1874: Metaverse Real Estate: Virtual Land Boom or Ponzi Scheme? Steve Hoffman

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors. Greetings empowered investors and listeners from all over the world. Jason is traveling this week in the beautiful state of Alaska and he'll be back with you soon. In the meantime, to our members of Empowered Investor Pro, don't forget we have our monthly meeting next Tuesday. And if you're not a member of the Empowered Investor Pro community yet, well, what are you waiting for? It's an incredible community of like minded investors and real estate professionals. Maximize your investments, save time and money. Learn from the best minds in real estate. Don't get left behind. Join us today@empoweredinvestor.com today Jason invites Steve Hoffman to the show. He is Chairman and CEO of Founder Space, a global innovation hub for entrepreneurs and investors and they'll be talking about investing in virtual real estate in the Metaverse. Enjoy the show.

It is my pleasure to welcome Steve Hoffman back to the show. Otherwise known as Captain Hoff, he is the author of the three books you see on the screen, if you are watching on video. If you're not, well, you'll probably hear about him during the show and I want to talk to him about a few things today, the first of which since he was on last time, a lot has developed in the space of land in the Metaverse. Right. We talked about that last time he was here and he has some new thoughts on that. I was kind of getting interested and. Well, you'll hear that in a moment and then we're going to talk about all of the applications. Well, there's never all of them, but many of the applications of technology in real estate. And it's going to surprise you. Some of this stuff, I mean, some of it, some you thought of, some you haven't thought Of So I think you're going to get some interesting insights into the future. We're going to appear in the future today. And Steve, welcome back. How are you?

Thank you, Jason. It's fantastic to be here.

Yeah. Good to see you. Actually, I should be saying Captain Hoff. I guess that's my nickname. All right, well, hey, first off, I want to ask you to just comment on Land in the Metaverse. Now, this has taken a while for me to get my head around NFTs, and I still remain skeptical of NFTs and cryptocurrency. And land in the Metaverse is really just another form of an nft, right? A non Fungi token, right?

That is correct.

So an NFT basically allows. Well, it creates digital scarcity because there can only be one of each thing. Yet, of course, the Metaverse is unlimited in size, so it's kind of a contradiction. I know some people have taken a while to get their head around this, as have I, and some they're new to it. So I just wanted to mention that for. For those newer people. But anyway, where do you buy land in the Metaverse? First of all, just give us some of the big places. You do that. Decentraland.

Decentraland, probably the most popular one. You can go there, you can buy homes, all sorts of things. They have art galleries where you can buy NFT paintings, you name it. They have parties, corporate events, bands, pretty active. There's also Sandbox, one of the other huge one Axies Infinity, sort of a game, like a Pokemon style game in the metaverse where you buy Pokemons, you earn revenue. They call it play to earn the whole model there. And there are many other. There are hundreds of others.

Right, right. There's an unlimited. There's no size constraints on this stuff. But it's really interesting how some of this stuff is being organized. I mean, it is formal in many cases. Building codes. I mean literally building codes. You would not think you would need a building code in a virtual reality world, right?

Or homeowners associations. You got to keep it up to standard.

Hoas. The illegal governments have invaded the metaverse. Unbelievable. Well, let me tell you folks, I recently, just last week, in preparation for this interview, I wanted to reacquaint my thinking on this. And so I watched the movie Ready Player One. Again, great movie. Good. Of course, that's a movie anybody who wants to understand what's coming should see Ready Player One. It's a famous movie and it talks all about the Metaverse and shows you examples of this whole life. But today I said I wanted to talk a little bit about Virtual Land in the Metaverse, and you said you thought it was a scam. Tell us about that, because that's what I thought.

I'll give people one other source to get acquainted with the Metaverse and the future of technology. Really. And it's my book, the Five Forces that Change Everything. It goes in depth on where we're headed with this technology. But let me start. I've been fascinated with technology my entire life. I'm a huge pro technology guy. That's what I do. I work with startups around the world, helping fund them, helping train them, grow their businesses. So I was fascinated by the Metaverse, and I wanted to see where we're headed and whether it's a good investment. Like, you know, your audience out there, they're investing in real estate. Why shouldn't they go to Decentraland or Sandbox or Axes Infinity and buy some of this virtual real estate and start earning from it? Well, the deeper I dug into it, the more skeptical I became. And usually, you know, I'm one who would be converted. Like, I love technology, but what I found is that, well, these are good investments as long as you know when to sell. So if they're very speculative. So basically, as long as that community is growing and strong and continues to grow, usually, usually you will see your investment appreciate meaning. Other people will pay more money than you paid. But as soon as these communities, there are two things that can tip the balance, and your assets can start to decline in value very rapidly, like, literally crash. And one thing is the community just dries up. Like, people move on.

Like, so it's kind of like a nightclub.

You know, if nobody's in the nightclub.

And everybody goes there, and then it kind of fades and the crowd changes and nobody wants to go anymore.

And so imagine if you bought a bar stool in this nightclub and we're renting it out to people and stuff. You know, it's great as long as people want to sit in it, but as soon as they aren't coming in, it goes away. And we see this. Like, virtual worlds aren't new. Like, the Metaverse isn't new. We had Second Life. Hugely popular. Its economy was bigger than some countries. And this was back decades ago, and, you know, then it imploded. It's still around today, but it's a. It's a shadow of its former self.

So Second Life is kind of like MySpace?

No, Second Life was a full on virtual.

No, no. I mean, I know what it was. I'M saying it's analogous to MySpace.

Oh, yeah, it's an.

Oh, it's huge. And now it's nothing.

Right? Just like MySpace. No, you could have a MySpace page, but who cares? Like, nobody does it. So most of these will end up like Second Life. Even if they're very successful. They just have a limited time span. It's not like real estate in the real world where people, somebody who always needs it.

Captain Hoff, I'll give you the counterpoint. I mean, big corporations that we think must know what they're doing are spending quite literally millions and millions of dollars on virtual land. And you know, Gucci has done a virtual fashion line. You heard about that? Probably. They have virtual Gucci stores you can go into and pay with real money to buy virtual clothing. Like, you know, it's, it takes a while to get your head around this stuff. I'll, you know, I'm too old for this.

I'm a virtual world veteran. I ran my own virtual world back in the days of Second Life. It all happened before. This is, this is redux. We've seen this before. All the big corporations were in. Did it make a difference in the long run? In for marketing anything that's hot. If you're a smart branding person, you'll jump on that bandwagon because it gets the Gucci name out. So they're not making long term investments for the value of these virtual goods or even releasing them. They are going in for the hype now, like I said, for any given period of time, if you know when to get out and you're a gambler, come in, invest and. But just make sure to sell before you don't want to be the last one holding the bag.

Okay, so, so look, you know, when we teach real estate invest, you know, I've been teaching real estate investing for almost 20 years now. Well, really even before that when I was in the traditional business, but, you know, exclusively investors for almost 20 years. And we teach buy and hold stuff. You know, we teach, don't expect appreciation if it happens. Great. It's sort of hard to, you know, have that line in the last couple of years because there's been so much appreciation. Has been wonderful. But, you know, we teach that. That's kind of the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself. How would someone know, though, in the metaverse where you are on that curve? Right? Because we have heard stories and I don't know if my listeners have heard them, but I've definitely heard them from people. I actually Know, I believe them. I don't think they're making this up, that they have made money speculating on virtual land in the metaverse. Now, how would you know if it's hot or if it'll remain hot or for how long or are there any metrics?

So a lot of these things, like anything that becomes a trend in the media, you can see, wow, this is taken off, right? People are coming in and it's always a risk because nobody knows when the market is at the top. And these aren't like real real estate, like actual physical property in the real world. Physical property in the real world, for the most part, for most property, you can earn income off of it. So you can, you can rent it out, you could live in the space and therefore you don't have to pay rent and you're saving money. They are worth something in the virtual world. Now what they have is they have play to earn, which means they've built in game mechanics into these like axies. Infinities is the biggest one in the world, where you can literally buy these Pokemon like characters and other assets in their virtual world and then you can start to earn money. So then you could say, well, it's analogous to real estate in the real world world. Like I buy something and it's producing income. Well, what they're paying you is in their own virtual currency. So they promise you buy this land or you buy this object or this character or this monster, whatever it is, and you can actually earn money owning it forever. Sounds great now. And it really works. So a lot of people, they would buy these assets and they would either be producing income for them or, or they would just be holding them and they would be appreciating the two ways you can earn. And as long as more people are coming into the system and paying money is flowing into that system and people are buying more, there's a strong demand, right, for people buying more. Then these virtual NFT objects generate more money and the value of that currency goes up and the value of those assets go up. However, what axes, infinity. And I say they're the biggest one ran into a snag and that is called inflation. Because as soon as things start to taper off and you don't get this huge flood of new users coming in, buying, all of a sudden they are printing their virtual currency. They promised it to all these people and basically they're flooding the market. Inflation. Inflation takes over and the value of the currency starts to drop and then the value of the assets start to drop. And everything starts to implode. Now Axis Infinity isn't dead yet. They're trying to. To grapple with this inflation problem, but it's really hard because they built it into the mechanics. They can't just turn it off. Once you promise people you're paying them this money.

A couple of things. I definitely want to get into this inflation stuff and their modern monetary theory, which is essentially what they're practicing, which is quite interesting because we've done a few shows on that. You talked about the ways to earn and I don't want to leave that behind, that it's gamified and if you are engaged in there and you know, I recently got onto a platform, an AI platform where that's gamified and the more you interact, the more points you get and so forth. And you can buy things with the points. Right. And I'm not a gamer or anything like that. I don't do gaming. Right. But I just found this to be interesting, so I picked it up and checked it out. I'll talk about it later. But you can also actually rent out your virtual land. That's what I've been told.

Oh yeah. In Axes Infinity, they had actually companies coming in, buying up these virtual assets and then renting them out to people who wanted to engage and earn more money in sharing the profits with those people. So they really took it to the next level. But all of this activity at a certain point comes to. It becomes moot when. If there's inflation, if you're just pumping out this virtual currency, but people have too much of it, so that inflation takes over the whole mechanics that they design, the whole economies just implode.

So their virtual currency is not like Bitcoin, where it's a limited number.

Even if it's a limited number, there's still supply and demand. So if people aren't valuing that at a certain point, then, you know, and what's the value of these digital assets? You have to ask yourself that.

It's nothing unless people believe in it. It's completely.

It's nothing unless people.

The irony of the whole cryptocurrency movement is that it's the biggest fiat of all. Fiat, right? There's no dollars fiat money.

There's no economy backing it. There's no government backing it. It's a bunch of hackers out there, some anonymous programmers. A lot of times they're anonymous who just put this out there. And if you want to spend money on it and you want to speculate on it, go for it. Right, but you have to understand what you're doing. So I'm saying whether it's cryptocurrency, whether it's NFTs, all of these things, the underlying value of these is what people believe in it. And if we look at the model, if we actually dissect the models, they are analogous to Ponzi schemes. Like if they, they are, they are legalized Ponzi schemes.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Sounds like a Ponzi scheme. But, you know, it technically is you.

Can make money on a Ponzi scheme. Like if you get in at the right time and out on the right time, you make money. There are people invested in Bernie Madoff who made a lot of money.

Of course, of course, of course. We all know that. But look, it's not a Ponzi scheme if just new people are coming in to buy things. I mean, that's how the real real estate market, I mean, I guess you could argue that's a Ponzi scheme too, but, you know, people believe in real real estate on earth, and more people keep coming in, demanding more, and they keep running up the prices. Right.

That's not a Ponzi. The land has an innate value. Right. I can live on the land, I can own a store.

A real estate still doesn't make it a Ponzi though, Steve, because a Ponzi means that you're paying new investors or you're paying the old investors with the proceeds from the new investors money. And even though I don't disagree with you at all that this is highly speculative and super risky, it doesn't make it an actual Ponzi scheme.

No, if you're just buying an NFT and you're not being. It's not paid to play, basically earn to play earn money as you play, then it's technically might not be a Ponzi scheme. The ones where you are actually earning money, they're actually paying you that money through the system, right through the money they're bringing in. And that is much closer to an actual Ponzi scheme.

Got it. Got it. And I don't deny at all that some cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes. In fact, I'm pretty sure they are. But I'll tell you what it is though. If it's not a Ponzi, it's simply the greater fool theory at work, which.

That'S the best and most accurate way to describe it. It's the greater fool theory.

So the greater fool theory says just for Those who don't know, you know, it says, no matter what I paid for this virtual land, in this case, some greater fool will come along and pay more. Right.

And if I believe that and my assumptions are true, that will work up to a certain point as long as there's another fool. And as soon as the fools stop coming. So that's what you're getting into. People should understand that people have made a lot of money in this and the people, and they're true believers. But you look at the, really, a lot of the crypto diehards, they're just moving from one of these to another. Like they invest in one, they hold it, they move to the next.

It's kind of, it's kind of like, you know, the MLM crowd, multi level marketing crowd, you know, they just go from like one deal to the next. And conceptually MLM isn't bad innately. But the problem is the people at the top of all these deals, they're just unethical and they make it bad. You know, like the business model could actually work. The problem is people are so fallen that it usually doesn't.

And they try to get you to buy products they know that you can't sell and you buy a bunch and you're stuck with them. And a lot of people, if it.

Was based on actual retail usage, then it'd be okay. But you know, those companies are pretty boring. They're like called Amway.

Okay, yeah, right, exactly.

It's Amway that's really based on usage and nobody makes any money with it anymore because everybody's done it. Exactly.

So I would just say to people, if you want to go to Vegas on your computer, invest in crypto, invest in NFTs. Like, it's a fun way to gamble, but you better know you're gambling and that's fine. Go to town if you want to gamble. But if you want a serious investment, a serious long term buy and hold investment, this is not the way to go. Don't buy and hold.

Interesting. Very interesting, Very interesting. I'm glad you shared that with us. I wonder if it will always be true what you're saying, if there will be some. I mean, for example, I hate to even mention their name because I hate what they do. And I think they're, I think the founder is a scumbag. But Facebook or Meta, actually, if they've got the traffic and there's such a big player that they're going to be around, right? Likely. You know what if you bought land in their Metaverse I mean, the likelihood is that's going to continue.

Just because it's technically around right doesn't mean it's going to be people are going to continue to pay for it. Now, Facebook, they actually just announced this. Like Mark Zuckerberg, I have the same opinion you do about him. He's proven he's unethical with everything he does. Now they announced they changed their name to Meta, said they're going to do a big metaverse. Then he recently announced he's not going to do a big metaverse. They're not doing it, he decided, because he can't guarantee it will be successful. And honestly, if it isn't successful, it gives Facebook a big black eye. Now, we know Facebook has launched in the past decade dozens of applications to compete with all sorts of different things online. They tried to do their own TikTok, they tried to do all these other. They ended up killing them all. Just because Facebook did its own virtual currency, they did its own cryptocurrency.

But that Libra never launched, did it?

They did. Yeah. Libra was going, but nobody cared. Nobody wanted it. Yeah, they launched it and it just went nowhere.

Wow.

And they killed it. So just because they launch a virtual world doesn't guarantee it's going to be successful.

I mean, listen, and I hate this company too, and it's bad ethics. I mean, big tech is just sleazy. It's the modern day robber barons, unfortunately. But if anyone wanted to launch a virtual currency, and I said this many years ago, probably almost 10 years ago, I said this, it should be Amazon. I mean, that's the company that actually could do a virtual currency really well because they've got consumers that buy actual things.

They could have done a crypto, right? They could have made cryptocurrency, but they didn't. And that's because, honestly, this is the fact, most people don't want to buy through crypto. Like, they don't want to buy. Like if you bought Ethereum, which I have, and you bought Bitcoin, and you've been in, you know, the transaction fees a lot of times the gas prices.

Oh, they're huge.

They're huge. It makes it untenable. And then even if you get those down, it's just darn inconvenient. And most people have their credit card, which gives them like 2% cash back and things like that. What's the incentive for me to do it? For the merchants.

For the merchants, to some extent. Captain Hoff, you know, we're all thinking that look, this is just the very early days of this. It's going to get better.

I've been saying that for over a decade now.

It's not that long in the grand scheme of things.

It isn't. I'm not a total crypto skeptic. I think there's room for cryptocurrencies. But I will tell you that the amount of hype compared to the amount of utility that these have delivered, it's totally disproportional. Like there's 1000x on hype and, and 1x on utility. Like, people don't want to buy with cryptocurrency, we've seen it, they don't want to do it. So what are they using cryptocurrency for? Number one, speculation. This is the biggest thing, like gambling. Like people are gambling with it. That's why people buy cryptocurrency. That's why they buy NFTs. Even if you look at Bored Apex, the biggest NFT out there, right? That's the biggest one. Bored Apes.

You know, my friend buys those.

Well, your friend has just lost 50%.

Well, he's made a ton of money on them so far.

Oh, he bought them early.

Then he showed me. I couldn't believe this. He showed me his dumb ape on his Twitter account. Yeah, okay. Because it's very prestigious to have an NFT as your Twitter thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Because it's like driving a Ferrari or something.

Right.

And I mean, I just can't get my head around that. Why is that thing worth $220,000 when.

You can right click and download it? You can have the same image on yours. You just won't have.

I don't need to right click. Just take a screenshot.

Yeah, yeah. Either way, right? It doesn't matter. But the bottom line is those went up astronomically in value and now they've come down. Like they've just come down 50%. I predict they'll come down more. They might go back up and they might come down, but in the long term, I think people will see it what it for what it is. It's. These things aren't really worth anything unless.

Somebody will pay more, but that's a big and less. Okay, look, I'm going to argue the other side of that. People pay for this stuff. I mean, they have, they have been. It's. It's been amazing. I mean, I can't believe it. Like someone made $70 million for a JPEG just over a year ago. I mean, it's like shocking yeah, Beeple.

Beeple sold his little jpeg. You know, great for Beeple. For the person who bought it, they were super rich. Anyway, these people, the people doing the majority of these big purchases, they're almost all made a huge amount of money early in crypto. So, like what I said before, they're just moving their money around to the next hot thing and then hoping to sell it for more.

It's going to be so interesting to see. And listen, I want to state my position again and we'll move on to the real estate stuff here. Okay? But I just want to state the position I have held since I found out about Bitcoin on a beach one night where a guy was describing it to us and I couldn't get my head around it. It was $74. So you know about when that.

You should have bought it.

Of course I should have bought it. But you know, maybe in a few years I'll be saying I'm glad I didn't, you know, but. But I bought a bunch more at a higher price. Okay. Anyway, look, I would love nothing more than to see, especially as something like bitcoin be hugely successful and just take over the world, a decentralized money of the people that doesn't require a banking system. That's a defi. You know, I would love that. I would love that, but I just don't think it's going to happen. And the reason is we have the two most powerful forces the human race has ever known, after God, which is a supernatural force. You have governments and central banks. They have standing armies, they have police forces. And there is no cryptocurrency that has any of that. Look, even. Let's go back in history. Let's go back to what, the 1500s and talk about the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch East India Company, probably the biggest corporation that ever existed in the human race, which was worth like $7 trillion. I know everybody thinks Apple and Amazon are so valuable. They're a smidgen compared to the Dutch East India Company. And that company had an army. It could wage war. Okay. To protect.

Equivalent to a nation.

Right. They were essentially a corporate nation. Okay. And no cryptocurrency has that.

No, not even close. If you think that any government, any major government, not El Salvador, which is just a disaster case, or countries like.

That go there if you want to be kidnapped.

Yeah, but any country anymore, really major country.

Well, Bahamas is getting into the crypto craze.

Yeah, but they're always into these alternative things because that's how they make their money is getting people to come there so they don't have to pay taxes or do whatever. But a major country, industrial country, that will adopt a third party crypto, not one that they issue themselves.

Yeah, right.

That will make that, tie that to their national currency. They will never do it.

So at the beginning of the biggest.

Rush leverage leverage countries have in controlling their economy is their currency. They're not going to give this up.

Of course not.

Hand this off to some decentralized thing and that will just remain a fact. Now, I want to say one thing. I do believe in cryptocurrencies, like cryptocurrencies will continue to exist. In fact, the US will go digital with its currency at some point. India's done it. China is launching their own blockchain with a cryptocurrency. Now, those cryptocurrencies aren't really decentralized. They are totally centralized. Well, this is my biggest problem with crypto in the first place is that anybody in power wants centralization, any corporation, any government needs and wants to control as much as possible. They never want it out of their control. So is there any incentive for them to have a truly decentralized currency? Absolutely not. The only incentive is for people outside that system who don't want to be part of that system to do it. And that's where we get Bitcoin. And the value of Bitcoin is for people honestly to get around the system. Right. So if you don't want to have your money tied in to a specific currency, you can put it in Bitcoin if you want to avoid taxes. If you want to do something illegal, you can put it in Bitcoin if you want to move it around the world.

But actually you'd be better off if you wanted to do something illegal. You'd be better off using the dollar because it's not traceable. Bitcoin is actually quite traceable.

I know, I know. But they're building cryptocurrencies now that are, are less traceable. So they're actually working on that. Crypto space is very innovative. And I'm not a Luddite. Like I said, my whole life is technology. I'm a realist, though. I like to try to keep my eyes open. So there is value to cryptocurrency because there are a lot of strong use cases like I just stated that aren't necessarily legal or beneficial to society, that people will use these cryptocurrencies for and continue to use them. But what I see in the future is that governments, including the US At a certain point, will want more and more control over these cryptos. A lot of them will be banned and a lot of them will be highly regulated. And then at a certain point, they won't be that different from other securities that we see.

It'll start to. The gap will start to close.

Right.

And there will be a lot less freedom in the crypto.

This wild west we're in right now will end and along with it ending, will end a lot of the speculation.

And a lot of the benefits.

Yeah. Especially if you're somebody who's, you know, really doesn't want your money tied into a specific system and wants it on the outside. Yes, a lot of those benefits will end.

Yeah. So to address your issue of, you know, will any country really adopt a third party cryptocurrency that isn't their own? Of course there's going to be a digital dollar or central bank digital currency.

Right, right. They're going to do that.

That's going to be here before we know it. And it's going to be unfortunate because it's really going to restrict our freedom and liberty. It's going to be a very bad thing, I think. But, you know, I just wonder what will Michael Saylor be saying in five or 10 years? Like, will he be right and bitcoin will be a million dollars a coin by then and, you know, or will it be nothing? Or will it be about the same? Like, who knows? Right. But the one country that I thought might actually adopt that third party crypto, a good candidate for it would be Russia.

Yeah, Russia.

Not that I'm sympathetic to them because I'm. I mean, the Russian people are great, but Vladimir Putin.

But again, I mean, Vladimir wants control. Like, his whole thing is about control.

Of course he does. But when they shut him out of the SWIFT system, if he uses Ripple xrp, like he has an alternative there.

For him, so there's an incentive for him. They're using crypto now, I mean, in Russia to move their money around. Of course it's something they're using. Right. The oligarchs there, they have to. They don't want their money now tied up in US dollars because it's. That again, that's out of their control. I see all these things come down to control and it's who's. Who's controlling what. The thing that a lot of people fail to understand is they think crypto is truly decentralized and this is a myth. They think that they are in control. And again, this is a myth, because these crypto systems, if you look really deeply at them, which I have, they have a lot of points of centralization. First of all, the exchanges, right, we've seen that. Secondly, stablecoins, right, people have to put their money where they don't want it, fluctuating like crazy. These stable coins are literally unregulated banks that can do anything with your money and they pay obscene interest rates which they can't sustain. And so they're not really stable at all, which we saw with Terra when it went 60 billion in assets lost. And that's not an aberration. That is the system of these. A lot of us decry regulation, and there's over regulation, of course, is really bad, but a lot of regulation protects consumers who really don't have the information to make intelligent decisions. And these are totally unregulated. So when you're entering these fears and even cryptocurrency, you can change the bylaws of crypto. You can like, fork and do all these different things if you get a consensus with the majority of the people who control it. And there are a lot of whales out there, and there's a lot of consortiums of groups who actually have the ability to totally rewrite the rules of the crypto. So you can think the rules are one thing one day and you're fine with those, but they could be something entirely different the next day.

In all fairness, though, I do think it's important to distinguish crypto from bitcoin, which really is different. I know it's similar in many ways, too, but bitcoin is in a class.

By itself, so technically they're not different. Bitcoin is just a variation of a cryptocurrency. It's a subset of cryptocurrency, which.

No, no, I mean, I understand that, but the ability to have consortiums and consensus on bitcoin is harder than.

It's harder, but it's still there. It's still there. And there's a lot of. And there are a lot of different groups intermediating and providing services for bitcoin that are choke points of centralization now, I will say is that bitcoin is the gold standard of crypto. So when people ask me over the years, if you were to invest in one crypto, what would you invest in? I'd said bitcoin, of course, because it's simply by the network effect, which is the more people that participate, the more value it's worth and the brand it's Something people recognize and trust. Bitcoin has a huge edge over these altcoins. So these altcoins are super, super speculative. Bitcoin is much more stable, like you.

Said, but even that has proven to not be that stable.

It's all relative. It's all relative. But markets go up and markets go down, the stock market goes up and there's hype. And so all of these things are affected by different things. Will bitcoin be around? My prediction is it's not going away entirely. The crypto isn't going away entirely. Like, it won't. It will evolve, too, and there may be new use cases out for it and new abilities. And there may be ways when it's regulated and integrated with governments like the United States, in an intelligent way, if we can do that, that it could provide real value to people beyond the current value that it provides. And I want to see what happens. I can't predict because there's so many factors involved and technology changes so quickly, but I am excited about seeing what happens next.

Yeah, yeah, it's really quite interesting, all this stuff. All right, Steve, look, I know we didn't cover any of the real estate technology stuff, which I definitely want to do with you, but going down this rabbit hole was fun and interesting, for sure, and I hope the listeners and viewers enjoyed it. So why don't we have you back on a second show? Well, that'll be the third, actually, and we'll cover the real estate technology. Folks, you're not going to believe all of the applications. Many you haven't thought of in real estate tech. Okay, so we're going to dive into that on a very soon future episode with Captain Hoff. And in the meantime, give out your website.

So if you want to reach me, you can just go to foundersspace.com founders space. I'm there. All my books are there. Surviving a Startup, Make Elephants Fly, the Five Forces. You can also reach me on almost any social network. LinkedIn is a great one. Search for founder space or Steve Hall Hoffman.

Can we reach you in the metaverse, though?

You can try. I'm in and out of the metaverse all the time, but like most people, I don't actually spend a lot of time hanging out there.

Well, that's because you don't own any land.

Yeah, but even people own land. They just buy and sell. They're not just chatting in those sites.

You don't have a place to stay. You're homeless in the metaverse. I am.

I'm so sad.

All right, good to have you. And we'll have you back real soon to talk about real estate technology. Thanks.

Thank you so much.

I just want to say thanks to you because I would never been able to retire if I hadn't got hooked on to you 10 years ago. And I really owe this to you.

That I've met my goal, you know.

To retire early and not work for the man and kind of be my own boss. And I would never been able to.

Do that had I not.

I guess I was a little discouraged 10 years ago, but hooking onto your podcast and learning from what you were teaching has made this all possible. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional and we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.