Interview with Chris Kline: Bitcoin, Scarcity, and Retirement Capital

The revolution of digital banking is happening like tectonic plates underneath us. Whether we want to admit it or not, there's a big change happening.

Joined by Chris Klein, co-founder of Bitcoin IRA, now in business about 10 years, which is like a lifetime in crypto. Chris, thanks a lot for joining me today. How are you?

Great. And you're, you're not wrong about that. 10 years in crypto feels like 40 years in any other industry. I didn't have any gray hairs before I started this, I can tell you that.

I was gonna say decades in crypto, but we're not there yet. But yeah, you're— you've been around for a while. So Bitcoin IRA, let's start with this. A year ago, many were calling for Bitcoin $180,000, Ethereum $10,000, full alt season in effect, and none of that happened. Timeline slipped. Retail interest today is like near an all-time low. From where you sit, do you still see the possibility of like a 2x move from here that wakes retail back up, or do we crawl back to $125 and just make it boring?

That's a good question. Usually whenever Bitcoin gets boring is usually right before it gets exciting. Last year was a very interesting narrative. We obviously had a big run after President Trump was elected, and the tariff chaos pulled down all markets and particularly risk-on markets. Uh, you pivot that towards reaching a new all-time high in October at around $125,000, and it felt like with the guardrails of new regulation and new bills going through that we, we kind of had great tailwinds. And then the good old government decided to take its longest shutdown period for 30-plus days and really put a halt on a lot of innovation around all technical space, whether it's with AI, cryptocurrency, or otherwise. and put the, uh, Clarity Act, which is really pivotal to the next evolution of, of the crypto space, at kind of a standstill. And now it's back in the Senate being heavily debated. It is a— it has become a battle royale between the banks and crypto providers around stablecoin yields and rewards competing with the dismal amount of interest that banks give us on our deposits.

Mm-hmm.

And so until we get through that process, I think you're gonna see a little bit of sideways market bouncing. What's interesting is we're not in a vacuum. You know, crypto has always been in its own little 4-year cycle. It's now, I think, in a more of a larger cycle overall with the entire economy. What's happening in the gold and silver markets is very interesting. And so there's a lot of things that could push it, but at the end of the day, this is a game of scarcity. It's not a red versus blue game. It's an orange versus green game. And we're turning back on the printers to buy up more backed securities and to print more money into the economy. Which will over time help assets like cryptocurrency at a time where we're reaching more and more scarcity in supply. And I don't know if the retail buyer is necessarily hardwired to understand that essence of scarcity. There are only 21 million that'll ever exist. We already have 19.5 that are accounted for. I do think you start seeing more enthusiasm from the retail person probably once we break a psychological threshold around like $140, because $150,000, and then you can start seeing some FOMO that could take it up to those $180,000. I was even one of them that still thinks we're going to get there this year. Um, but if you— when in doubt, zoom out. The last decade of Bitcoin has a 16,000% return. So if we can go forward 10 years, we can get our DeLorean with Doc and Marty and head forward 10 years. I think you're going to start seeing people talk about when will Bitcoin hit $1 million a coin.

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I've called for the possibility before, but for different reasons. Um, You're in Austin right now, so let's talk about that. When the state of Texas puts roughly $5 million into the iBit and then holds another $5 million outright, and then when also CalPERS, California's retirement system, is heavily invested in the strategy, those don't feel like speculative bets to me. They feel like institutions are underwriting a future outcome. How does that kind of positioning look from your seat?

Yeah, it's interesting. The ETFs came in January of 2023 or '24, really started to take off. BlackRock basically made a banner year, best year ever with IBIT. And its first, what, I think first 90 days were record-breaking by 10x of any other ETF that's ever been offered. Institutions are seeing the writing on the wall that crypto is here to stay. It's become financialized. It's critical to a balanced portfolio. I mean, you see from pensions to strategy to the state of Texas. So you've got nation states, we're buying as the US, we want to reserve, and other nations want reserves. Now, individual states, corporations, institutions, pensions, it is about individual sovereignty is what the retail buyer is kind of missing. And this is a chance if you're seeing what's happening, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but there's always market manipulation when big institutions are trying to place large bets in underwriting future situations. So this moment in time where we're sub $80,000 is is a gift from the Bitcoin gods for any retail buyer. I know I'm dollar-cost averaging. I've been buying since 2016. Any chance you can get Bitcoin at a discount is great because these guys know what's happening. There's a reality to this, and it's going to be a strong piece of the overall balance sheet for any of these businesses and groups moving forward, especially when you have to balance out dollars. If your balance sheet is heavy in dollars that are facing inflation and not really offsetting that with much yield, Then you have to find other places to find that. And that's where Bitcoin has, has starting to see as a, as a critical piece to a balance sheet reserve.

You mentioned the government shutdown, and when that happened, you know, that was during the time when Uptober was a total bust. But Citadel ended up writing Ripple a $500 million check during that time when everything was shut down. I love that move. A year earlier, the SEC had demanded Ripple pay them like $200 million. But then they waited it out and then they used that settlement to buy rail infrastructure. So yeah, I love that move, but we're not talking about an XRP IRA. But what does that sequence say about how Sirius Capital views digital rails versus the headlines?

Oh yeah, the, the revolution of digital banking is happening like tectonic plates underneath us, whether we want to admit it or not. There's a big change happening. Um, we— you actually, you said we're not talking about an XRP IRA. You can put XRP in your IRA. We have 85 different cryptocurrencies available. So we're known as Bitcoin IRA because we have been around since there was only Bitcoin. And then we added Ethereum. We've actually had XRP in IRAs since 2000 and late '17, around the time of the Bitcoin Cash fork. We added it alongside Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash support. We have 85 different ones now. And, you know, the way you look at this revolution of digital banking, I always try to explain it, you know, that sometimes it goes over the heads of a retail person. It's like, well, the banks settle between each other and there's all these things. But if you can get the settlement process instantly on a blockchain, whether it's the XRP, the Ripple technology, there's several options out there. There will be a day— I have a 12-year-old daughter out in Scottsdale. There'll be a day, I hope, that she, when she gets paid to do a job, if she doesn't end up being an entrepreneur, you should be able to get paid hourly. You work an hour, you get paid an hour. The only reason we take, as an employer, I have 200 employees, I have to pay a third-party group to take care of my payroll, and then they disperse it 4 or 5 days later. And their entire business model is they take that money and they make the float off of that money, or the interest for those few days, in the billions and billions of dollars. XRP and digital banking revolution is designed to get rid of a lot of those middlemen. It also would eliminate the need for 24-hour funds, which is where, like, across the, the International Date Line, our bank will lend out money for a 24-hour period for to 4% interest on that annualized on that day. And then that's a way to keep yourself liquid. That, that is a very disruptive factor to traditional banking, just like the rewards on stablecoins are very disruptive to the model where banks are basically taking our deposits, leveraging them to make 10 to 12%, if not more, and only paying out a dismal 1 to 2% unless you lock it up for a long-term CD. These are disruptive moments. from technology that at the end of the day, the consumer and the economy win. But you've got to get through the old guard to get there. And the old guard has got their heels in the sand. They've got the best lobbyist groups. We used to talk about big oil, big pharma. Big banking is no joke. And they have a lot of power and clout in DC. So we've got to get through those obstacles and navigate those waters. But when we get out to the other side, these types of assets like XRP and what Ripple is doing, the way these institutions are doubling down on these investments, They again see the writing on the wall that there's a future where banking is done much more efficiently and to the benefit of the individual person and their sovereign wealth.

Yeah, that's a good point. There's a lot there, but yeah, they're building a modern bank stack. And I used to say that it took about 131,000 XRP to buy an iPhone at retail, iPhone 6. Now you fast forward 10 years and it at the top is about 320,000. So we're moving towards that. And I just wonder in the future that Will that transaction actually settle on-chain and be closer to that 1-to-1 ratio? And it's just interesting, so much to talk there. But as far as investor behavior for Bitcoin IRA, because that's the granddaddy of them all, that's what people associate with crypto is Bitcoin. And, you know, if that's held in a retirement account now instead of on an exchange, how is that different for the investor psychologically, not just financially?

Yeah. So financially, obviously, you're— the government taketh, taketh, taketh. It very rarely giveth. And one of the things they gave us in the 1970s, and then again in the '80s, and then in the 1997 Economic Relief Act, was retirement account incentives. You can take money from your paycheck and put it into retirement and save, either lowering your tax bill now, deferring taxes for trades and growth until retirement. And in this case of a Roth IRA, you can completely have tax-free growth and withdrawal when you get older. That's the financial benefit. Psychologically, it allows people to think of crypto as a longer-term investment strategy. So instead of watching the day-to-day volatility and aberrations, when in doubt, zoom out. Our clients have started, for example, we have clients that started with us in 2016 that bought Bitcoin at $200 a unit. I myself bought one at that price, but I still also buy Bitcoin at $76,000, $80,000. It's more of a long-term mentality of stacking up, stacking your sats more or less, and getting to a point where there'll be a day where having one Bitcoin, especially in a retirement vehicle, could be life-changing for your retirement strategy. I always said, when we first started this, people looked at me and they're like, are you crazy, kid? You want to put Bitcoin in a retirement account? And to me, given that we're in a modern portfolio theory, this isn't my grandfather's economy where I can just buy some stocks, get dividends, and live off of a pension and Social Security. I want to put my riskiest assets in my retirement because I have a greater chance for reward and I have a longer timetable before I'm going to need those, which is nice because it also allows you to set it, forget it, and not— the last thing you ever want to see, like the FOMO runs of 2017, '18, and then 2021, people were taking out second mortgages, they were taking out loans. That's in any investment vehicle is bad investment behavior. And especially with the volatility of crypto, this allows you to say, hey, I'm getting a benefit from the government for saving long-term. I'm using the incentives of tax. tax strategy so I can build generational wealth, and I'm choosing to spread my eggs in different baskets. So I've got my stocks and bonds, I've got my gold and silver, but I also have my cryptocurrency, my Bitcoin.

So you went, you know, back to the past in that DeLorean and talked about the history there. You've been in this for 10 years or more, buying Bitcoin $200, and then as you said, $70,000 and so forth. Your experience is unprecedented. And so speaking of regulation, you know, it's often framed as a threat, yet Bitcoin IRAs exist because of regulation. Um, we're facing a lot of, uh, things in Congress right now, uncertainty, but what kind of regulation actually unlocks adoption?

Clear guidelines and, and guardrails for the consumer and the institution from any fraud or malicious acts would probably be like my textbook definition. Now, the more friendly definition is no regulation is terrible. We've seen that time and time again because there's bad actors in any space, whether it's real estate, whether it's gold, silver. I mean, without regulation, it just begets problems. It attracts bad actors. But the government, what they happen to work with is a— they don't do the ultra-fine Sharpie. They don't even do the thick Sharpie. They do like the extra thick Sharpie when they write regulations. So they make these broad strokes, which can hurt good actors. And we kind of saw that lack of regulatory clarity from the entire Biden administration, which was really putting a stifle on the crypto innovation. There was a lot of really smart guys trying to do really amazing things in the crypto space, ourselves included, adding staking and yield assets and all these other tools that were just kind of stuck at a standstill because if you moved, you knew you were going to get the radar of the SEC, CFTC, and every other 3-letter agency like what XRP and Ripple went through. I think that if they get it right, the Clarity Act finalizes— other than the stablecoin rewards, that's a big issue we have to get over, because I think that's good for the common consumer, and we should allow competition because banks are starting to act like a cartel. But put that to the side. The rest of the Clarity Act is really opening those clear guardrails for how these things need to behave in traditional financial instruments and who's going to regulate them. What 3-letter or 4-letter agency is actually going to be the regulator so that we don't have to deal with 6 of them? And I think I agree with Kevin O'Leary, who was on Power Lunch about 3 weeks ago, and he stated he thinks there's about $1 trillion of additional inflows coming once that bill passes through the Senate. So I think that's— this is the last piece of a very complicated process to get to this point, and we're not done. The thing about technology is more regulation will come because technology is going to continue to evolve. We haven't even started to scratch the surface of regulation around AI at this juncture. And there's a very beautiful crossroads between cryptocurrency and AI that can help self-regulate and keep accountability to that space using blockchain and using cryptocurrencies, in particular incentive vehicles for AI robots and things like that. So, the future, you know, you get back in that DeLorean, it's an exciting time. I wouldn't be— I always say this when I talk to just regular folks, my family, friends around the holidays. I wouldn't be surprised, I'll live to see the day that my smart fridge which I don't have one yet, but let's say I have— there's a lot of them on the market— figures out that I ran out of— I'm running out of milk and orders it from an Amazon drone, and that drone drops it off and delivers it. And then there's got to be a payment process between those 2 machines where blockchain and cryptocurrency meet a beautiful marriage with AI and technology. And I think that's where we're headed next. But again, we're going to go through these pendulums where they're going to deregulate places and things are going to go a little crazy, and then problems happen, and then you have to swing back to overregulation. And if we can just find a sweet spot, which I think we're really close to, Mm-hmm. That's gonna get a lot of adoption waves and mainstream push.

Yeah, agreed. And speaking of regulators, you know, on the TradFi side for financial advisors, there's FINRA, and you don't wanna mess around with them because they are who they are. And, you know, we have all these regulations, as you mentioned, but for years advisors either avoided crypto or answered client questions without the right framework, you know, creating risk really. From your perspective, what's been missing advisors before they recommend something like a Bitcoin IRA?

I think first stage was having an ETF exist because that was comfortable, that lived inside their world. They didn't have to build separate rails to offer it. I think the next thing is that groups like us, we're now a fully regulated financial institution trust company by the state of Nevada. We're working on onboarding platforms that make it very easy for them to transact on behalf of clients. Most groups have went direct to the retail buyer like Bitcoin IRA. We built an entire platform for guys like you and I to go on and manage our accounts. RIAs like to be the intermediary between those, and there's— there hasn't been a clear-cut, clean solution brought to market yet for them. And I think that hopefully, knock on wood, we'll be bringing that to market later this year as another market first from our group.

So many people feel like they missed out on Bitcoin, yet retirement capital is only now getting involved, really. So are we late or just early in a different way?

I think, well, there's never, there's never too early or never too late to buy Bitcoin, has always been my opinion. Now, obviously, we wish we could all go back and buy it. I wish I would go back and buy more at $575 or $200. That also comes with a misnomer and a myth that you have to buy one whole Bitcoin. So a lot of people will say, oh, I can't buy Bitcoin, I can't afford that, it's $75,000. The fractionalization goes to the 10th decimal point. Satoshi. So you can buy a few dollars of Bitcoin at a time. And that again is another hurdle of just retail psychology. I think once they get over that, they realize they can stack towards a Bitcoin. They can buy $1,000 or so at a time. But like I said at the beginning here, I think that we're going to be talking within the next decade, we'll be talking about Bitcoin at $1 million or climbing towards $1 million. So if we're under $100,000 now, that's still a 10x return in 10 years. Not too shabby for a retirement vehicle choice.

Yeah, Cathie Wood put out $1.5 million, then kind of retraced from there a little bit. State of Texas, uh, Cal strategy, Lasers Louisiana strategy— these are like, you know, the outcomes that they see. And, you know, that would be like a 2x, you know, and they feel great about it. But yeah, I mean, at some point in the future, it's just going to keep going up because that's why we're in this. Business here with crypto, and particularly with Bitcoin, if it never went any higher, it would be the most successful thing ever. So it's just people need to remember that, in my opinion. And then also, as you said, if they go to the exchanges, $75,000, $80,000, or $180,000, they're gonna have sticker shock. They're gonna have sticker shock and possibly FOMO into alts. So they have to be prepared. And that's why I do what I do and have people on Substack and everywhere else to help and get this information out. So when the time horizon is decades, custody really matters. What do most investors misunderstand when they hear Bitcoin IRA?

I would say probably there's the— it's not as much as it used to be, but there was the era of not my keys, not my crypto. This is all about personal isolation and privacy, ultimate privacy outside the system. And And what has changed in the last 10 years is we found a way to work within the system, and custody is one of those. If you go on to like a Coinbase or somewhere, you're— and if you leave your cryptocurrency on a hot exchange, you are your greatest weakness. And the target on cryptocurrency from hackers and malicious actors in this space is thousands times bigger than it was when I started Bitcoin IRA, and it'll be another 10,000 bigger in the next couple years because AI is making these hackers and, and these bad actors even more powerful and faster. And so you need to make sure to understand and respect the security that goes into keeping your assets safe. We use multi-signature cold storage exclusive wallets built by BitGo, which is like the Brinks of the industry. It's covered by up to $250 million in, in insurance, uh, for digital assets. And, and it's also not just that, that vault, but also your personal information. The minute you start getting— if you go to Coinbase or other You're going to get spearphishes, you're going to get fake text messages, you're going to get emails, you're going to get calls from— like all this stuff you get targeted the minute your name— because at the end of the day, everybody's information is on the dark web now. It's not even the dark web anymore, it's everybody's web because there's been so many breaches. Like 1.6 billion data points were breached last year alone. So everybody's data is out there and these guys are buying it and using it to social engineer situations where they can convince you, hey, your crypto is not safe, you need to send it over here. What's nice about having a third party to take care of the retirement elements and the security elements is that you can rest knowing, hey, I have access to my platform 24/7, but I also don't have to worry about seed phrases. And if something— I get hit by a bus, does my wife know or my kids know what to do with my Ledger device? And those types of things. We've heard all kinds of horror stories about that. So the era of I'm totally outside the system to this works within the system and it feels as comfortable as buying stock from Walmart, Home Depot, Raytheon, et cetera. That's the world that we've gotten into. And I think the biggest misnomer is, oh, that's for younger folks and things. You know, 75% of our clients were born before 1976. So this isn't a young man or woman's investment game. There's a, there's grandpas, grandmas, fathers, uncles, aunts, tíos, tías, the mix. Everybody is involved in crypto, not just youngsters.

And there's a lot more because retail interest is quiet. They were supposed to be here and they're not here now. They're interested in other things, but historically, one strong green candle can pull them back in because they know about crypto and Bitcoin. I do think that they associate the two together, but do moments like that, a big green candle, does that change who shows up to Bitcoin, or do the long-term allocators, the people in your business, already know that's coming and how they behave?

I think that people that have been in the space for a while have picked their strategy. Some are just going to hodl and hodl and hodl and hodl, and they have no plan at exit. Others have— they do really good dollar-cost averaging strategies on the way in and on the way out. People always remember to DCA in, so take $10,000, break it apart in $1,000 increments, and take the emotion out. But then on the way out, they forget, I need to DCA out too. I'm not going to find the top. I need to sell a piece here, a piece here, a piece here. So Most of the ones that have been in the space for a while, they definitely have a good strategy. You will see a new crop of new entrants into the space, or folks that were— my favorite meme is the line for $75,000 Bitcoin is that guy that goes, oh, I'm glad I didn't get that. And the line for the $150,000 Bitcoin is wrapped around this building 10 times.

Yeah.

And smart folks are getting their money in now and early because they see this as an advantage that You're always going to buy Bitcoin more expensive over time. There will be short-term aberrations of volatility. There'll be dips, there'll be runs. But if we can go forward 10 years, it's just going to keep doing this over time when you zoom out on that chart. And that'll be interesting to see the new interest coming, because now they're aware of Bitcoin. There's more accessibility to Bitcoin. It's just a matter of them pulling the trigger, because there is a lot of noise in the space. If I had a nickel for every time the mainstream media said Bitcoin was dead, I would probably be retired by now because it's happened so many times, right? And there's a lot of noise. And I think the biggest thing is to do your homework and research. Don't just rely, you know, Chip, you do a great job. There's a lot of great guys like you that are doing a service to get good information out there. But then there's also, for the same number of great Chips and Chrises out there, there's, there's 2 or 3 guys on Instagram just throwing out fake news and FUD and clickbait about XRP and other assets. So just make sure you do your homework and remember, Get information from multiple sources before you just jump in and stick to— I think the big thing is stick to what you know. If Bitcoin you're comfortable with, stick with it. Just because you like— the one thing I hate seeing people do is they come in and they're like, oh, okay, I missed out on Bitcoin, so I'm gonna go buy $10,000 of all these other little coins in the alt season, hoping— it's like gambling the roulette table and picking the numbers versus picking the brackets, right? Or picking the color. And now you're going for this long-term bet and you're Even if you hit one of them 10x's, but you lose 9 other ones, you're kind of broke even when you could have just went into something that you knew. There are blue chips to this space. I think Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, anything in the top 10 of the market cap are pretty tried and true. They've been around for a long time, and they all have upside potential. If Bitcoin gets to $180,000 or $200,000, you're going to see ETH at $7,000, $8,000. You're going to see XRP hitting $5. Like, there's— what's good for the goose is good for the gander over time. Now, is it all proportional? No, there's some, some win more than others, but everything is at a discount right now, which I think is great. And we're seeing, you know, what we see right now, this is the tax season, right? So you have up until April 15th to do your contributions for last year. So we have, of our existing 200,000 clients, they're all adding their funds for last year or already have done that. And that's their ability to average in more in these dips. And so people are always adding more capital to it because it's built in every year. You need to be adding more to your IRA for long-term retirement.

Interesting. Yeah, there's so much there, and I agree with you on so many points there that once the price gets to $150, $180, that's where there's so much more validation for people that need that confirmation. I've said before that that's not the time to go to the exchanges. It's You got to do that now and prepare for that because you could have sticker shock and FOMO into alts because those alts are going to be looking green. They're going to have Web2 names and, you know, you just have to be really careful. So now is the time. I say that a lot on Substack and other places.

Rockefeller that said, when there's blood in the streets, I'm buying, right? Again, that's— I've always lived by that. It just works.

Yeah. One of my main ideas that I've shared with people is to say that there's a lot of noise out there, but I see it as having gone through the 2008 financial crisis and all that stuff before, because I'm 53. So I have a pretty good perspective on things, I think. And I tend to also think that we need a new American dream. And so once that American dream is Bitcoin at $225,000, because that was the price of a home 20 years ago, 3-bedroom with a yard, that if you get 1 Bitcoin, it'll afford it all. When Cathie Wood puts out $1.5 million on Bitcoin and then retraces a bit, it's still over a million. So if people are sold on that because the American dream was mortgaged already, we need a new American dream, and Bitcoin is it. And so I've said that, uh, that's my pre-corner theory. Pre-corners are people not here right now, but they're coming. And they were waiting, but it didn't happen all season and all those calls at the end of the year. So those timelines got pushed out. They're always going to get pushed out, but now's the time to learn and so forth. And the question I have really to end today as we finish this conversation is one that I just thought of as you were speaking, but I wanted to know what's the starting point for a Bitcoin IRA for somebody who has never been to BitcoinIRA.com. How do they get started? And it also sounds like I don't need to go to Coinbase if I've never been in crypto. I could just go to BitcoinIRA.com and get started.

Yes. And that's— and I think, uh, I think our team provided you with the link for— for that you can include when you publish. Um, but if they go there— and also what I'm really proud of is we stuck with real crypto, real people. So unlike Coinbase, the Krakens, the others— and I don't get me wrong, I love these guys, I know a lot of them over the years— We stuck with the analog. So we actually have vice presidents of retirement that have helped thousands of Americans open up their retirement accounts because retirement's not one size fits all. You might be doing traditionals, Roths, SEPs, Solo Ks, all kinds. There's all kinds of derivatives out there. So once you go to bitcoinira.com, you can fill out information. You can open up an account in a matter of a few minutes online. Very easy to do. Gets your identity verified securely, all that. But you will talk to somebody just like me. on a Zoom conference like this, or it's what we use where we just send you a link and we can see you right on the phone and share our screen. And we walk through and we share the security of our platform, what our customer service looks like, how staking works, how the trader works, what features are coming, how the insurance— all these details about our platform, and then answer all your specific questions about your retirement needs and your retirement journey. And that's a great place. And you can actually call at any time. The number is 877- 936-7175, and you can start talking to an individual right now. We have folks always available to talk with new, new retirees or folks looking to retire with cryptocurrency.

Yeah, I say that a lot. Um, I haven't really focused on the IRA conversation. I'm glad that we're having it today, but definitely learn this stuff right now and prepare psychologically and so forth. But I think that's a good idea to go to Bitcoin IRA.com and get started on what we've been talking about. So he's Chris Klein. He is the co-founder of BitcoinIRA.com, been around for 10 years or more. Congratulations on that. And I really appreciate you being part of conversation today. I know that I've learned a lot, and a lot of my audience, like on Substack and other places, will as well. Thanks a lot, Chris.