Michael Taggart — Simple Ways To Get Involved In Cryptocurrency Trading

Boom, boom, boom, Boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, yo, yo.

Sup, Sup? This is Joe Fear. And over there to my right, and now my left, and now right in front of me, because I'm walking, is Mr. Matt Wolf.

Hello.

Today is part two, another part tour of our series, and this one is about cryptocurrency and trading, investing with our main man, Mr. Michael Taggart. And we had him on a couple weeks back or whenever it was published, I don't know right now, but he talked all about the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, ethereum, basically.

He gave a good explanation of how it all works, why you would want it, what the implications are. It was pretty much a masterclass on why you should be caring about blockchain and bitcoin. This time we wanted to talk tactics. We wanted to talk how do we invest in it, how do we trade it, how do we make money with it? How do we automate it?

We went into all those topics, tons of things. So, like, if. And this. Don't, don't. Like, if you ever traded, you know, if you never had traded stocks. Bitcoin, crypto, none of that stuff. Don't worry about it. This is good for newbies, it's good for experts. There's a lot of cool things here that he basically teaches you and you can get running into today if you wish. And there's a lot to be said and learned here.

Yeah. If you don't know anything about blockchain or bitcoin or any of that kind of stuff, make sure you listen to our part one with him. That's where we dive really deep into how it all works.

See?

But this one, we're gonna actually get into some more technical stuff and dive into how to trade it, how to store it, and all that good stuff.

Let's go. All right, we're back for round number two with Mr. Tagger. How you doing, man?

You know, I'm doing pretty good today.

Yeah. Good.

It's good to hear that. Just got back from la. It was nice and sunny. I was hanging out on Catalina island, and then I showed back up here, and it's like 35 degrees.

I heard it's cold as hell out.

There, but San Diego, we got a heat wave right now, right?

Yeah. We're in shorts and no shoes right now, so.

Sorry.

That's okay. I'm not wearing anything right now.

Typical. Awesome.

All right, so just let's preface this real quick. This is actually round two with Mr. Michael Tagg. So if you haven't listened to round one with him, you need to listen to that because that's where you kind of get the whole backstory of what Michael was doing and how he got into blockchain and bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and a whole overview and educational course essentially on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. So listen to that if you haven't already, because we're not going to really go into the basics as much in this call. So I just want to disclaim that before we dive in.

Yeah, yeah, and this one, we kind of want to focus more on the investing side, trading, maybe not so short term. And we'll get into that. We'll see the difference between short term, long term, and a whole load of questions we got from our users too, or our listeners. So, yeah, man, I guess let's dive in. Yeah, let's just get straight to it. So in terms of, I guess let's explain short term and long term investing because you were just telling us before the call, you know, one's a lot more stressful than the other.

Yeah, it is. So, you know, back in the first call, I kind of talked about how I got involved in bitcoin. And so one of the big things I did is, number one, I have no experience whatsoever in trading stocks or doing any sort of stock, just stock forex trading, whatever. And I just kind of just bought a F ton of bitcoin. Like, this is a lot, actually. Some of my friends told me I was the greatest person that they knew at the time, but I bought a ton of it. Like, I had many thousand bitcoins and I basically was just sitting there and trading them back and forth and doing. Doing crazy stuff. Like, I did start realizing that, hey, at certain times when people are acting a certain way, I could do a. Like I could sell a third of them and then sell the other 2/3 of them really fast when they're freaking out and just. And get a bunch of money. And then as they're all freaking out and jumping because they see like huge orders, like thousands of bitcoins just getting dropped all at once. And I just go buy that globe, right? And so I would sit there and do like high frequency trading, different things like that. And it got to be stress. So I did develop some software for bitcoin trading. Now I. I'm not selling it anymore right now. We didn't Keep it updated. I let it kind of go after Bitcoin was going down, down, down, down, down the entire time for, for a long time I kind of went on to other things. I stopped being as interested in kind of frequency trading and started being more interested in developing out ecosystem and all that. But what I was doing is EMA trading which is like exponential moving averages and using that to profit. And I would say that I did win more than I did lose using the software. But when I was doing it by myself, you know, I don't really have.

Many stats for that. I made a couple of really, really good trades early on and it double tripled my stash. And then I did some trading in between there. Maybe made some, maybe lost some on some days. The big thing for me was actually exiting before it crashed all the way down from 1200. Kind of got out. I got out still at when it was at a thousand. So you know that was, that was good for me. But my software was the one that did it. It was just based off of some moving averages and it was just meant to get me out during a, what looked to be a catastrophic, you know, breakdown for a little while and getting back in later once the market stabilized. But problem is market didn't stabilize enough. I just stayed out for a long, long, long time and I kind of moved on to other stuff. So there's people who do short term, there's people who do long term trading which is just more buying, investing, holding. Some people right now I think more stabilized version of trading and probably something that you're going to be able to net positive a lot easier on is just getting in on ICOs early or getting in on a pre sale or pre ICO where you're able to buy big chunks prior to the public ico. So you get them at even a lower price than the public is getting in at the low price. So as soon as it goes live and it's able to trade, you can just sell and make an instant profit. That's almost guaranteed. And a lot of people do these pre ICOs because they want to try to hit at least the minimum target goal for the ico. For a few reasons, marketing perspective, they don't look like a bunch of assholes. You know what I mean? Not hitting the target goal or anything like that. That's, that's a major reason from, from just a mind share standpoint and stuff like that. The other part is, you know, some of them are trying to hit their goals in general so they can knock out the Project, do whatever they're doing, stuff like that. And you know, just like any other investment opportunity that you're able to get in on before a lot of other people, they want to let the people in first that maybe are part of their community or people at their friends, family, this, that and the other or people who are like minded with them dep. Depending on rules and regulations there. I don't know if they always follow them. I can't speak to that. Yeah, you know what I mean. So there's different types of trading out there.

So what you're saying is, with the. As far as a short term trader standpoint, that's really the only short term trading that you do these days is kind of get in before the ICO and then dump them when the ICO actually happens?

Pretty much. I mean, I don't really feel like sitting around and staring at charts all day and hand doing it. There are some bots that you can get into with different cryptocurrencies, different types of bots. I'm not going to go naming a bunch. I could probably give you guys one or two after the call. We could throw them up there.

Sure. Cool.

That you can just use to set some kind of trades where you buy them at a couple percent lower than the books and you sell a couple percent higher than the books and usually you can do okay with that sort of thing. A lot of people run bot trading. It's simple and easy. But what happens is when there's a big flash crash, all those bots, they all start selling too, and that they just contribute to the catastrophic crash. And a lot of people lose money over that sort of thing. So you know, they just, that's, that's the thing with it. And so if you're going to trade, just be willing to lose everything you got. Always the best advice I could ever give, really.

So with those ICOs, I actually want to kind of dive into that for a second. Since you brought that up. How would somebody even find something that's in pre ico?

Good question.

Ooh, that is a good question. There are private groups on Telegram that you can kind of get into. You know, got to know a secret handshake this, that or the other. You can ask around. There's a lot of different groups you can go to, like bitcointalk Forum and you can look around for different ICO groups, pre ICO groups.

There are some Ethereum based ones out there. I'm going to give a shout out to. I shouldn't do it to Competitors, but sometimes I will. My homeboy Marcus, he's with a group called co found it and they basically help launch out different businesses projects. ICOs, this, that and the other. They've got kind of like a walled garden where they'll do an ICO launch. They allow their co founded members to get in on it first and then they'll launch it out a little bit further and stuff like that.

Nice.

And they've got their own token as well, the co founded token. So just. Yeah, so basically Marcus is actually up here in Boise with me, which is cool. So you know, just different, different groups like that.

Essentially keeping your ear to the ground at, you know, any, any sort of place that people who trade cryptos hang out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Stokens, you know, they, they've got like a walled garden. They, they have SEC compliant tokens, which is a very good thing. And then yeah, there's, there's a couple of apps that I use like ICO Alert and there's a couple of, if you just type into, you know, Google, there's a couple we can go over later. But there's some couple ICO like aggregate sites that pretty much tell you like what schedule, what ICOs have been in the past, which ones are going on right now, which ones are scheduled, how much they made different things like that. So you can go and watch, go and look at all these ICOs that made like 2,300 million dollars in donations and now they're only worth like 40 million.

Yeah, that's what I've been wondering for a while now is like when the hell is an ICO coming? What is. I mean, I know what it is now, but how do I get in on that?

Now you mentioned a tool called Telegram. You actually mentioned that before the call and Joe and I just kind of pretended like we knew what you were talking about. What is Telegram?

Telegram is a encrypted, like messaging service and you can make groups. It's kind of like similar to Slack. Yeah, but it's encrypted. China just banned it, you know, Telegram. So you know, just stuff like that. But you can make channels on there. There's different traders channels on there. There's whale channels with just groups of whales. There's pump and dump channels. The world is yours.

So there you go. Yeah. If China bans it, you know, it's good.

Yeah, right behind it.

Well, cool. Yeah. Actually since the last call I put some money into a few things. Ripple was one of them. But like so far I'm like making little Gains here and there. You know, it's kind of based off what we were talking about. It's like, look at the team, look at what they're doing. I think those are pretty obviously solid things is look at the whole mission and the technology they're building.

The funny thing is, Joe was actually literally looking at the team. He looked at a picture on one cryptocurrency site and said, I can't buy this. The dude's wearing a fedora.

And I did say that. I can't trust a CEO with a fedora who has a gold chain on as well. Yeah, bro, I don't know.

Nice Indiana Jones pimp.

He's a little funky, so maybe I can get behind it, but it's cool.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. I might be judgy, too. That's a good point, though. You guys just brought up kind of looking around at these different ICOs or different token opportunities and trying to figure out what would lead you to want to invest in them. For me, some key things I look at before investing in specific coins or cryptos are what is the project in and of itself that they're proposing? Have they been running business operations in the past on other companies? Has this company already been in business? Right.

Another. Another good thing is just looking at the team again, checking them out, seeing if they're saying their real names or if they're not, because, you know, then that's just going to lead to. If they have their real names on there, you know, there's definitely a little bit higher trust. They're able to have some sort of recourse in some markets and stuff like that.

Look at the team real quick on LinkedIn, you know, do they have some. Some solid connections in the industry and outside the industry? Do they have skills? They're LinkedIn on point. Look at them. All sorts of stuff like that. Pretty much. You know, if you guys were going to maybe invest in a regular physical company, what would you look at? Same sort of thing. Do you have any P&LS? What's their roadmap look like? Do they have a white paper? Is the white paper really bare bones or have they taken a lot of time on it? Do they have a good legal basis? Is it a security? Does it pass the Howie test or not? Or is it a utility token? Is it a utility token in just name only and wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It's really security because those ones are going to be the ones that I think people are going to be really hammered on later on. I think there's going to be some government intervention here or there, something like that. It's going to cause people to lose some money on it. So just those, those sorts of things of what I really look at before I invest in any altcoin right now. That being said, you can invest in altcoins that have no future jack shit for teams look horrible this, that and the other. Just got a lot of hype and a celebrity tweeted about them and you can make money off of it, but when you're making money, somebody else just lost money. That's gonna be a fact somewhere. Somebody else lost some value somewhere. And do you want to really be a part of.

This? Is kind of like me soapboxy for a second. But do you really want to be a part of that sort of environment that breeds that sort of thing and be a part of the problem and potentially hurt or irreparably harm an industry that has a lot of promise for advancing humanity as a whole? Right. If the answer is yes, you have no problem with that, then go trade that shit.

If the answer is like, I kind of feel like an asshole if I did that, then just don't and actually go invest in real products and stuff like that, because you can do that and make really great speculatory money and not contribute to the problem. And so that's what I try to do whenever I invest.

Now, there's one thing Joe and I were actually having a discussion about before this call is there's a lot of coins that seem like the sort of technology behind it and what they're trying to achieve are very, very, very similar. And it's hard to kind of tell which one could potentially win out in the future. You know, one example we were thinking of was we were looking at one called 10X and one called OMG. And both of them seem to have a method of making it easier to spend your cryptocurrencies. One's like a debit card, one's like a phone app that you can use, kind of like an Apple Pay, it seems like. But they seem very similar in what their outcome is going to be. So how would you look at the two coins that seem to have similar functionality, that seem to be trying to approach the same problem and decide, okay, this is. This is the one that I'm going to go with. Does that even make sense? I feel like I'm rambling.

Oh, yeah, no, no, absolutely. Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's plenty of coins that are coming out that are similar in properties and what they're trying to accomplish. They're appealing to potato in a different way. I'm from Idaho. I say potato plus skinning cats is really sick.

But it's like you mentioned Omisco, basically. OMG. And you mentioned 10X.

They're all attacking the problem at slightly different angles.

My short answer to that is just spread out around your investments. If you see a couple of things that look good, look like they have promise.

Then just spread them around. Are you looking. Let's just say this. Let's say you buy in each of them for $2,000 pop, and one of them goes nowhere and the other one goes up 10x. Are you really that the other one? Shit, man. You made a hedge. You made a calculated choice to just try to play both sides. And alternatively, the other one could go up 100x or you could lose out on both. But if you're doing that method and you're investing in some of these crypto companies early, you're going to likely hit one really good one. Yeah. And I've met people here at the Boise meetup for Bitcoin who literally are just like, I don't know what I'm doing. I just bought some Ethereum and bought into this ICO and then it launched and it blew up and I sold and I'm up like $8 million. And I'm like, good for you. You got lucky. And it's just people just. And so now they just take that money and they just spread it around a different projects trying to just hit another lottery ticket, pretty much. So that's what it is. But if you're. If you're doing this in an industry again, that has a lot of technological promise, if you look at the teams, look at the record of them and see what's going on, and then you just want to make a calculated choice, then spread it around a little bit and just be smart about it.

That's smart because it goes to the strategy Matt and I saw in one of these Facebook groups we're in. Is someone going into altcoins, these guys kind of smaller, smaller values. I think one strategy was, okay, invest in the top eight, like at any one time by market cap. By market cap, yeah. And spread it around that way. And kind of hedge, obviously it's a little different than looking at what they're doing and all that stuff, ICOs and whatnot. But it was kind of like a simpleized strategy of kind of what you're saying there too.

It is. And again, that you're averaging it out. What you're kind of doing is you're buying into all of them and then you're averaging out your profit and loss on each one together. It's kind of like a fund or an index, if you think about it. That's kind of what you just did. So there's that. Here's the other thing, and I'll point this out too. There's some people that are talking about creating decentralized exchanges and stuff like that. Those, I believe, are the future for a lot of different reasons. Centralized exchanges are just huge points of failure and honeypots and this, that, and the other. And like we've got at BitShares. I'll put my bitcharest hat on for a minute. We had a decentralized index. Basically, decentralized exchange has been running for three years plus. No security incidents, no problems. Everything's super fast. And it's the world's only true decentralized exchange. 100% ran by the blockchain. So there's projects. When I. When I see people saying, you know, well, we're going to build this out, we're going to do this decentralized exchange, I'm like, there's already one out there. It's already got a track record. And this, this, this, this, and this. And I also know how hard it is to run a decentralized exchange and how to build one out and actually make it work correctly and things like that. And then there's competitors. Like, you'll see things like waves, and I'm not going to knock on WAVES too much, but I will say some things like they claim to be the fastest in the world's only decentralized exchange. That's blatantly not true. Somebody just actually posted a great article today about. They had about a list of 15 to 20 different huge failure points on waves and how it's not decentralized, it's 100% centralized. It says in their white paper they're centralization. And then they basically found all of these different problems with waves, like the way that the passwords are stored in files that are not even encrypted.

Just things like that. Or iota, for instance, which is in the top five or ten having some major. I mean, if you guys Google it, IOTA had some major flaws in its code. They did go back and fix it, but the problem is that the rest of code hasn't been audited either very well. So there's been major issues with some of that stuff. So when you look, you just need to do a little bit of research, like find out what the problem is. Are they truly what they're saying that they are being or things like that, Just because they're popular today, when somebody publishes a report like that, they could get torched tomorrow. And if you're not on top of it, you could lose a lot of money.

So what would you recommend for someone? And this might be using the answer you already said, so you can kind of shoot it down. But what's a good, simple strategy? Someone totally green, someone brand new to crypto, how should they kind of start and just put their toe in the water?

You know, you can't really go too wrong with buying some of the top cryptos, Bitcoin, Ethereum.

Litecoin, some of those other ones they've been around for a very, very long time. Just dip your toe in the water there. A lot of people go to Coinbase in the US initially. So when you go there, those are going to be the three that you're able to grab onto and be able to get relatively easily. Another one, I would say, is this is actually a little unorthodox, but it's also a great method for people. You may have listeners who don't have a lot of money that they can really spend right now to get into crypto, but there are ways that you can earn your way. So you can potentially go and get some. There's some bitcoin referral programs and stuff like that, where they teach people about bitcoin and wallets and this and that, and they give you a referral link and you can send people to that and you can make a couple of bucks or they'll pay you in bitcoin, small little pieces of bitcoin for every person that signs up and stuff like that. So you can try to work on that as a way to earn some bitcoin that you can then go and invest in some other cryptocurrencies. You can also go to steam, go to steemit.com and basically blog or, you know, post pictures or whatever your strong point is. And you can earn cryptocurrency by just providing content or curating content on the site, and you can transfer that over to exchanges and start buying other cryptocurrencies with it. So you guys don't even really need to take money out of your bank account if you got to go explain it to your wife or your husband.

Why there's money missing. And now they've got a shiny digital Wallet on their phone. It might be a hard conversation, but if you're making it a different way like that, then it's a lot easier to tell them to buzz off. It's your thing.

That Steam concept is really cool and I think you touched on it in our last episode, but I actually want to kind of dive a little bit deeper on it right now because I think that's really interesting. So how do you actually earn, like Bitcoin or Crypto or Steam Coin or whatever you earn from that? How do you actually earn it by posting content? Is it like a dig or Reddit kind of site where they upvote it and you make more based on upvote? How does that work? I'm just. I'm curious.

Bingo. Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's like this. When you're upvoting and downvoting stuff, you are curating content, correct?

Yep.

You guys get that, right? And so that's one method of them being able to maintain quality control without employees. Right. Or minimal employees. Another way that you're interacting or engaging is by commenting, which is adding to the content and adding to the interest or the engagement of that particular post. Because if you're continuing to add engaging comments onto it, people are going to continue to come back and it's going to get more traction. More views. And more views means more ad revenue, which means this, this, this, this, this. Right now, Steven doesn't necessarily have ad revenue, quote, unquote, yet, but, you know, you never know what's going to happen. But every website does look for impressions and views, right? So what they're doing is they're saying they're rewarding folks for adding content and curating that content. So not only just the person who did the initial story, but anybody who's actually commenting on it, anybody who's downvoting stuff. How do they get paid as the network pays them out for that content? So similar to Reddit tips, people used to be able to tip Bitcoin or tip some sort of Reddit coin or Red coin or whatever the hell they're doing over there today.

It's very, very similar to that. So it's just I publish some content and this, that, and you get paid for it. Now there is a vesting system on the network, so you get more reputation and more clout and more ability to influence conversations and curate content. If you take the money that you're making on the site and you vest it into the site and basically lock it up into an escrow by doing that you're saying, I'm willing to take all the money, let's say you got $10,000 worth of coins and you put it in this escrow. You're saying, I'm willing to lock it up in there to power up my account so I can do more cool stuff. The trade off to that is you can't instantly access it again. You've got to access it over a 13 week period. So part of that vesting helps with the liquidity of paying out other people who aren't necessarily vesting at that moment in things too. So you guys see how that works. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of cash flow rolling around.

So what kind of money are we talking about? Is it like, could somebody be a full time steamer or is it like a totally just like little trickles of side income kind of thing?

Full time? I mean, there's people who are just making trickles, there's people who are traveling the world and all they do is travel blogs and post on Steemit. There's people who are making $5,000, $2,000, $10,000 on some of their posts.

Got it. Okay.

Damn.

Yeah, it's nuts, man.

Now we mentioned Steam, I think on the last time we chatted, but I don't think I totally grasped it until just now. And now I'm kind of going, oh shit. I actually now see how cool this is.

Right? I'm telling you right now. I mean there's no reason you guys should ever have like a Facebook group. If you guys, you guys can go clone Steam and brand it for you guys own personal use and you can send your whole audience there and they could roll around. There's a lot of interesting things to do with it is what I'm saying. I think you're going to see a lot of websites forking that code or using it. In some ways, Steam's made it possible and they're continuing to make it possible for you to now have your entire website. Let's just say you have your website, but instead of using the WordPress comments or the Facebook comments, you can use the Steam comments. That means that your engagers, people that are engaging on your website now might potentially be making money off of engaging in content with you.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

No, this is like a mind blown kind of moment. Like we didn't grasp it until just now.

Yeah.

And we will be implementing this asap.

No, that's really cool.

I see why I get so excited about this stuff because. Oh yeah, like we Started talking about social media sites three years ago and how we're going to use a blockchain to go out there and change social media. And that's how we were going to go out there and change ad networks with it. There's ICOs that are doing ad network stuff right now. Yeah, there's just a lot of really cool stuff that are going to impact not just our industry, not just the marketing industry, but all websites all the way. People make money in general just by providing the content that they're already doing. They're just opting not to go and let Facebook monetize their content, control everything. Yeah, right. Because I mean, they're not getting paid for shit on there.

They could choose to go somewhere else and get paid and they get a value out of it and it's turning everything more micro. Just like the whole pendulum swing right now is going back towards local and micro and stuff like that. The same thing.

Decentralizing.

Can't you actually buy Steam coins as well?

Yeah, buy Steam coins and you can trade them around. I'm going to tell you guys, pro tip right now, Steam Blockchain has no fees. So Steam is actually the easiest crypto to move around from place to place, and it's the cheapest one to move around place to place. So if there's. If you've got one crypto and you can exchange it over to Steam, then you can move it from point A, B, Z, anywhere you want to until you want to settle it out. And any trades in between, as long as it's on the same blockchain, are 100% transaction free.

Okay, so I can totally see how this is sort of the future of social media because it's taking something that people are doing every single day anyway and saying, hey, you know that thing you're already doing? How about we pay you for it? And I mean, I don't see why people wouldn't be sort of jumping at that opportunity.

Yeah. Or some kind of reward like we were talking about this before. It could just be a token that's redeemable for something else.

Any kind of incentive like that. Yeah, that's cool.

That's brilliant. Okay.

And for the listeners, really quick, if you don't understand again, the implications of Blockchain and the technology behind it, go listen to episode one and then come back over here and your mind will be blown even more.

All right, so I want to shift back to the sort of trading discussion again. Are there specific things that you're looking for.

To get out that's sort of one of the things that I've always found trading difficult with trading even with stocks is all right, when's the right time to get out? Are there sort of markers you're looking for? Are there? I know you don't do really much technical analysis. It's mostly fundamental analysis. So you're not really looking at charts and graphs and, you know, candlesticks and all that kind of stuff. You're kind of more looking for news and staff changes and things like that. So I'm curious what kind of things you look at to say, okay, this is probably a good time to move my coins out of here.

It's like a full time job trying to stay up on crypto right now. Honestly it is. I mean I've got like news flashes every 10 seconds on my screen. And Russia says that they're going to ban all cryptocurrency exchanges. And then three hours later, Russia's finance minister says, well, we may just have miners register and regulate exchanges. You know, in between those two hours, you know, all hell breaks loose. It's just crazy stuff. So things to look for is just people making, you know, big, big statements or large governments making large statements, things like that.

Signs to look for, get in or get out. Like, you know, somebody just announced the other day that they were going to redeem all bitcoin on the end of October. I don't remember the specific day, I was like the 25th, but I could be wrong for bitcoin gold. And so basically if you're holding bitcoin, then on that day all you do is you take your keys and you load them into this wallet over here and they'll just give you some free shiny bitcoin gold. Well what is that going to do? Well, that's going to run up the price on bitcoin wants to get their free bitcoin gold. So now everybody's going to be accumulating bitcoin as much as they can prior to that date. And so you're going to see a run up. Well, what's going to happen after that date? Well, people are going to sell off that bitcoin because they, because they may be liquidated some of their other cryptocurrency holdings in the meantime to acquire those bitcoin. Well now all those other cryptocurrencies that they sold, they could be down a lot lower than what they sold at. So they're going to take that bitcoin and they're going to go back over there and buy back in Right. So bitcoin is going to go down and alts are going to go up. And so if you think about it and you look at it, you look at things that have dates like that, and you watch ICOs. Well, what's going to happen? What's that ICO? What are they accepting on their ICO? Is it going to be Ethereum? And it's. Is that ICO got huge backing. Chances are Ethereum is going to go up. So you may want to buy a bunch of Ethereum and let these guys run it up on the ico and then mid ico, get the hell out of Dodge on Ethereum, because same thing's gonna happen once, you know, all the donations go through. Those companies are gonna liquidate. Yeah, you know, that's what happens is things like that. Hell, today, in the last two days, since the 8th of October, you know, some cryptocurrency exchanges went about liquidating a lot of their fee pools that they've been holding on to for a long time because.

They'Re liquidating into bitcoin.

Bitcoin gold, the free bitcoin gold. Why not, right? As an exchange, it makes sense. Why would you hold all these other alts when you can just liquidate and throw into bitcoin real quick for sure, get some Bitcoin gold for sure and then whatever. And so what happened is all at the same time, one of the major exchanges just sold all of their alts all at the same time. And if you go look at the 8th, go look at some charts real quick, you can see just like complete bloodbath. Right. For all sorts of alts. And that's what it did, because they literally sold like millions upon millions upon millions of tokens of all these different currencies all at the same time. So sometimes you can't catch it, but if you could catch it fast enough and you see that going on, get the hell out, man.

Some of these cryptocurrencies have lost 10, 20, 30%.

In the last 24 hours, 48 hours.

Now, do you look at that as an opportunity to buy, or do you tend to kind of stick with the herd a little bit? Because you do have evidence that it's probably going to go up even more.

Well, I do look at it as an opportunity to buy, especially again, I look at the project real quick. Is it more of a legacy coin? Has it been around for a long time? Do they have solid this and this? Chances are then it's going to bounce back. So you get in, there's some Coins that you may have wanted to get in on ico, you might be able to get out pre ICO rates right now, you know, so that might be an opportunity for you to just buy and just hold on to it for a year or two and see what happens. I think again, and I said this on the first call, a lot of cryptocurrencies are two to five year hold. And if you don't do anything else, just don't even pay attention to the news and just pretend like it never happened and come back in two to four, five years, chances are you will have made money on those.

Yeah, that's smart. And obviously those would be more, the more established ones, like you were saying, right?

Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, I really do believe bitcoin is going to be going up pretty high here in the next year or two. And some of it's going to depend upon, you know, capital controls in other countries. I think that there's going to be some financial breakdown in some places. And whenever dollars in fiat currency weaken, bitcoin gets stronger and stronger and stronger.

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, there's been some, some crazy sort of.

Forecasts, I guess you would call them from, from some big name people who, who actually see bitcoin getting up into the six figures per coin. I mean, the, the dude from McAfee Antivirus, I think, said that he expects Bitcoin to hit $250,000 per coin or else.

Yeah, or else he has to take Cathy Challenge.

That's right.

I don't know. We call it the McAfee guarantee now.

Is that what he said?

Check his Twitter to see what we're talking about.

Exactly. I just type in the McAfee guarantee. Somebody the other day told me that they guaranteed they'd show me how to make an extra $10,000 a month. I said, what kind of guarantee?

You take the McAfee guarantee, then I'll go with you.

Yeah. They said no, they weren't really.

The guarantee wasn't that strong.

That should be minute.

Yeah.

Do you guarantee that?

Okay, so actually, I want to jump back to something you were talking about a second ago when you brought up bitcoin gold and that sort of thing. Can you explain what a fork is or a hard fork, that kind of thing? Because I know with bitcoin it happened recently with bitcoin cash and now it looks like it's going to happen again with bitcoin gold. But I'm totally, I have no clue what's going on there. I don't even get what's happening.

I think it's hilarious, honestly.

I called this months ago before the first hard fork, just when they started first announcing that they were going to update and that there, there was some miners saying, we don't want to do that. I said, oh, watch what's going to happen here. You're going to see a split, four or five, six of them in the next few months popping off. And all they're doing is they're literally splitting right off of bitcoin, extracting some value out of the bitcoin market cap directly over there. They're basically doing ICOs without any of the work. It's hilarious. They're doing all the ICO work. All they're doing right now is just the hype up until the snapshot. So here's what it is. Basically, they're saying that they are going to not continue to process transactions on the bitcoin chain and they're going to take their processing power and they are going to take a clone of the bitcoin chain and they're going to clone it and then go off on their own. So it's kind of like you're going down one road one day and you're all in the same bus and this, that and the other. Or let's say you've got a caravan of people and you're all working together as a team and stuff like that. And then all of a sudden one of them says, up ahead there's a road and there's a fork in it and we're going to go that way. And you guys argue about it and eventually everybody decides, you know what, we'll agree to disagree to peace out. Everybody goes their way. One goes one way, one goes the other. They all have the map from before, but now they're each going a separate way. Or if somebody just says, screw this, I'm making a road over there because I don't like the way that you guys go down this road and this road up here looks like crap anyways and I'm gonna go make a new one. Plus I can do it better. And so they just turn over and they just four wheel off on their own. And some people split off with them and they go with them and some people don't and they carry on. It's essentially what it is. So they're cloning bitcoin and they're calling it something else, and they're pushing some of their mining power and their processing power over there and they're going to run that, that transaction Network, just like that. Now, in order to entice people to participate and to be interested in it and to have some sort of value, they're saying things like, we will give you free bitcoin. Or let's just say, for instance, bitcoin gold or bitcoin cash is what they did too. We'll give you free bitcoin cash. All you need to do is come over here and drop in your bitcoin address information and this and this, and we'll just give you free money in your account. Start messing around with it. Essentially what they're doing, they're doing that so they can get people to assess a value to it and then start transferring other value like bitcoin and other currencies over onto their network to buy their stuff, which is then going to give it some viability and set some price floors and stuff like that for it. So it actually gives the coin more and more value and legitimacy as soon as they do that and they get some participation. So their goal is just get as much participation as possible. That's all it really is. Now, I wrote an article a couple months ago about bitcoin changing and hard forking and this and that. And I said the same thing. I swear to God, they must have read the article because I said bitcoin is a great store of value, very similar to gold. And they probably said, hey, bitcoin gold.

I said bitcoin is a good store of value like gold, but it's just like gold in that it's heavy, it's clunky, and it's slow to move around and stuff like that. So it's a great store of value. But if you want a medium of exchange, it's not the best medium of exchange. And that was my argument, is that it's great at what it does, it stores value. But to exchange it from person to person to person to person, it's slow. Slower than a lot of technologies that are out there. It's more expensive, too. More expensive than a lot of other technologies out there. You can send bitcoin and spend 2, 5, $10 or even more to send one transaction when there's other technologies right now that you can send anywhere for free, like Steam or bit shares, which is like one penny to send any amount anywhere in the world, or three seconds or less. So there's. Those are better mediums of exchange, you know, then bitcoin, because you got to wait 5, 10 minutes for a transaction to get finished, and this, that and the other. Right? So that's that's kind of what that means. So bitcoin gold is interesting. I think they're just taking the premise that bitcoin is a good store of value and that's kind of the premise that they're going on with it.

So how would somebody actually get their.

Bitcoin gold? Because I actually owned some bitcoin when the hard fork happened last time with, what was it called? Bitcoin cash. I never actually ended up getting any bitcoin cash because I didn't understand what was going on. And I just had my money sitting in Coinbase. I didn't have it in any of the little. The more complex trading platforms, I guess you can call them. It was just in Coinbase, but, you know, nothing ever came out of it for me. So I'm curious how that whole process works. And if somebody owns bitcoin or wants to get into Bitcoin now before that fork happens, you know, what, what do they do to make sure they get. They get what's coming to them?

Well, you don't want to keep your. So here's. Here's how it works. Like, if you wanted to get your bitcoin cash, you should have your Bitcoin in a wallet that is not in an exchange. Now, I'm not sure about whether Coinbase counts or not, but I would say it's probably not something safe or you wouldn't be able to use it to redeem it. You need to have it in a downloadable Bitcoin wallet, one that you have access to your private keys and your public keys and all that sort of stuff. So any sort of bitcoin wallet that allows that sort of thing. I like blockchain.info. as a good web wallet that you have access to your private keys on and stuff like that. So if you have your Bitcoin in an exchange account, you probably don't have access to private keys on your account the same way, and you can't claim those tokens. Interesting kind of how that works. So you'll want to have it in something like Metamask is a Ethereum wallet. Blockchain.info holds Ethereum and Bitcoin. So I usually just recommend just throwing it in. Blockchain.info it's one of the oldest wallets that's ever been around. They've got good security.

You can make those wallets pretty secure with all the security features that they have on there. And that's the easiest way. Just throw it in there and then you can Just redeem them with your keys. Now.

Don'T hold it in exchange wallets. Typically you won't be able to redeem any of those coins.

Got it? Okay, so most of my coins right now, and I believe Joe's too, we've got them in Bittrex right now. Is that considered a wallet or is that an exchange?

That's an exchange wallet. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to redeem unless Bittrex says that they have a way to help you redeem them. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have them in there. And I go back to the first conversation. I said I wouldn't even hold my coins in any centralized exchange unless I was actively trading. The second I'm done actively trading, I am moving them directly back out.

Okay, so that you know that that's a good sort of segue because one of our questions on here was about wallets, exchanges, offline wallets, hardware wallets, that kind of stuff. Do you have any recommendations? Do you tend to hold your stuff in like an offline hardware wallet that's not even connected to the Internet, or do you tend to hold them in like a blockchain.info type wallet?

Well, good question.

Question is.

I would never recommend holding them in any centralized exchange for a lot of different reasons.

That's a big thing. Second thing is that I typically stay away from web type wallets. I did mention blockchain.info. they are one of the exceptions. Metamask is a browser type wallet. I like that one. As well as just quick and easy Ethereum transactions. Should I need to do something with that then? Other than that, I typically use downloaded wallets that are on my computer. The reason being on a web wallet, if it doesn't have two FA and it doesn't have throttling on logins, then somebody could attempt to try to brute force your password. That's totally possible for people to do. I don't care how hard people say it is. Believe me, there are people who take that as a personal challenge.

Oh yeah.

And they get in sometimes.

So having a downloadable wallet means that they would actually have to access your personal device and then be able to access and get in through your passwords and stuff like that. Another layer of security if you really want to, if you've got a lot of your wealth and assets and you don't plan on trading actively or anything like that, it's really not a stretch to throw it onto a USB device and have some wallet files on Your USB device have a Trezor kind of hard wallet, like an actual physical wallet for it. There are. There are. You can have an old laptop, any old laptop, you know, that doesn't connect to the Internet. You can just make sure it doesn't have any access to WI fi or anything, and have a wallet on there. You can load your funds and just hold them on there, and whenever you need access to them, you just spit out the recovery file, go over to your computer that's got a connection and load that recovery file into a wallet on that computer, and boom, you're accessed and you're live on the Internet. But it comes down to this. There's going to be more and more and more security incidents, more and more and more devices hacked. If you have mobile wallets on your phone, you are absolutely taking a risk all the time because there's just so many apps on your phones that you're always connected, can allow backdoor access, right?

Yeah.

On top of that, hackers can try to gain access to your phone through other means and potentially be able to get into some of these things. So it's just really. It's really risky to hold anything on mobile phones. Also, this is interesting, but, like, Department of Homeland Security, they published a bulletin saying if you're going out of the country or into the country and you've got a USB device with a bunch of Bitcoin on it, you have to declare if it's over $10,000 because it's a monetary instrument, is what they're saying. I disagree because IRS says it's a. It's property, it's not money. So, you know, it's kind of confusing.

So do you want to be that guy? Are you in that report? Probably not. But the point is, just what I typically do, and I find this to be easy, is that I use highly encrypted mail services, and I can email myself.

From that mail service to that mail service, the recovery keys, and then I can log in to that mail service from anywhere in the world, use my two FA and a couple of other things to make sure that it's super secure. And then I have that in a super secure location. It's kind of on a cloud, but not really on a cloud in that manner. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And then I can access it without actually traveling with it. So I'm not crossing borders.

Yeah, yeah. Now, I. We were listening to an interview at one time, and they were talking about how with, you know, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies you literally could take your. Your number, whatever. I'm not quite sure all the terminology yet. I'm still learning it. But you could take your number, write it on a piece of paper, delete every.

Instance of it that you find on the web, and as long as you have that paper accessible, you can access your Bitcoin at some point, right?

You can. You can basically do what's called a paper wallet. And you can print out the paper wallet and wipe out everything and just have that paper wallet. And all you need is the information on there in order to access your coins. Just, you know, that's the only copy in your house. Burns down, you're gonna be one sad guy. Just make sure. Maybe photocopy it or make. Take a picture of it and email it to a super secure encrypted account.

Oh, yeah, no, I definitely see the downsides of that strategy for storing it, but I just didn't totally grasp that concept until this call of how that actually works.

And here's a. This popped in my head for some reason. But like with people dying, let's just say that, like, if a lot of people are bringing that stuff offline or in places where no one else knows they have these, these hard. What happens? Because it's a finite amount of stuff out, like Bitcoin, for instance.

A lot of Bitcoin currency has been lost already, hasn't it?

Probably 10%.

Yeah. So just imagine, I mean, it's still early. What if.

Just a bunch of people start dying who are invested in Bitcoin? What happens with that shit?

It's not accessible anymore. It's not in public circulation.

It eventually pushes the value of those other coins up, especially somebody sees that that coin or that account hasn't been accessed or opened or moved anything in years or something like that, it's reasonably.

Able to deduce that they may have lost access to that account.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, supply and demand, right? The supply. If those are gone, that just means the supply is less.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's interesting. That's a good point. And you're absolutely right. So just be careful with that sort of thing. There are some blockchain industry softwares. I'll mention Bitshares again for a minute. Bitchares can allow for multisig logins on wallets. So I can say if anything happens, basically, I could say this inside my wallet. I can designate, let's say, six different people, my family, to all have access to the wallet with certain percentages, with certain weights to each person. So I can make it. So my mom and my dad both have 51%. So that means that either one of them can log in my wallet at any time and transfer stuff around, move stuff around and do whatever they need to do. But I can have my siblings at 15% each. So it would take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of them in order to hit 55%, which would then enable all of them. So they all have to turn a nuclear key at the same time in order to access my shit. That would mean that they'd have to have complete collusion among my siblings, which isn't unheard of.

Or. You know what I mean? Or one of my parents or a parent. You see what I'm saying? You have the parents at 49. So that means it would take a parent and one child, all the children, or both parents.

Got it. No, that makes sense. That's a good old fancy. Yeah.

So those things are possible right now with current technology. You're going to see people coming up with those kind of things more. There's also ways where you can lock up funds and proposals. So let's say you just don't trust yourself to trade.

Yeah.

And you're like, man, if I have it, I just might trade it. So you can actually propose to yourself or propose to another account to send them money and have a certain date on there and then accept that proposal. And then the blockchain will lock it up into an escrow until that date. And you can't access it. Nothing. There's a lot of things that you can do with it. So you know, somebody's 18th birthday, you know, different things like that. So multi sig technology, logging in, all that stuff is super doable. You're going to see some more of that. And you should always be careful with who you give a password to or access to, because I'll tell you one thing, irreversible transactions is no joke.

All right, so this is probably the last topic we're going to dive into.

Maybe I have one.

Oh, Joe's got a different topic.

What are you going to ask?

Okay.

I don't know what you're going to ask. Can't read your mind, man.

All right, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the numbers and keeping track of everything, because I think. Was that what you're going to ask?

Yes.

Okay. I think Joe and my biggest struggle with all of the cryptocurrency stuff is understanding how much the value is in US Dollars with what we have. Because, you know, you're buying. You know, let's say a bitcoin or an ethereum or a litecoin or something like that with cash. And then once you've got that bitcoin, then you're buying altcoins with that bitcoin. So there's like a couple degrees of separation from the US dollar and we have like crazy spreadsheets and shit like that that we're trying to use to wrap our head around the value of our actual currency. And that's been a big struggle for us and we can't be the only one.

Not only that, it's conversion, it's tracking where it's at. The fees are another element as well. Yeah.

So just keeping keeping our heads wrapped around that all the time has been literally our biggest struggle.

Sounds to me like a job or like a gap opportunity for you gentlemen. You know what I mean?

It really does.

No, it really is something that big where you guys are identifying a major problem with cryptocurrencies right now and that you have to have all these spreadsheets and you have to have all these different things. You need to download all of your transactions from every exchange and cross reference them and this and that. Yeah, that sounds doable. Like anybody wants to do that sort of thing. Kevin Bombino from Kraken, he also has, he co founded Press Advantage with me and some other guys. He had created some spreadsheets, this is back in 2013, to help people with their cryptocurrency tax earnings and figuring that sort of thing out. It comes down to just long term and short term. Capital gains is really what it comes down to right now. So you only have to pay short term or long term right now. Again, I'm not a financial advisor, legal advisor, don't have a law degree. None of this is intended as that type of advice. But with that said, you're supposed to in the US pay capital gains either short or long term, but it's only when you exit crypto. Kind of makes you not want to leave crypto, really.

Right, right.

You know what I mean? And it makes it really tough for us because honestly, and I'm not meaning to scare anybody, but it could potentially put anybody at risk for an IRS if they really want to go after you. And then that's no fun. That's the worst thing in the world, really.

Been there.

Yeah. That's a gap opportunity for a lot of people right now. There's multiple blockchains, multiple exchanges. How are you supposed to keep track of all that? That's a really hard question.

And the only Way we've. Well, I mean this is just from our initial digging, but we found a spreadsheet that was created by someone else online that pulls in real time prices or values of each thing and you just kind of plug in when you invest at what amount. So it's, it's cool. It's given us a rough estimate.

It gives you a rough estimate. Right. But it doesn't give you exact numbers. And all they need is one, one time where they're like, oh, you put the wrong decimal, wrong place and you're.

Gonna count for fees either. So I mean the numbers are probably slightly higher than actuality because there's no fee, no fees accounted for it on it either. But I mean, the biggest issue is, is the. Most of the exchanges seem to show the price of coins and tokens in relation to Bitcoin and not in relation to US dollar. So we're constantly doing like a double conversion. We're converting that to Bitcoin and then figuring out the value of that amount of Bitcoin back to the US dollar. And it's just, it makes our head spin sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. And that is the toughest part. It truly, truly is. So yeah, it's just. This is the problem with. I hate. We'll change that word. We'll say this is the challenge with an emerging industry like this where there are kinks like this to be worked out. If you guys could come up with a solution for people to basically download from their wallets.

Export some sheets and be able to upload them and it would do the calculations, including fees and stuff like that, you guys would have a million dollar business tomorrow. You know, that sort of. This is, this is, this is the reality, man.

Yeah, and it's only getting bigger, so.

There'S more coins popping onto the market seems like daily. So it's not. The problem's not going to go away.

No, it absolutely won't. And it's gonna, it's gonna get figured out one of these days by somebody so, you know, somebody smart just come along and say, I've got a little time and some money or I've got a programming team that could throw at this. That's a huge. That's a huge thing. I typically don't really sell a lot of my cryptocurrency anymore. I'm typically in. If I do convert it to fiat in any shape or form, then that's where I would need to take the accounting for it. I try to do one for ones like using BitUSD because it's pegged to the dollar, so it makes converting out of digital pretty easy. So consider that interesting.

Now, what's your take on, you know, you've got China outlawing ICOs and other countries constantly popping up threatening to do that kind of stuff. What's your take on that? And you know, do you think at some point there's going to be multiple countries that don't even let you operate in cryptocurrencies? I mean, where do you think everything's going to go with that?

So really, I mean, I don't feel like these countries are going to be able to stop it no matter how hard they try. Mostly because people are stubborn and they are into it. And I don't care what you say, you know, you're gonna scare a bunch of Chinese people off for a little while and they're gonna be right back in. Sure.

All right, so yeah, let's wrap this sucker up because it's going. We've covered a lot here, man. It's been good. So I guess what are some. I guess last way we could wrap up is just where should we direct people to go Check your stuff out. Maybe some cool resources, Anything that can help out.

Yeah, for our stuff. Let me give a couple shout outs real quick. You know, we created.

The hero, which is the kind of anti dollar I like to call it. So I don't know if I said this on the last call, but the hero is the United States dollar value back from 1913. So what a United States dollar should be valued at right now is a little over $157, close to $158. Which means that you could buy a Corvette for around like 800 bucks right now if you're using dollars from 1913. And then that's true story stuff, right? It's 65, 70 thousand dollar car for 800 bucks. That's crazy, right? So I've got the hero. So you can find more information about that@soverefhero.com we also have a website that's coming online here very, very soon. The site's up and you can actually go and you can sign up to get free coins to trade around and play around with right now. And that one's@billionhero campaign.com and basically with that site, we're just using that to teach people how to use cryptocurrencies, teach people how to give to causes and donate to disaster relief, all sorts of different things like that, those things. And then I've got a digital settlement company called Remedio. So People can feel free to cash out of cryptocurrencies into fiat currencies, to their bank account or to.

Debit cards. You can do anywhere from $5,000, zero to $5,000 transactions on debit cards and then zero to $50,000 transactions at your bank account. And you can use about 60, 65, 70 different cryptocurrencies to settle right into accounts. Can be your account or anybody else's. And that's@remedio.com and yeah, we're really busy. I'm also going to be speaking at Latin American Blockchain conference in Mexico in Cabo. And that is, I believe, the November 8th and 9th or 9th and 10th. I'm going to have to look again since I'm shooting from the hip right now on the phone. And then I'll also be in Prague speaking next February. And we're looking at that around the, I think the 21st, 22nd of February at a blockchain conference out there. And then I'll be speaking at Fintech Austin.

Sometime next month. And I might be there later this month, too, or I might send one of our crew down there for that. So one busy guy.

Check them out. Yeah, if you haven't already. You know, Mike, Mike, you're always on top of everything. And yeah, we'll be doing around three.

I'm sure, pretty soon at some point.

Yeah.

Anytime, guys. You just let me know.

I'm going to load up on bitcoin now to get before this October 25th thing.

I'm going to go start steaming it up.

I think I'm on steam it right now, so. Yeah, it's cool.

Yeah, man, you do. Go steamroll it. Have fun with it.

Awesome, man.

Thank you so much for, for all of this. I mean, you've spent so much time with us over these last two calls and we really, really appreciate it. We've learned so much and I know everybody else is, too, so thanks so much for that.

Absolutely, guys. And I appreciate being asked to and giving some knowledge, wisdom and some, you know, sarcasm to you guys. Always and always, man. Always appreciate it. So again, thank you for having me on the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Guys are awesome, man. And I'll make sure and send this out to my tribe, too.

Thanks, my man.

Appreciate it, man.

Cool. Have a good one.

See it. Take care, guys.

Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to this podcast. Now if you want to learn more and hear from us every single month, which a lot of people do, it's pretty fun. We actually write this thing called the Evergreen Profits Letter, and that is a printed newsletter that we actually send to hundreds of people every single month to your doorstep. So you actually get it in the mail. You can read this sucker. You can highlight it, you can dog ear. You can scratch some stuff out. If you don't like that one, you say, no. Joe and Matt, that's not cool for me. But you can take a lot of different strategies, about 15 or so from every single issue, and it's really cool. So basically, these are actionable strategies that you can use in your business right away to test out and pretty much build on what you already have going on. So check it out. It's at www.egpletter.com. it's pretty amazing. And go check it out. See what it's all about.

Boom.