How to Protect Your Bitcoin with This ONE Thing | 27-Minute Crypto Guide

What is a wallet? Is it safe? How can I put Bitcoin in a USB and carry it with me? If Bitcoin fluctuates so much in price, how can I make sure that I'm not paying for a pizza in Bitcoin that later, that same amount of Bitcoin will have made me a millionaire? Okay, so there's a classic story about somebody who bought Bitcoin for whatever, however many, 120 Bitcoin, that at the time was very, very little. Now 120 Bitcoin would be millions of dollars. So It is. In fact, if I remember right, it might have been thousands of bitcoins because the last time somebody checked, the pizza ended up costing like $250 million or something like that. So there is no way to know that. And this would be like buying something with gold. Over time, that gold is going to go up in value, one hopes. So you never know if that's going to be the case. So the way that I would think about it is personally, I don't put money into Bitcoin because I plan to sell it. I put money into Bitcoin because it's a store of value and I want to hold it across time and space. So when I invest in Bitcoin, I don't care about the ups and downs of the market in the short term. As Michael Saylor said, when it comes to Bitcoin, any time horizon less than 4 years is just noise. Now, the reason that he picked 4 years, if I'm not mistaken, is because that's when it halves its output. A, I don't understand that well enough to go into the, like, nitty-gritty of how it works, but there are what are called miners, and they're currently mining for that next Bitcoin. Remember, there will only ever be 21 million units, but not all 21 million units have been created yet. And so there are miners that are out there slowly creating this over time. And there's a set schedule at which interval they come out. And every 4 years, the amount of time and energy basically that it takes to release those unmined Bitcoins gets cut in half. So if it were 16 per block now, at the next 4-year cycle, then it will fall to 8, and then 4, so on and so forth. So That's why he says 4 years, because that ends up creating market dynamics that change the price. So a wallet, as I mentioned earlier, is an application basically. And the one that I recommend, it's the most common when you're dealing with Ethereum, is MetaMask. So MetaMask is a Chrome plugin that is an extension on your browser. So you would search for MetaMask, Go to the official site, which we'll put the link to the official site. I'm pretty sure it's metamask.io. But you're going to go there, you're going to install it into your Chrome browser. Again, I think that's the only browser that it works for. You get it in Chrome and now you set up your account. You're going to get something called a seed phrase. Whatever you're doing, I want you to stop and I want you to pay attention because this is the One of the most important things I'm going to say. In the beginning, remember I said part of the thing that gets people excited about the blockchain and cryptocurrency is that it gives you sovereignty. When you take on Bitcoin and hold it in your MetaMask, because maybe you bought it, and all cryptocurrencies, by the way, let's say that you bought it on Coinbase, they're the custodians of that. So there's a saying in cryptocurrency, not my keys, not my coin. Meaning, if you don't have this seed phrase to be able to open and close that, the security on that, to stop things from flowing in and out, then technically, Coinbase or the government, whoever, the government could come and put pressure on Coinbase to seize your assets. Whereas, if you have them in your MetaMask wallet, or you have them in a cold storage, like I mentioned earlier, Ledger. Ledger is a USB drive that you can store your seed phrase on. Now, I haven't spent enough time on hardware wallets to know the exact mechanism by which it works, but it's basically a, a dumb terminal that can't be hacked. It has so little information and computing power that there's virtually— nothing is bulletproof— but there's virtually no way to get into that thing. So, uh, it's considered as unhackable as something is going to get. So by putting your access to your crypto on that. Remember, your crypto isn't actually on that. That's your access to your crypto. So the thing that gives you universal, global, worldwide access to your crypto is something called a seed phrase. Now, when you create your MetaMask wallet, it will give you a seed phrase. When I say don't ever, ever, ever, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, ever, ever, ever Don't ever give your seed phrase to anybody else, okay? My wife doesn't know my seed phrase. Now, it's not because I don't trust her, it's because that's just another point of vulnerability. So now you should be asking yourself though, but wait a second, if I'm the only one that knows my seed phrase and something happens to me, then how would somebody else get my money? Or like my wife upon my death, or more terrifyingly, what happens if I lose my seed phrase, forget my seed phrase, or I get caught up in a phishing attack and I give my seed phrase to somebody? The answer is you are fucked. That's sovereignty. There is no recourse. If you lose your seed phrase, whatever that was protecting. So if that's your MetaMask wallet, like right now in my MetaMask wallet, I shudder to think how much is in there. In NFTs, it's a lot, a lot, a lot. And if I forget my seed phrase or am dumb enough to give my seed phrase to somebody— and I do have empathy for people that have been tricked into giving their seed phrase, which is why I'm really going out of my way to say don't give your seed phrase to anybody— if I forgot it or gave it to somebody, poof, it's all gone. And you need to really think about that. But the great news is that nobody can confiscate it. So if you're the only one that has it, there's no way to get into your MetaMask wallet. There's no way to hack that to get it out. And that's doubly true if you have it on a hardware wallet. So you're trading this inviolability. No one can take your money from you. And if you heard about what happened in Cyprus, I forget how many years ago, But I don't know, 7 or 8, 10 years ago, something like that, in Cyprus, one day they just decided, we're taking 10% of everybody's money to get the government solvent again. Now, you can't do that if you've got your stuff stored on a hardware wallet. So that's why people do that. But the problem is that if you lose that seed phrase, There's no getting it back. There's no forgot my password. That doesn't exist. So you have to be really, really incredibly thoughtful about what you do with that. To circle back around to the pizza question, the whole goal there is that by holding your Bitcoin, it is going to go up in value. So if you're going to spend, like I said, I spend Ethereum and I hold Bitcoin, but Ethereum also goes up. And so that's a tricky beast. And is Ethereum— some people predict that Ethereum is going to be bigger than Bitcoin, and that one day, it's going to be worth even more. And if that ends up being true, you could be in the same situation. So part of how I get myself to sleep on that one is that I just spend Ethereum so back and forth, so casually on things, just like I would the US dollar, that it's like, at some point, your money has to function. So if all you want to do is hold, then use your US dollars for exchange. Use your Bitcoin, Ethereum as a means to store value and just don't spend it because no one, I mean, the whole hope is that this goes up over time.

Wanna be happy? Build a life, not just a business. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back, a lack of belief in yourself. You watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too. You've got Michael Jordan level genius at something. So today, let's live your best believe life and learn how you can use cryptocurrencies to their full potential. Enjoy. Lesson number 2, buy crypto with Raoul Pal.

So it was 2020, that March to June period that made me reassess my big macro framework. Because we knew what the central banks would do, but they did it harder and faster. And what we ended up with was the shortest recession in all recorded history and the biggest recession. That never happens. So, what we've done is we've created a reaction function in the central banks to do more. Because Janet and Jay will look at each other, high-five, and go, we've nailed it. The world stopped, and we only had a 2-month recession, and the markets recovered pretty quick. Now, we know that the reality of the underlying economy and other things is not so great. But for the central banks, they're going to do more of this. Why would they not? They're now thinking, do we need a business cycle at all? But what they're doing, if you actually look at it, the central bank balance sheets, the G— the big G4 central bank balance sheets are growing at about 15% a year. So, I started thinking this through, and then thought, I know a lot of people use M2 as a way of understanding printing, but I just thought I'm just going to use the balance sheets because that's new stuff that we know that they're doing. And I know that there's no— it's not a pure way of flowing into the economy, whatever. But anyway, so I put the S&P against the Fed balance sheet, and all of us have observed that correlation over time. The thing was, it told us what we deep down know is the S&P has gone nowhere since 2008. It fell in 2008, the money printing came, and the S&P has basically been going sideways. Then I looked at gold, and it had even underperformed the Fed balance sheet. I looked at real estate, it was identical to the Fed balance sheet. I then looked at the NASDAQ, and it had done better because it had all these network stock stocks in it. And then I looked at Bitcoin, it was like, oh, this is a whole different world. So, there's only one asset that looks like it offsets the printing of money. So, if you know that, and you are able to trade it, then let's say we go into your Quad 4, what are you going to buy? Well, the highest upside is going to be crypto.

Lesson number 3, protect your purchasing power with Anthony Pompliano.

You've talked about Bitcoin is going to become the global reserve currency. I don't think that governments go down without a fight?

Yeah, so global reserve currency, uh, first of all, it's like a term that everyone talks about, but what is a global reserve currency, right? Um, there's two ways to look at this. One is the legacy terminology of global reserve currency, which is the most dominant military basically puts the, uh, the currency, you know, in place and then enforces that across the world. The dollar is probably in a pretty good way to, to use that as an example. Every economy has a reserve asset. The US economy is based on the US geographic, uh, players, right? People within the US geography. And the reserve asset is the US dollar. If you go to Mexico, the Mexican economy has a reserve asset, the peso, etc. And you go through the world, this is true. There's an economy though that has been created. It's actually the largest economy in the world. And it doesn't have a reserve asset. It's the internet. The digital economy does not care about where you physically are. Geography does not matter. It's unhinged from the, the geography. What's the reserve asset of the digital economy? Well, most people would say, well, I use dollars, right? That, that seems to be one of the more popular ones, but that's because we live in the developed Western world. People on the internet in India don't use dollars, right? They use their local currency. And you go around the world and you see this. What happens if we all just used one currency and all the units were the same? Okay, that'd be interesting. And so the reason why I say that it is going to be a global reserve currency is I actually don't think it's nearly as competitive with the fiat currencies as people think it is, because Ultimately, what happens is the digital store of value, I wanna protect my assets. And so what we're moving towards is a multi-currency world, right? Right now, you and I live in a single currency world. You get paid in dollars, save in dollars, invest in dollars, and then you also pay taxes in dollars. If you want to go to somebody else's single currency world, Mexico, you have to convert your dollars to pesos to operate within the Mexican economy for the most part. Well, when you make that conversion, it's actually very difficult. Go to the bank and you try to withdraw it, it's got to be large sums. Or you go to like a currency exchanger at the airport, they rip you off, right? Like, like, it sucks. What happens if all of a sudden the friction and the cost of transacting between currencies or switching— the switching cost goes to zero, and now I get paid in dollars And with a click of a button, I can change my dollars into pesos or into Bitcoin or into a digital euro, etc. Well, now the technology is the exact same. The only difference, the only competition between the currencies is at the monetary policy standpoint. They're all digital currencies. So the digital dollar, the digital peso, and Bitcoin are literally all the same technology-wise in that steady state. But there's competition at the top layer, at the monetary— at the monetary policy layer.

What is monetary policy?

All fiat currencies have the same monetary policy on a structure standpoint. They're all inflationary currencies, meaning that there's constantly more printed of it. It's got a variable monetary policy, meaning that, uh, it constantly changes. Sometimes they're expanding, sometimes they're contracting. But the reason why the dollar is guaranteed to lose value is because they have to continue to create more of it, right? Same with the peso, same with the euro, etc. So if you actually take all the fiat currencies and you put them in a bucket, there is a non-consensus or a different currency structure, which is Bitcoin, for example. And so if it ends up being right, it's gonna be wildly valuable. It's non-consensus and right. But two is, if I'm looking to store value, if I'm trying to save, I'm not going to save in the fiat structure, regardless of the currency, doesn't matter, dollars, euros, yen, whatever. I'm going to put it into an asset where it protects my purchasing power. And if the switching cost is zero, I now can switch back and forth very easily. So you can see a world where my employer pays me in dollars, it auto-converts into Bitcoin, I sit it there, and then I got to pay my taxes in dollars. I convert back into dollars and I pay. Well, I'm saving in Bitcoin, I'm storing value in Bitcoin. What do people do? Well, historically, maybe I had to buy real estate to do that. So my employer paid me in dollars, took the dollars, I converted it into real estate. I sat there, and then all of a sudden I needed money to pay my taxes. I could sell the real estate, get it, and pay it back. Now that's a ridiculous, you know, order of events if I'm simply going to use it as a saving mechanism to then pay my taxes, you know, later this year, because there's cost, there's time lapse, etc. But there's no difference between doing that with real estate or doing it with Bitcoin. It's just now all of a sudden I can do it instantaneously. I can do it with a digital asset that protects my purchasing power, and the switching cost is zero, essentially.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Lesson number 4: Borrow against your assets with Michael Saylor.

If I have $10,000, I'm probably going to hold $50 in my currency wallet. I'm going to convert the other $9,950 into Bitcoin because that's my checking account versus savings account. And even then, the best thing I think, the ideal situation you want to get to eventually is I put 100% of my assets into Bitcoin, and then I have a credit card/credit line, which is drawn against the— which is converted into local currency, and it is drawn against the Bitcoin. So I have $10,000 of Bitcoin, and I want to spend $37. So I spend $37, and now I owe $37 against my 50 million Satoshis, and I never really sell my Bitcoin, I just generated debt against the Bitcoin. And this is— we're a little bit early here, but if your expense ratio is less than your expected appreciation, over time, that is to say, if you expect Bitcoin to go up 10% a year, and if you have $1 million in assets and your expenses a year are $50,000, so your expense ratio is 5% a year, and you expect Bitcoin to appreciate at 10% a year, if your expense ratio is less than your expected appreciation over time, you never have to sell anything ever. You can borrow against your assets from now to the end of eternity. Now, it requires that you have a Bitcoin banking sector developed. You have to have a credit line against the Bitcoin, and we see that developing in different ways around the world, but ultimately, that would be the ideal situation. You would want to have a situation where you're holding Bitcoin, and you're drawing credit lines in the currencies that exist.

Lesson number 5: Be your own banker with Mark Cuban.

Here's what it comes down to. Either the applications are going to be there to make life better and to make business more productive, efficient, and profitable, or they're not. And that is everything right there. And so if it's easier to transmit value from point A to point B using Bitcoin or using Ethereum or using somebody else. All right, that's what we're going to do because the way SWIFT is set up right now for, for, you know, international transfers is ridiculous. And, you know, like Elon Musk, like Jeff Bezos says, your margin is my opportunity. It's the same here. You know, the banking's margin, the bank's margin is Bitcoin and crypto's opportunity, particularly for finance. And it's going to It's going to impact it. You know, I keep on telling people, and they don't fully understand it with DeFi, that when you own crypto, you become your own personal banker. You get to borrow against your Bitcoin or your Ethereum faster, quicker, better than any way you've ever been able to borrow before. I have a decent amount of money in the bank, right? And I have to go to my banker and sign forms now it's easier now with DocuSign and get their permission to borrow against my money on an overcollateralized basis. So, when I wanted a mortgage for my— well, let's just put aside a mortgage, just— excuse me, needed—

You can do mortgage on the blockchain now, on Ethereum blockchain.

Well, exactly, right? And so, the whole point being, when you have qualified digital tradable assets, because they can be traded in real time, They're very easy to collateralize. And when you— when they're easy to collateralize and price, then it's really easy to lend against.

Lesson number 6: Change with the times with Kevin O'Leary.

I work in a very regulated world. I'm an investor in so many different financial services companies that are reporting issuers. And so we don't have the luxury of being offside with regulators, not now, not ever. And in 2017, when we were talking about those epic moments. And it's true because I get those things shoved in my face every day. But, but I point out that when things change, I change. That's when I took my first Bitcoin, Ethereum positions in 2017. Obviously, I've done very well with those. But recently, after the regulators in Switzerland, France, Germany, Australia, England, Japan, Canada all started to change their stance on crypto, it allowed me to start to allocate to it in a compliant way. And that's really what got me going. Obviously, this is an asset class that's here to stay. It's still going through a very nascent phase. I'll be putting a lot more into it as time changes. And still, the regulator's not 100% on board. We all know that. But things are getting better, not just domestically, but internationally. And so I'm an international investor. And in many countries where we're talking about Bitcoin or Ethereum or other assets, other crypto assets, assets, tokens and coins, the regulators opened up.

And lesson number 7, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is look for safety with Anthony Scaramucci.

We have had gold come back in vogue, if you will, as the debate on inflation continues to heat up.

Does that form some competition again for crypto?

Listen, I'm never going to sell short gold. It's got a 5,500-year history of offering a store of value. But like everything in our society, when you get a technical property where there's a massive improvement, that has a tendency to eclipse things. And so, you know, we had DVDs, Scott, and we moved to Netflix and streaming. The Satoshi Nakamoto white paper basically put us into a new era, and the technical properties associated with Bitcoin are infinitely better than You can move it costlessly, you can store it virtually costlessly, and it has this ledger that is completely missile-locked. You know, you can't hack it. And so with 21 million coins and its scarcity, remember we only have 65% of the gold mined right now, the shortage of supply, the technical properties, I think it's probably gonna be 10 times better than gold over a long period of time. But for right now, Bitcoin is pacing what people like Michael Saylor and Cathie Wood are predicting that it will do. It will eventually eclipse gold. It's about a $1.2 trillion market cap today. Gold's roughly $11 trillion. But I think Bitcoin gets there, Scott, the same way we're using our smartphone today and not using a rotary phone. I think they can. I think gold will be okay, but it's sort of a flatline. Situation. Can it go up modestly?

Yes.

But I think Bitcoin and, you know, properties like Ethereum and Algorand are going to go up exponentially just because of the scalability security issues around them. And so, yes, can gold go up? Certainly. If you're going to have 6% inflation, will gold go up?

Sure.

But I would put, I would put my money, and I'm encouraging clients to put their money in Bitcoin. You know, I've been talking about that for the the last year, and I think we're just getting started in Bitcoin. So, for me, it can go up, but I'm not going to be surprised if Bitcoin goes up at an exponential rate and gold is going up at a linear one.

Bitcoin, as I've argued in some of my writing, is more than just an invention. It's actually the discovery of absolute scarcity. And that we have unveiled a property of money that we will only discover once. And it's got really major ramifications for the world at large. So with gold, for instance, as we've covered, it became money because it was the most relatively scarce monetary metal, right? Its supply was hardest to increase over time. However, If we could somehow flip a switch today and make everyone in the world go out and start mining gold, we could increase the supply much more quickly. Its historic inflation rate's about 2%. We could double that pretty quickly. Bitcoin, with Bitcoin, it is not possible. So no matter how much effort and energy and capital and operational expenditure we pour into the mining network, we cannot deviate from its fixed and diminishing supply curve. From between now and the last Bitcoin being mined in 2140 because of the difficulty adjustment. It's constantly, it's adapting to human action actually. So the harder we pursue it, the more that it recedes, and then the less we pursue it, the more available it makes itself. And this is, it's a real major breakthrough because it's the closest thing to perfect information we've ever had in an economy. And perfect information is this— it's a theoretical but unattainable state of the market where all market actors have all the relevant information about everything so that they can compete as efficiently as possible. And in the state, in a state of pure information, we have— I'm sorry, perfect information— we have perfect competition. And in perfect competition, we maximize wealth generation. So we're competing as freely as possible from coercive and violent impediments. And so I think Bitcoin in that sense is going to pull the world closer to a state of perfect competition than we've ever been before, which would increase wealth generation to an extent we've never seen before.

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you want a deeper dive into Bitcoin, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there.

Much, much more valuable than it is today. Do we get institutions to adopt then, you know, kind of developing nations and then there's a default and there's an inflection point? Like, how do you think we sequentially get there? What does that like order of operations almost look What does it look like?