're gonna get burnt.

I would strongly caution you to take extreme caution. Anyway, so I think I've hammered that enough. Specific recommendations I'm not willing to make publicly. What I'm doing is very similar to what I just explained. You know, it's just kind of little bits at a time, building it up over time. I'm happy, I'm very grateful that I was in super early. So, you know, my small investments have yielded huge dividends. In fact, my crypto account got so big, it was bigger than my retirement account, so I had to rebalance my whole portfolio. And that was kind of interesting and cool. But, you know, that's, don't. If you're expecting that to happen, guys, you're already like, unless you have a time machine, that's probably not going to happen to you. So, you know, invest accordingly. You know, it's a future proofing kind of mechanism. Like if crypto becomes really big, cool, I'm a part of it. It's exciting. It's something you can watch and, you know, entertainment is valuable too. But I wouldn't be making massive investments in the space unless you have hardcore insider knowledge and a lot of experience.

Just like any investment asset class, right? Just like Warren Buffett says, you don't invest in things you don't understand.

Cool.

All right. I feel like I've said my piece. I mean, what specific.

Where do we find the top 10 cryptos? Brad lists.

Oh, right, Coincap IO is my favorite app for just tracking what the prices of cryptocurrencies are. And then you rank them based on their market capitalization. So market capitalization in the stocks and shares markets would be the number of stock so that the number of certificates issued times the price at any given time, whatever currency. So that's all market cap is just the size of the marketplace of that thing. So the bitcoin market cap's around 100 billion right now, maybe a little less. And it's the biggest one at the moment. Ethereum and block Bitcoin cash are kind of like neck and neck right now, last time I checked. And then the other ones kind of go up and down and keep changing. Neo is interesting, Ripple is interesting, you know, because they do different things and you just really got to like go to the websites and kind of dig into the white papers and see why it's interesting. But I'm not willing. I don't feel good about maker recommendations, guys, because this whole industry is going to have a huge calling at some point and I just, I don't want to be the guy who was out there saying, yeah, Brad told me to invest in yada yada, and now it's, I lost my 401k and I don't want to be that guy. I don't think it's responsible to make recommendations like that. So I'd rather give you the mindset so that you can build the strategy versus a strategy that won't be executed properly and without the right mindset.

Do you have any idea roughly an equivalent of how much crypto is trading per day?

Per day is a great question. I know the whole market size is about 200 billion currently. So let's say 5% of that turns over a day. There you go. Let's call it, you know, $10 billion a day. But that's tiny, guys. I know traders on the floor that do ten million dollar trades all day and they can call up a billion and leverage themselves one guy, right? So that's relatively tiny in the ocean of money. That's the thimble.

I'm interested as well. Brad. Just heard Russia, China now working on their own cryptocurrencies. Just how far away do you think we are from every nation having their own crypto and just money as we know it today, just not existing?

You know, that's a question. I'm glad you asked that question because that's a question I really want to have with the Fed. You know, that's a conversation I want to have with the Fed and the central bankers, because they're, I think, going to. If governments are going to do it, it's really the central banks that got to sign off on it.

And I won't reveal right now, but my plan is to get a room together with some of those types of people and have that kind of conversation. If that does happen, I'll let you know about it. I just don't know how hip they are to it. I'm sure it's on the radar at this point. I just don't know how well they understand it or what policy, if any, is being enacted. Additionally, there's a shakeup at the Fed right now. Trump just named a successor to Janet Yellen, and there's a lot going on, so it's probably not super high on their radar at the moment.

Questions just come in.

Is it interchangeable if there are so many?

Yes. So there are multiple exchanges. So think of an exchange like the New York Stock Exchange, except for crypto. So there's Coinbase, there's Kraken, there's Bittrex, there's Polyunex. I trade on three different exchanges currently, and it's all on my cheat sheet. If you go to that link, you can grab that and read that. But essentially, the way I look at it is.

Yeah, every single currency could be traded for Bitcoin. Every crypto trades in Bitcoin and Ethereum, typically. So from there, you can trade Bitcoin and ethereum in any other currency. So Euros, pounds, US Dollars, whatever. So you can get your money in and out of these and in and out of each other, depending on the exchange, relatively easily. But again, there's so many being create the time that if you want to buy something that's just a weird one that nobody knows about or very few people trade, you're gonna have to look pretty hard to find that or you'll end up buying it directly from whoever coded it 10 minutes ago. And you just handed them all their money and got nothing in return. Like, guys, this is the closest thing to I drew a dollar, I drew a $5 bill, and you gave me $5 for it that I've ever seen in my life. This is pretty insane. You're literally buying codes, computer codes.

When you buy a cryptocurrency and whether or not it's valuable as a function of utility and demand. If there's no utility and no demands, meaning nobody wants to use it, nobody wants to buy it, then guess, guess who's the buyer of that? Guess who's the biggest fool in that transaction is. So don't be the biggest fool, right? Do your work, do your homework. Don't buy the marketing hype and the videos. Like, just, just don't get sucked into it, guys. Greed and fear is big. And I can see how it happened. It just, I've been through the ringer enough times to tell you it's just until something is something, it's nothing.

And it. But it is, like you said, very exciting that all these big countries are talking about it, but who knows what the hell is real? I mean, you know, just, we don't know. You can read the news all you want, it'll just make you more confused. I just go with what I know. And who I've talked to is, you know, who I believe is very smart in this space. So some of the people I follow in the space or Tim Ferriss had a great podcast with a few really high level people. I've listed a few of their interviews in.

What do you call it? In my crypto cheat sheet, I follow a guy named Amir Rozik and his business partner is Dimitri Vitaly, who is the father of the guy who invented Ethereum. So I listened to those guys and what they say because they look at crypto all day long. That's their deal. But it's just like anything guys like, if you spend a lot of time on it, you'll eventually gain some expertise and you'll start to sort out the nonsense from that. But if you're just a casual speculator or gambler, which is essentially what we're all doing here, you'll probably get hurt more than you win. And that's unfortunate. But there are ways to. So I always love to tell the story of my investing strategy and why I invest the way I do. So my great grandfather owned a lot of land on Long Island. There wasn't a lot of demand for housing, so he turned it all into orchards. And he had a saying. He said, an orchard is not one tree. An orchard, you know, I got to plant a thousand trees knowing full well that some are going to die. I just don't know which or which beforehand. So I'm going to plant a thousand trees and water them all, and eventually I'll have a thriving orchard that bears much fruit. It's the same thing with investing. Guys like you got to be able to have enough things going where if one dies, okay, cool. And you have to be able to because you can't see the future. Those who live by crystal balls end up Eating broken glass, which is a quote from my favorite book of the last five years, which is Principles by Ray Dalio. I recommend picking this up. He's Bridgewater Capital, 165 billion under management. The best hedge fund manager in the world in my opinion and certainly the largest hedge fund in the world. And these are the types of guys I follow because principles and it's mindset that gets you to where they are. And it's not some fly by strategy that will change as soon as the landscape changes.

One more question I think you may have asked this. How do you buy crypto other than spread trading?

So you can buy crypto so anytime you trade a currency it doesn't have any value except relative to other currencies. That's how forex works. So it's like USD is this valuable in relation to euro or gold or anything else, Right. So you have to create a, you know, what do you call it, an exchange rate essentially in order to tell what it's value. Because otherwise like I've got marbles and they're worth whatever I say they're worth, right? No, it's worth what it's worth based on how much can I buy a marble for, Right. So yes, it's only traded in relation to other things because it's essentially a foreign exchange, right? But it's not foreign in the sense that like it's a crypto exchange I guess is a better word for it than forex, but forex just stands for foreign exchange. So it's rel. It's what currency versus what other currency am I trading or what other asset class for that matter? So go ahead and check it out. Jump on the email list. We send you something cool every day about entrepreneurship, investing, life, what I'm learning. Like yesterday I wrote about how I got nailed by a stingray out in the ocean. Just stuff like that. It's fun and we try to keep it light but also informative from around the world to San Diego. I appreciate you, thank you so much for being here. I'm grateful for the opportunity. Thank you Christian.

So there you have it. And I'm sure if you've been listening closely there and taking notes, you now are in a much better decision making place as to whether this is the right direction for you to go. Now as Brad's shared very wisely, do not invest money that you cannot afford to lose. And he gave some great tips there for someone who maybe is looking to start getting into cryptocurrency investment for the first time. So listen back, go through that. And if you want to download the crypto sheet that Brad shared, then head over to mmm.makemoremarbles.com crypto okay, so that's mmm.

Crypto. And you can download the crypto cheat sheet there. And that's got a whole bunch of information that we just couldn't go into in that short time there. So I hope you learned a lot from that. And if you've got questions and you want to speak to Brad and ask any, anything at all, then the best place for you is to go over to the private Facebook group for Escape the Rat Race. And you can join by heading to www.etrr.online.

Facebook now. I can't wait to see you in there. And I can't wait to speak to you again on the next episode of Escape the Rat Race Radio. So until then, see.